Free Republic

Astronomers have found a cool, Earth-sized planet that's relatively close to our Solar System. The properties of this newly discovered planet - called Ross 128 b - make it a prime target in the search for life elsewhere in the cosmos. At just 11 light-years away, it's the second closest exoplanet of its kind to Earth. But the closest one, known as Proxima b, looks to be less hospitable for life. Found in 2016, it orbits the star Proxima Centauri, which is known to be a rather active "red dwarf" star. This means that powerful eruptions of charged particles periodically...

Last week, a team of astronomers reported the first potential discovery of an exomoon–a satellite orbiting a planet around another star. Part of what is so striking about the report is the scale of this possible planet-moon system. In this case, the “moon” appears to be about the size of Neptune; the planet it orbits is some 10 times the mass of Jupiter, or about 3,000 times the mass of Earth! The system pushes at the limits of how we normally categorize objects in space and invites questions about where we stand in the scale of things. What is the...

The hunt for potentially habitable planets outside of our solar system is one of the most exciting frontiers of science, and you can become a part of it without ever having to leave the comfort of your own home. This week, MIT and Carnegie Science Institute released a huge dataset containing close to 61,000 measurements of over 1600 stars. These measurements contain data that could potentially identify thousands of new exoplanets, many of which might be Earth-like in their nature. Unfortunately, the MIT and Carnegie Institute team simply doesn’t have the capacity to trawl through all of this information,...

August 24, 2006 was a dark day for Pluto enthusiasts. It was on that day that the International Astronomical Union established three conditions a celestial body must meet in order to be considered a planet. A planet must orbit around the sun, it must be massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, and it must have “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit, which means, simply put, that it must have a certain amount of gravitational pull. Pluto does not meet the third condition, so once those rules were put in place, Pluto was demoted to “dwarf planet,” 75...

A new calculation compares the effort so far to exploring a hot tub’s–worth of Earth’s oceansWith no luck so far in a six-decade search for signals from aliens, you’d be forgiven for thinking, “Where is everyone?” A new calculation shows that if space is an ocean, we’ve barely dipped in a toe. The volume of observable space combed so far for E.T. is comparable to searching the volume of a large hot tub for evidence of fish in Earth’s oceans, astronomer Jason Wright at Penn State and colleagues say in a paper posted online September 19 at arXiv.org. “If you...

Astronomers have found evidence of the first moon to exist beyond our solar system. The gargantuan 'exomoon' is similar in size to the gas giant Neptune and orbits a planet 8,000 light years away called Kepler-1625b. More than 3,000 exoplanets - worlds orbiting stars other than the sun - have been found so far but no 'exomoons' have ever been confirmed.

Many galaxies appear to have stronger gravity - and thus more mass - than can be explained by their visible matter alone. Overly massive galaxies are most often attributed to dark matter, an invisible substance that interacts with matter through gravity. To date, though, no one has directly detected dark matter particles. But a well-established notion in physics could hold another explanation for their size. This says that empty space is really a frothy, turbulent sea full of virtual particles - matter and antimatter that spring in and out of existence so fast that we can't see them. Though they...

2015 TG387, a newfound object in the far outer solar system, way beyond Pluto. The orbit of 2015 TG387 shares peculiarities with those of other extremely far-flung bodies, which appear to have been shaped by the gravity of a very large object in that distant, frigid realm — the hypothesized Planet Nine, also known as Planet X. "These distant objects are like breadcrumbs leading us to Planet X," And 2015 TG387 is special among these bread crumbs, because it was found during a relatively uniform survey of the northern and southern skies rather than a targeted hunt for clustered objects...

Astronomers have a problem on their hands: How can you make planets if you don’t have enough of the building blocks? Stars are born from colossal clouds of gas and dust and, in their earliest stages, are surrounded by a thin disk of material. Dust grains within this halo collide, sometimes sticking together. The clumps build up into planetary cores, which are big enough to gravitationally attract additional dust and gas, eventually forming planets. But many details about this process remain unknown, such as just how quickly planets arise from the disk, and how efficient they are in capturing material....

-snip- The researchers found that the real division between planets and other celestial bodies, such as asteroids, occurred in the early 1950s when Gerard Kuiper published a paper that made the distinction based on how they were formed.However, this reason is no longer considered a factor that determines if a celestial body is a planet.“The IAU’s definition was erroneous since the literature review showed that clearing orbit is not a standard that is used for distinguishing asteroids from planets, as the IAU claimed when crafting the 2006 definition of planets,” said Dr. Kirby Runyon, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied...

Teaming up to explore the galaxy with an AI assist. First light for TESS. This is the ifrst science image taken by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS. NASA/MIT/TESS ==================================================================== The researchers at NASA’s Frontier Development Lab (FDL) in Mountain View California just spent the summer working on out-of-this-world problems. They came from all over the globe and all different disciplines; computer science engineers, planetary scientists, even a particle physicist. For eight weeks they dug through data and maps, created worlds and atmospheres, sorted them, and tested their computer algorithms against the simulations. Their final products are still rough,...

Scientists have uncovered the truth about a mysterious space rock called Oumuamua which has been hurtling through Earth’s solar system and was spotted last year.A group of acclaimed astronomers, including members from NASA, the European Space Agency and the German Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, released a report this week on the origins of the cigar-shaped asteroid which was first observed in October 2017. The name Oumuamua is Hawaiian for “messenger from afar arriving first” and was named by the site who first spotted it. According to the report, “a fast moving object on an unbound orbit was discovered close...

Moore’s Law: Life is Older than Earth Itself — “A Process that Began Billions of Years Before the Formation of Our Solar System” Posted on Sep 24, 2018  As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law which states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The regression suggests that if life takes 10 billion years to evolve to the level of complexity associated with homo sapiens, then we may be among the first, if not the first, intelligent civilization in the Milky Way, negating Drakes Equation.Our Solar...

Star Trek’s Spock comes from the planet Vulcan, which of course doesn’t exist. But new research might give us the next best thing—an exoplanet orbiting the real-life star that Vulcan is said to be orbiting in the Star Trek universe. In 1991, Gene Roddenberry wrote a letter to Sky & Telescope about what kind of star the planet Vulcan was likely to orbit. In that letter, he specifically picks out one such star, 40 Eridani. Later, 40 Eridani became the canon Vulcan star system featured in a handful of episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise.

As recently as two years ago, SETI began picking up a different kind of signal — one that scientists can’t explain but believe that it isn’t born out of an attempt to communicate: fast radio bursts (FRBs). These FRBs are massively powerful; so powerful, in fact, that the leading natural explanation scientists can come up with is that they’re from “highly magnetized neutron stars, blasted by gas streams near to a supermassive black hole.” The problem with that explanation is that the bursts aren’t all coming from one specific place, but they are all coming from one specific region of...

The newly-discovered exoplanets, called EPIC 211964830b and c, are both mini-Neptunes — gaseous planets smaller than our Solar System’s Uranus and Neptune.The inner planet has a radius of around 2.3 times that of Earth, and the outer planet has a radius of 2.8 Earth radii. They orbit their parent star extremely closely, with periods of 5.8 and 19.7 days.Designated EPIC 211964830, the star is an M2.5 dwarf, with a radius and a mass of about 47% that of the Sun.It lies on the periphery of the central core of the Beehive Cluster (also known as Messier 44, NGC 2632 and...

Before man can cross the vast distances of space, the designs of spacecraft’s sails will be key – striking a delicate balance between mass, strength in addition to reflectivity. Working with NASA, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) scientists have created the fresh material out of silicon in addition to its oxide, silica. The team has figured out that will super-thin structures made of This specific composite can transform infrared light waves into a momentum that will would likely accelerate a probe to 134,000,000 mph. Speeds like This specific can carry a little probe to our closest stellar neighbours, a huddle...

The seven planets orbiting the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 are mostly rocky, with some potentially holding more liquid water than Earth. New research reveals the density of the worlds within this crowded system to a greater precision than ever before. The findings reveal that some of the planets could have up to 5 percent of their mass in liquid water form, about 250 times as much water as found in Earth's oceans. "All the TRAPPIST-1 planets are very Earth-like — they have a solid core, surrounded by an atmosphere," In addition to narrowing down the composition of the exoplanets, the...

MU69 is a relatively small Kuiper Belt object. It is estimated to have a diameter of 30 miles (48 km) — that’s more than 10 times larger and 1,000 times more massive than typical comets, but only about 0.5 to 1% of the size of the dwarf planet Pluto. This object was discovered in June 2014 by astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.Also known as PT1 and 1110113Y, and nicknamed Ultima Thule, MU69 orbits the Sun once every 293 years at a distance of more than 4 billion miles (6.5 billion km) from Earth.The MU69 flyby will be the...

n July of this year (2015), NASA’s New Horizons mission will fly past Pluto and its moons. It will map the surface of the Plutonian system in unprecedented detail, revealing craters and other surface features for the first time. In preparation for the deluge of newly discovered craters, mountains, crevasses and other surface features, Mamajek et al. discuss a naming system for Pluto and its moons. Pluto is one of the last large planetesimals in the Solar system to have its surface imaged in detail. Pluto’s surface features will reveal the history of its life in the alien conditions at...