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Solar system could have over 100 planets with new criteria Posted on March 19, 2017 by Kathy Fey Solar System A new classification system for what may be considered a planet would result in over 100 planets occupying our solar system. 178 SHARES ShareTweetGoogleReddit Our solar system could contain over 100 planets if a new classification system is approved. Tech Times explains that the definition of a planet was last changed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 2006 when the new criteria famously demoted Pluto from the rank of a planet to dwarf planet and Kuiper Belt Object. Space...

Cassini flew just 25,620 miles (41,230 kilometers) from the pockmarked moon Jan. 30, on the spacecraft's seventh and final flyby of the moon. Due to a massive crater on one side, Mimas is known as the "Death Star" moon — but this time, that crater is out of view. (Another recent Cassini photo, from a November flyby, highlights the giant Herschel crater.) During the flyby, Cassini captured 10 images from about 28,000 miles (45,000 km) away that were combined into a mosaic. More than half the moon was lit only by reflected light from Saturn — one image has that...

Astronomers have just spotted a star whizzing around a vast black hole at about 2.5 times the distance between Earth and the Moon, and it takes only half an hour to complete one orbit. To put that into perspective, it takes roughly 28 days for our Moon to do a single lap around our relatively tiny planet at speeds of 3,683 kilometres (2,288 miles) per hour, meaning this star is moving at some mind-boggling, break-neck speeds.

Roscosmos hopes to expand its reach further, with missions planned to the Moon and even Mars. Towards this end, on Tuesday, March 14th, the agency announced that it is conducting a recruitment drive for new cosmonauts. All are welcome, the agency stressed, to apply to become the next-generation of space explorers (provided they meet the criteria). And if all goes as planned, a few lucky applicants will be the first members of the Russian space program to “fly to the Moon.” Understandably, Roscosmos is hoping to jump start its space exploration program again and recapture the momentum it enjoyed during...

ALBANY - Denying an inmate a motorized wheelchair is discriminatory under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act, a federal judge has ruled. Northern District Judge Mae D'Agostino found that the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision...failed to show that there were such safety risks in giving Nathaniel Wright the electric wheelchair that they outweighed his right to have the device.... Wright, 55, will complete a five-year sentence from Monroe County for first-degree sexual abuse next month.

Explanation: Stars are forming in the gigantic dust pillar called the Cone Nebula. Cones, pillars, and majestic flowing shapes abound in stellar nurseries where natal clouds of gas and dust are buffeted by energetic winds from newborn stars. The Cone Nebula, a well-known example, lies within the bright galactic star-forming region NGC 2264. The Cone was captured in unprecedented detail in this close-up composite of several observations from the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. While the Cone Nebula, about 2,500 light-years away in Monoceros, is around 7 light-years long, the region pictured here surrounding the cone's blunted head is a mere...

A crew of five astronomers from Belgium have discovered an exceptional planetary system and surprisingly it has got the name of their favorite beer. The planetary system has been christened TRAPPIST-1 by the astronomers after The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope or TRAPPIST. It is an arrangement of seven planets just 40 light-years away, surrounding a dwarf star. The sizes of the planets are almost similar to that of the Earth. Three of the seven planets are in the liveable area of the star to ensure that they can reinforce liquid water in the external zone and support life....

I recently had the opportunity to fulfill my civic duty. I gave Al Franken an Atomic Wedgie. No.....just kidding. Though I do think that every American should pull Al Franken's shorts over his head. I was called for jury duty. They sent me an engraved invitation with a veiled threat to kick my donkey if I didn't show up at the appointed time. The invitation said to wear "appropriate clothing", and I was going to the jury pool, so I tried to check in wearing my speedo and flip flops. Turns out there's some kind of dress code to try...

No one had heard from Chandrayaan-1 since Aug. 29, 2009. That's when the pioneering moon orbiter — the first lunar probe ever launched by the Indian Space Research Organization — abruptly went silent just 312 days into what was supposed to be a two-year mission. The orbiter has been missing ever since. It's no bigger than a refrigerator and difficult for Earth-based telescopes to discern given the moon's nighttime glow, making the craft hard to track down. Plus, the moon's lopsided topography — riddled with mascons, or areas of dense material with higher-than-average gravitational pull — makes satellites' orbits incredibly...

A joint Fermilab/SLAC publication New research could tell us about particle interactions in the early universe and even hint at new physics. Much of the matter in the universe is made up of tiny particles called quarks. Normally it’s impossible to see a quark on its own because they are always bound tightly together in groups. Quarks only separate in extreme conditions, such as immediately after the Big Bang or in the center of stars or during high-energy particle collisions generated in particle colliders. Scientists at Louisiana Tech University are working on a study of quarks and the force that...

Near-Term goals for the exploration of Venus include improved remote-sensing from orbital probes. This will tell us more about the gravity and topography of Venus. Improved radar imaging and infrared imaging will fill in more blanks. The team also promoted the idea of a sustained aerial platform, a deep probe, and a short duration lander. Multiple probes/dropsondes are also part of the plan. Dropsondes are small devices that are released into the atmosphere to measure winds, temperature, and humidity. They’re used on Earth to understand the weather, and extreme phenomena like hurricanes, and can fulfill the same purpose at Venus....

The Milky Way appears as a relatively flat structure when viewed along its plane in visible light. Gamma-ray emission, however, paints a different picture: two huge structures billowing outward from the galaxy’s bulge like an enormous hourglass. Named the Fermi Bubbles, these structures are the result of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole gorging itself on interstellar gas in the past. Using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers have now determined just when these structured formed. A team of astronomers led by Rongmon Bordoloi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has used distant quasars to trace the structure and motion...

NASA on Thursday released pictures of Pan, one of Saturn's many moons, and its distinctive shape is drawing comparisons to flying saucers and stuffed pasta. The images of the moon come courtesy of NASA's Cassini spacecraft, and reveal the UFO-like form of the tiny satellite, which has an average radius of just 8.8 miles. Cassini's Twitter account tweeted a gif showing the raw images. ... According to NASA's website, Pan's strange shape comes from what is called an equatorial ridge, a characteristic it shares with one of its sister moons, Atlas. The ridge has formed over the course of Pan's...

Considered lost since 2009 when radio contact with it was lost, India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft has been found orbiting the moon. The spacecraft has been found by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. Earlier, JPL's calculations indicated that Chandrayaan-1 was circling some 200 kilometres above the lunar surface, but it was generally considered "lost." Chandrayaan-1 was India's first mission to the moon, was launched successfully on October 22, 2008 from Sriharikota. ISRO says the "satellite made more than 3400 orbits around the moon and the mission was concluded when the communication with the spacecraft was lost on August 29,...

Here's Our Best Look Yet at Saturn's 'UFO' Moon Adorned with a thin band of icy ring particles, the small moon Pan inspires comparisons to alien spacecraft, walnuts, and even ravioli. View Images One of Cassini's new views of Saturn's moon Pan. Photograph by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute By Nadia Drake PUBLISHED March 9, 2017 There’s a tiny “flying saucer” orbiting deep within Saturn’s rings, and a NASA probe has just gotten its most impressive look yet at the strange object. The saucer is actually a little moon called Pan, and NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured its distinctive shape on March 7...

Our closest planetary neighbor shares a surprising feature with Earth: volcanoes. A new study, published February 1st in the journal Science Advances, revealed interesting new details about the volcanic history of Mars. Thomas Lapen, first author of the paper and Professor of Geology at the University of Houston, told Astronomy that their analysis of Martian meteorites showed that volcanic activity on Mars has been ongoing since at least 2.4 to 0.15 billion years ago—and likely continues today. Given that the meteorites Lapen and his group studied came from a single ejection site on Mars, they reveal over 2 billion years...

Dark matter remains largely mysterious, but astrophysicists keep trying to crack open that mystery. Last year’s discovery of gravity waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) may have opened up a new window into the dark matter mystery. Enter what are known as ‘primordial black holes.’ ... Unlike stellar black holes, primordial black holes originated in high density fluctuations of matter during the first moments of the Universe. They can be much larger, or smaller, than stellar black holes. PBHs could be as small as asteroids or as large as 30 solar masses, even larger. They could also...

YOUNG STUDENTS lucky enough to benefit from a science education will likely recognize Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, or Gregor Mendel. But ask them about Georges Lemaître and they'd probably be stumped. Indeed, the man who first proposed that the universe is expanding and formulated the theory of the Big Bang is scarcely recognized by Google. Search for "famous scientists" and scroll through the horizontal list that pops up. Lemaître is nowhere to be seen.

Less than 10 feet across, asteroid 2017 EA made its closest approach at 9:04 AM EST (14:04 Universal Time) last Thursday, coming 20 times closer than the Moon, just 9,000 miles (14,500 km) over the eastern Pacific Ocean, according to a NASA statement. The space agency’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which operates out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, tracks asteroids and comets that come close to the Earth and computes very precise orbits for them but did not detect this asteroid until just six hours before its closest approach to Earth. It was first sighted...

NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) is coming up on its second year studying the Red Planet's atmosphere. But it had to make an unexpected maneuver this week as it came face to face with an unlikely foe—a Martian moon named Phobos. The larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos' defining feature is a giant crater on its surface, Stickney, and a smaller crater within that crater, Limtoc. It moves around Mars faster than Mars rotates, and it became clear last week that it was going to be on a course missing the MAVEN satellite by only seven seconds....