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Astronomers are making a surprising breakthrough in the study of Venus, as new simulations suggest there may be a hidden family of asteroids quietly orbiting the Sun alongside the planet. This discovery, detailed in a recent study by Valerio Carruba and his team at São Paulo State University, is like uncovering an entire continent that was previously unknown. The research, published on the preprint server arXiv, uncovers important insights about the dynamics of Venus’ orbit and could have significant implications for our understanding of the solar system. Venus has long been one of the most mysterious planets in our solar...

A scorched alien planet is flying so close to its parent star that its atmosphere is being swept off it in a glowing tail like some sort of giant comet, NASA announced Thursday. The existence of the planet and its strange tail, which was suggested in previous studies, was confirmed recently by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. These new observations of the gas giant planet, called HD 209458b, suggest strong winds from its nearby star are blowing the atmosphere off the scorched world and shaping it into a comet-like tail. "Since 2003 scientists have theorized the lost mass is being pushed...

HD 209458b, shown in red in an artist's conception, is the first confirmed "cometary planet," experts say. Image courtesy G. Bacon, NASA/ESAAn alien planet orbits so close to its star that its atmosphere is being blasted away, forming a gaseous, comet-like tail, astronomers announced Thursday. (Related: "Odd Star Sheds Comet-like Tail.") About 153 light-years from Earth, planet HD 209458b hugs its star so tightly that the planet's atmosphere is likely a scorching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,093 degrees Celsius) an a year passes in just 3.5 days—making Mercury's 88-day orbit seem downright leisurely.That tight orbit also means this gas giant—meaning...

Astronomers have for the first time found a gargantuan, comet-like tail created by a slowly dying star, a discovery that gives new insights into how old stars seed the galaxies with material that ultimately becomes new stars and solar systems. Astronomers have long known that dying stars provide the building blocks for future ones, but never before have they seen the process so vividly in action. Save & Share Article What's This? DiggGoogle del.icio.usYahoo! RedditFacebook The 13-light-year-long tail is made up of molecules of oxygen, carbon and nitrogen shed by the slowly dying but very fast-moving star as it speeds...

NASA's Pluto-bound spacecraft, New Horizons, recently surfed a long tail of charged particles trailing behind Jupiter. Observations from that wild ride revealed enormous bobbing bubbles of charged particles, or "plasma," and showed that the structure of the planet's tadpole-shaped "magnetotail" is surprisingly varied. The findings, detailed in two reports in the Oct. 9 issue of the journal Science, could help scientists understand the protective magnetic environment surrounding Earth and other planets. "If we understand our Jupiter better, we will be able to further understand the extrasolar 'hot Jupiters' of other stars," Norbert Krupp, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute...

ROME and BOSTON - Scientists from Boston University's Center for Space Physics reported today that NASA satellites designed to view the escaping atmosphere of the Sun have also recorded evidence of gas escaping from the planet Mercury. The scientists reported these findings at the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) meeting in Rome, Italy this week. The STEREO mission has two satellites placed in the same orbit around the Sun that the Earth has, but at locations ahead and behind it (STEREO, or Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory, is the third mission in NASA's Solar Terrestrial Probes program). This configuration offers multi-directional...

Strange Space Object Stumps Astronomers; Appears to be Asteroid but Has Six Comet-Like Tails Posted by Russell Westerholm Astronomers have spotted a curious comet-like spatial object with the Hubble Telescope that has six trails, causing it to look like a badminton shuttlecock, BBC News reported. The observers were lead to believe the object is an asteroid because it was spotted in an asteroid belt, but its tails are more characteristic of a comet. Asteroids also typically only appear as tiny dots of light. "We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it," Dave Jewitt, a professor from the University of California...

Left: what the tunnel would look like; right: what the sky does look like. (Image Credit Below) Mysterious structures in the sky that have puzzled astronomers for decades might finally have an explanation – and it's quite something. The North Polar Spur and the Fan Region, on opposite sides of the sky, may be connected by a vast system of magnetized filaments. These form a structure resembling a tunnel that circles the Solar System, and many nearby stars besides. "If we were to look up in the sky," said astronomer Jennifer West of the University of Toronto in Canada, "we...

Huntsville AL (SPX) Apr 18, 2008 Behold the full Moon. Ancient craters and frozen lava seas lie motionless under an airless sky of profound quiet. It's a slow-motion world where even a human footprint may last millions of years. Nothing ever seems to happen there. Right? Wrong. NASA-supported scientists have realized that something does happen every month when the Moon gets a lashing from Earth's magnetic tail. "Earth's magnetotail extends well beyond the orbit of the Moon and, once a month, the Moon orbits through it," says Tim Stubbs, a University of Maryland scientist working at the Goddard Space Flight...

The northern lights (above) and their lesser-known sibling the southern lights, aurora borealis and aurora australis, respectively, undulate across the skies in hazy green and sometimes red ribbons near Earth’s polar regions. The two phenomena aren’t identical, however, and now researchers think they know why. Aurorae appear as solar wind, a gust of charged particles emitted by the sun, blows across Earth’s magnetic field. Because the charged particles flow along symmetrical lines in Earth’s magnetic field linking the north and south poles, it made sense to assume the atmospheric displays in each hemisphere would mirror each other. Advances in Earth...

Measurements from NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, aka LADEE (pronounced “laddie”) have confirmed the long-suspected presence of neon in its atmosphere ... along with isotopes of argon and helium. The relative concentrations of each of these elements also appears to depend on the time of day. “The presence of neon in the exosphere of the moon has been a subject of speculation since the Apollo missions, but no credible detections were made,” said Mehdi Benna of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, lead author of a paper describing the...

This is an image of Mercury's tail obtained from combining a full day of data from a camera aboard the STEREO-A spacecraft. The reflected sunlight off the planet's surface results in a type of over-exposure that causes Mercury to appear much larger than its actual size. The tail-like structure extending anti-sunward from the planet is visible over several days and spans an angular size exceeding that of a full Moon in the night sky.

The ion tail of Venus. Credit: Jeff Hecht, New Scientist Magazine May 31, 1997.   Feb 20, 2008Venus' Tail of the UnexpectedAncient peoples report that the planet Venus once had visible "ropes" stretching out to the Earth. Could a plasma glow discharge have been the cause?The "induced magnetotail" that points away from Venus in the direction of the earth is a teardrop-shaped plasma structure filled with “a lot of little stringy things” that was first detected by NASA’s Pioneer Venus Orbiter in the late 1970s. In 1997, Europe’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) Satellite showed that the tail stretched some...

Discovered by the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) spacecraft, the unusual phenomenon is thought to have been caused by the effects of the solar winds and could help to shine more light on how the Martian atmosphere escaped in to space. "We found that Mars' magnetic tail, or magnetotail, is unique in the Solar System," said NASA scientist Gina DiBraccio. "It's not like the magnetotail found at Venus, a planet with no magnetic field of its own, nor is it like Earth's, which is surrounded by its own internally generated magnetic field." "Instead, it is a hybrid between...