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In 2015, observations by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter revealed trace amounts of water (mixed with heavy doses of salts) on the Red Planet's surface. These "hydrated salts" corresponded with dark streaks on Martian hillsides called recurring slope lineae (RSL), which researchers had already identified as possible sites of liquid water rising to the surface. Studies of RSL, and in particular the findings by the MRO, introduced the tantalizing possibility that there could be enough liquid water on the surface of Mars today to support microbial life But the new study shows that those dark RSL could simply be flows of sand...

About 11 light-years away, Ross 128 b is closer to the solar system than any known exoplanet save Proxima b. First there was Proxima b, the Earth-sized planet orbiting the closest star to us, Proxima Centauri. Then came the seven Earth-sized worlds orbiting TRAPPIST-1, a star 39 light-years away, three of which are in the habitable zone. Now we welcome a new tantalizing exoplanet to the group, the second closest we know of, also Earth-sized and temperate, orbiting a calm red dwarf star: Ross 128 b. Ross 128 is an old, inactive red dwarf star that sits 11 light-years away....

In the hostile environment of the ‘galactic bulge’ at the heart of our galaxy, scientists have spotted a planet so big it might not actually be a planet. A large international team of researchers found the object when looking at data acquired by NASA’s Spitzer infra-red space telescope, which was first launched in 2003. Using a technique called micro-lensing, which measures distortions in light when a star passes in front of another, scientists were able to discover the mysterious object is 22,000 light years away from Earth, and orbits its parent star roughly every three years. Dubbed OGLE-2016-BLG-1190Lb, the object...

Recently, scientists reported in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society the discovery of a theory-shattering exoplanet — one of countless such discoveries in the last two decades. As reported on phys.org on October 31, the hot Jupiter “should not exist according to planet formation theory.” In this episode, we outline the fundamental differences between the standard model of planet and star formation versus that of the Electric Universe.

The planet NGTS-1b is situated 600 light-years from our solar system, according to a statement from the University of Warwick, and it is a gas giant about the size of Jupiter. Its star, on the other hand, is just half the mass and radius of the sun. The planet orbits its star at 3 percent the distance from the Earth to the sun, and it whips around a full orbit every 2.6 Earth days. ... The system's star is a small, dim M-dwarf, which is the most common type of star in the sky. Red dwarfs burn their fuel much...

Kepler normally makes news for its planetary findings, like this batch of nine planets discovered in a habitable zone of stars where conditions could be right for liquid water, and potentially life. Twitter has a long history of hacks, often targeted at celebrity accounts. A hacker compromised Jack Black's Tenacious D Twitter account earlier this year with a fake death notice sent out to his fans. Other big names, including Katy Perry and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, have also been victimized on the social-media site. NASA's Kepler account seems like an unusual choice for a Twitter hack. "We're investigating the cause...

More clues about where to search for a possible ninth planet lurking in the fringes of our solar system are emerging from the Kuiper belt, the icy debris field beyond Neptune. And new calculations suggest that the putative planet might be brighter — and a bit easier to find — than once thought. Evidence for the existence of Planet Nine is scant, based on apparent alignments among the orbits of the six most distant denizens of the Kuiper belt (SN: 2/20/16, p. 6). Their oval orbits all point in roughly the same direction and lie in about the same plane,...

Installation was completed on the world's largest radio telescope on Sunday morning as the last of 4,450 panels was fitted into the center of the big dish. ... In the first two or three years after its completion, the telescope will undergo further adjustment, and during that period Chinese scientists will use it for early-stage research. After that, it will be open to scientists worldwide, said Peng Bo, director of the NAO Radio Astronomy Technology Laboratory. Scientists can also carry out remote control and observation in other cities such as Beijing, more than 2,000 kilometers from the telescope site, said...

In a late-day Friday announcement on July 1, 2016, NASA said that the first-ever spacecraft to visit the dwarf planet Pluto – NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft – has received the nod to fly onward to an object deeper in the Kuiper Belt, known as 2014 MU69. This object had not even been discovered when New Horizons was launched in 2006. The spacecraft will rendezvous with 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019. ... In addition to the extension of the New Horizons mission, NASA determined that the Dawn spacecraft should remain at the dwarf planet Ceres, rather than changing course to...

Centaurs are a population of objects within our Solar System that behave as both comets and asteroids (hence why they are named after the hybrid beasts of Greek mythology). 10199 Chariklo is the largest known member of the Centaur population, a possible former Trans-Neptunian Object (TNO) which currently orbits between Saturn and Uranus. The rings around this asteroid were first noticed in 2013 when the asteroid underwent a stellar occultation. This revealed a system of two rings, with a radius of 391 and 405 km and widths of about 7 km 3 km, respectively. The absorption features of the rings...

When it comes to detecting laser pulses aliens might shoot at Earth to attract our attention, scientists now find they can detect signals as faint as a single photon of light every few tiny fractions of a second. Astronomers have gazed at the skies for decades searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Lasers can in principle help transmit messages over extraordinary distances, but while scientists have monitored a large number of stars looking for alien laser signals — for instance, facilities at Harvard and Princeton scanned more than 10,000 sun-like stars for several years — no evidence for any have...

There may be an alien planet lurking within Earth's own solar system. If the hypothetical Planet Nine does indeed exist, the sun probably ripped the world away from another star long ago, a new study suggests. "It is almost ironic that while astronomers often find exoplanets hundreds of light-years away in other solar systems, there's probably one hiding in our own backyard," study lead author Alexander Mustill, an astronomer at Lund University in Sweden, said in a statement. [The Evidence for Planet Nine in Pictures]. Earlier this year, astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, both of the California Institute of...

All the planets in our solar system orbit close to the sun's equatorial plane. Of the eight confirmed planets, the Earth's orbit is the most tilted, but even that tilt is still small, at just seven degrees. It was natural, then, for astronomers to expect that planets orbiting other stars would behave the same way... But in recent years, new observations have revealed that the story is somewhat more complicated, at least for the oddest planets known, the Hot Jupiters. ... Comparable in mass to Jupiter, they move on incredibly short period orbits, almost skimming the surfaces of their host...

An artist's conception of Kepler-62f, a planet in the 'habitable zone' of a star located about 1,200 light-years from Earth. Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle ========================================================================================================================= A distant planet known as Kepler-62f could be habitable, a team of astronomers reports. The planet, which is about 1,200 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Lyra, is approximately 40 percent larger than Earth. At that size, Kepler-62f is within the range of planets that are likely to be rocky and possibly could have oceans, said Aomawa Shields, the study's lead author and a National Science Foundation astronomy and astrophysics postdoctoral fellow...

Astronomers used the Harlan J. Smith Telescope at the University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Texas, to search for a planet around star CI Tau. Credit: Ethan Tweedie Photography ================================================================================================== In contradiction to the long-standing idea that larger planets take longer to form, U.S. astronomers today announced the discovery of a giant planet in close orbit around a star so young that it still retains a disk of circumstellar gas and dust. "For decades, conventional wisdom held that large Jupiter-mass planets take a minimum of 10 million years to form," said Christopher Johns-Krull, the lead author...

Every now and then, a distant star called KIC 8462852 dims by as much as 20 percent. That's huge. Even a passing planet as big as Jupiter would only block about 1 percent of the star's light. Ruling out a planet, scientists have no idea what could be eclipsing the star (which is informally known as 'Tabby's Star'). The leading hypothesis is a family of really big comets, but that doesn't quite fit. Astronomer Jason Wright pointed out that the light patterns are consistent with what we'd expect if aliens had built a Dyson swarm of solar collectors around the...

Last year, scientists proposed nearly 50 locations on Mars as possible places for future human landings. Those landing-zone sites contain "regions of interest" that can be reached from primary touchdown spots. Good touchdown sites will allow crews to land safely and carry out operations; offer a wealth of interesting science activities; and provide resources that the astronauts could use. For example, any favored exploration zone should allow expeditionary crews to tap into at least 100 metric tons (110 U.S. tons) of water, NASA officials have said. With its suite of instruments and cameras — particularly the sharp-shooting High Resolution Imaging...

In a paper published Monday in the Astrophysical Journal, Kaltenegger, who is director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University, and her colleague Ramses Ramirez modeled the conditions under which life could exist around stars that are close to using up their fuel — ones much older and bigger than our sun. "We can find all these new places that may become habitable worlds," Kaltenegger said, in the dim, red glow of a slow-burning dwarf star, or on once-frozen planets thawed by a rapidly expanding red giant. Nearly two dozen such potentially life-sustaining suns exist right in our own...

The hunt for signs of life on Mars has been on for decades, and so far scientists have found only barren dirt and rocks. Now a pair of astronomers thinks that strangely shaped minerals inside a Martian crater could be the clue everyone has been waiting for. In 2008, scientists announced that NASA's Spirit rover had discovered deposits of a mineral called opaline silica inside Mars's Gusev crater. That on its own is not as noteworthy as the silica's shape: Its outer layers are covered in tiny nodules that look like heads of cauliflower sprouting from the red dirt. No...

Astronomers monitoring the Kepler space telescope have detected nearly 1,300 planets flying in orbit around distant stars, a cosmic search that began nearly 10 years ago inside a rusty old telescope dome at the Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton near San Jose. From the size and orbits of the new-found “exoplanets,” the astronomers said at least 550 could be rocky planets much like Earth, and at least nine are orbiting at just the right distance from their stars to lie inside their “habitable zones” where temperatures would be just right for liquid water, the one ingredient essential for life to...