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Posted by Stephen Shankland This diagram shows plasma from interstellar space colliding with the heliosphere that surrounds the sun.(Credit: NASA) SAN FRANCISCO--Thirty years after launch but earlier than expected, Voyager 2 has left the cozy realm of our solar system, where the stream of particles from the sun dominates space. You might think that space billions of miles from the sun is a placid, empty domain. In fact, Voyager 2 has been heading outward in the same direction as the solar wind, charged particles streaming from the sun, but things started to get a lot more complicated on August 30,...

Earth... Venus. Despite the fact that Venus, our sister planet, has been described as purgatory personified, there are some researchers who still hold out hope for life there... Mars. Then and now, everyone's favorite, inhabited extraterrestrial planet. While Mars' highly reactive and powder-dry landscape is practically guaranteed to be sterile, there is indirect evidence for watery aquifers a few hundred feet beneath the surface... Titan. This large moon of Saturn... Europa. There's good evidence, mostly from its changing magnetic field, that this ice-covered world orbiting Jupiter has an ocean lying 10 miles or so beneath its crusty exterior... Ganymede and...

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...

The new moon could be related to Methone and Pallene A new moon has been discovered orbiting Saturn - bringing the planet's latest moon tally up to 60.The body was spotted in a series of images taken by cameras onboard the Cassini spacecraft. Initial calculations suggest the moon is about 2km-wide (1.2 miles) and its orbit sits between those of two other Saturnian moons, Methone and Pallene. The Cassini Imaging Team, who found the object, said Saturn's moon count could rise further still. New family The moon appears as a dim speck in images taken by the Cassini probe's...

PARIS (AFP) - Astronomers on Wednesday announced they had spotted the first planet beyond the Solar System that has water, the precious ingredient for life. The watery world, though, is far beyond the reach of our puny chemically-powered rockets -- and in any case is quite uninhabitable. It is made of gas rather than rock and its atmosphere reaches temperatures hot enough to melt steel, which means the water exists only as superheated steam. The find, named HD189733b, is about 15 percent bigger than our Jupiter and orbits a star in the constellation of Vulpecula the Fox, according to a...

Sometimes the line to get into the Imax theater at the American Museum of Natural History seems long enough to stretch all the way out to other planets. Now it does. This weekend “Beyond,” a one-year exhibition of more than 30 large-format photographs of Earth’s planetary neighbors, opens in the museum’s Imax Gallery, a corridor by the theater that is also a pathway to the Rose Center for Earth and Space. Michael Benson, a writer, photographer and filmmaker, created the stunning series of pictures from the enormous archives of images taken over the years by robotic explorers of the solar...

Mars is unlikely to sport beachfront property any time soon, but the planet has enough water ice at its south pole to blanket the entire planet in more than 30 feet of water if everything thawed out. With a radar technique, astronomers have penetrated for the first time about 2.5 miles (nearly four kilometers) beneath the south pole's frozen surface. The data showed that nearly pure water ice lies beneath. • Click here to visit FOXNews.com's Space Center. Discovered in the early 1970s, layered deposits of ice and dust cap the north and south poles of Mars. Until now, the...

What should follow the great success of Cassini-Huygens? The European and US space agencies are moving ahead on their next major missions to explore the Solar System. Nasa has begun choosing a destination for a "flagship" robotic venture along the lines of Cassini-Huygens, which has been exploring Saturn and its moons. It is considering four targets: the Jupiter system, Jupiter's moon Europa, and Saturn's moons Enceladus and Titan. The European Space Agency has called for proposals for one flagship mission and another medium-sized mission. Europa, Titan and Enceladus are also among the destinations expected to be proposed under the...

A debris disk spied recently around a distant dead star is likely the remains of an asteroid that was vaporized when the star died, scientists say. The discovery, detailed in the Dec. 22 issue of the journal Science, could be a sign of what will happen in our own solar system in a few billion years. Because the crushed asteroid was probably gravitationally lassoed in by one or more planets, the finding also provides evidence that planetary systems can form around massive stars. While analyzing the light spectra of several hundred white dwarfs, astronomer Boris Gänsicke of the University of...

Stargazers will get a rare triple planetary treat this weekend with Jupiter, Mercury and Mars appearing to nestle together in the predawn skies. About 45 minutes before dawn on Sunday those three planets will be so close that the average person's thumb can obscure all three from view. They will be almost as close together on Saturday and Monday, but Sunday they will be within one degree of each other in the sky. Three planets haven't been that close since 1925, said Miami Space Transit Planetarium director Jack Horkheimer. And it won't happen again until 2053, he said. "Jupiter will...

Sept. 21, 2006: Almost every day, the great antennas of NASA's Deep Space Network turn to a blank patch of sky in the constellation Ophiuchus. Pointing at nothing, or so it seems, they invariably pick up a signal, faint but full of intelligence. The source is beyond Neptune, beyond Pluto, on the verge of the stars themselves. It's Voyager 1. The spacecraft left Earth in 1977 on a mission to visit Jupiter and Saturn. Almost 30 years later, with the gas giants long ago seen and done, Voyager 1 is still going and encountering some strange things....

Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, a team of astronomers has spotted for the first time a cool brown dwarf orbiting with a companion planet around a Sun-like star. “This is the first brown dwarf that has been directly imaged in an extrasolar planetary system,” lead researcher Kevin Luhman of Penn State University told SPACE.com. The finding, which appears in the current issue of The Astrophysical Journal, sheds light on these mysterious objects that blur the lines between a planet and a star. Sometimes called "failed stars," brown dwarfs are too small to trigger the fusion of hydrogen that keeps stars...

Pluto got its walking papers yesterday. Throw away the place mats. Redraw the classroom charts. Take a pair of scissors to the solar system mobile. After years of wrangling and a week of debate, astronomers voted for a sweeping reclassification of the solar system. In what many of them described as a triumph of science over sentiment, Pluto was demoted to the status of a “dwarf planet.” In the new solar system as defined by the International Astronomical Union, meeting in Prague, there are eight planets instead of nine, at least three dwarf planets and tens of thousands of so-called...

Telling the history of our time in song. MIDI - ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA (2001)

The original definition of planet is wanderer, from the Greeks who watched these bright lights wander through the firmament of fixed stars. Observers discerned nine of these travelers over the course of human history, the last being Pluto in 1930. But recent discoveries of more objects orbiting the sun, both bigger than Pluto and similarly rounded in shape, called into question the arbitrary limit of nine, with some proposing that Pluto did not merit its planetary status. Now the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has crafted a new definition for what constitutes a planet that would expand the solar system to...

Not for the first time, but with new urgency in 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) impaneled a committee to define both the word "planet" and the status of Pluto. Our committee -- seven in number, like the planets of old -- met at the Paris Observatory in late June and reached a unanimous agreement. In short: A planet is a body in orbit around a star (as opposed to orbiting another planet) and big enough for gravity to make it round. The full text of our proposed definition is being released today, to be discussed by astronomers from around...

Astronomers detected unusually high quantities of carbon, the basis of all terrestrial life, in an infant solar system around nearby star Beta Pictoris, 63 light-years away. "For years we've looked to this early forming solar system as one that might be going through the same processes our own solar system did when the rocky planets, including Earth, were forming," commented lead author Aki Roberge, who began the research while at Carnegie's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. "But we got a big surprise--there is much more carbon gas than we expected. Something very different is going on." The research, published in the...

An exotic theory, which attempts to unify the laws of physics by proposing the existence of an extra fourth spatial dimension, could be tested using a satellite to be launched in 2007. Such theories are notoriously difficult to test. But a new study suggests that such hidden dimensions could give rise to thousands of mini-black holes within our own solar system – and the theory could be tested within Pluto’s orbit in just a few years. Black holes of various masses are thought to have sprung into existence within 1 second of the big bang, as elementary particles clumped together...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is giving astronomers their most detailed view yet of a second red spot emerging on Jupiter. For the first time in history, astronomers have witnessed the birth of a new red spot on the giant planet, which is located half a billion miles away. The storm is roughly one-half the diameter of its bigger and legendary cousin, the Great Red Spot. Researchers suggest that the new spot may be related to a possible major climate change in Jupiter's atmosphere. These images were taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys on April 8 and 16, 2006

Xena, unofficially called the 10th planet, is the second-most-shiny known object in the solar system, new observations show. Scientists are scrambling to explain where Xena got its sparkle. Some suggest that it might have enough heat to belch methane, despite being in the coldest region of the solar system. The new notion of Xena arises from Hubble Space Telescope images that were released this week. The images reveal that Xena, the most distant known object in our solar system, isn't quite the big shot that scientists had thought it was. The chilly outpost's diameter—2,384 kilometers—makes it about 5 percent larger...