Free Republic

An international team of astronomers has discovered a close-in super-Earth exoplanet in the HD 164922 planetary system. HD 164922 is a bright G9-type star located approximately 72 light-years away in the constellation of Hercules. Also known as Gliese 9613 or LHS 3353, the star is slightly smaller and less massive than the Sun and is 9.6 billion years old. HD 164922 is known to host two massive planets: the temperate sub-Neptune HD 164922c and the Saturn-mass planet HD 164922b in a wide orbit. The sub-Neptune is 12.9 times more massive than Earth, and orbits the parent star once every 75.8...

By now, we have discovered hundreds of stars with multiple planets orbiting them scattered throughout the galaxy. Each one is unique, but a system orbiting the star HD 158259, 88 light-years away, is truly special. The star itself is about the same mass and a little larger than the Sun - a minority in our exoplanet hunts. It's orbited by six planets: a super-Earth and five mini-Neptunes... These two bodies are in what is described as a 2:3 orbital resonance. For every two laps Pluto makes around the Sun, Neptune makes three. It's like bars of music being played simultaneously,...

There may be multitudes of Earth-like planets sprinkled throughout the Milky Way galaxy, but they are not so easy to find. To date, only around a third of the over 4,000 exoplanets found and confirmed are rocky -- and most of those are within a few thousand light-years of Earth... So the announcement of a new rocky exoplanet is always exciting -- but this particular newly discovered rocky exoplanet is even more exciting yet... it's a whopping 24,722.65 light-years away from us -- which could make it the most distant Milky Way exoplanet discovered yet. It's so distant, it's close...

We can now add atmospheric craziness to WASP-79b's already substantial exotic appeal. The gas-giant exoplanet, which lies about 780 light-years from Earth, circles extremely close to its bright host star, completing one orbit every 3.7 Earth days. That proximity makes WASP-79b scorching hot, with an average temperature around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 degrees Celsius), NASA officials said. All that heat puffs up WASP-79b substantially, making it one of the largest alien worlds ever observed. Although WASP-79b is just 85% as massive as Jupiter, it's 1.7 times wider than our solar system's biggest planet. Then there's the alien world's air, which...

Conspiracy theorists will readily tell you that the U.S. military is hiding alien corpses in a secret facility in the Nevada desert. But paleontologist and University of Washington geology professor Peter Ward thinks that scientists should be looking for a different type of alien life on earth: alien microbes. Ward is the author of several popular books about astrobiology, including the controversial Rare Earth, co-authored with Donald Brownlee. In his latest book, Life as We Do Not Know It, Ward addresses an issue often avoided by astrobiologists. Although all known life on Earth has a similar DNA-based chemistry, life found...

The first planet to be discovered outside our solar system isn't a planet at all, and may be a giant dust cloud created by the collision of two icy asteroids, a study finds. Twelve years ago, astronomers spotted what they thought was a Saturn-like planet in the Fomalhaut star system 25 light years from Earth, and called it Fomalhaut b. But now researchers from the University of Arizona claim the visible and infrared images of the 'planet' captured by the Hubble Space Telescope were actually of a cosmic collision. The team studied the images in more detail and found they...

IN 2013, SCIENTISTS were stunned to find microbes thriving deep inside volcanic rocks beneath the seafloor off the Pacific Northwest, buried under more than 870 feet of sediment. The rocks were on the flank of the volcanic rift where they were born, and they were still young and hot enough to drive intense chemical reactions with the seawater, from which the microbes derived their energy. Now, however, another team of researchers have discovered living cells inside exceedingly old, cold oceanic crust in the middle of the South Pacific. It isn’t yet clear how these new microbes are managing to survive—and...

A new paper describes how the researchers connected the moving dots to find the new TNOs, and also says this new approach could help look for the hypothetical Planet Nine and other undiscovered worlds. The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. It studies galaxies and supernovas and precisely tracks their movements. This survey has been active since 2013, using the 4-meter Blanco Telescope located at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. The...

In 1781, an oboe player discovered the first new planet since antiquity. The History Guy recalls a solar system shattering event that represented an era of scientific inquiry. It is history that deserves to be remembered.

Astronomers have finally found something they have spent decades searching for: a teardrop-shaped star that pulsates on only one side. Citizen scientists helped the discovery team find the strangely lopsided star, which is known as HD74423, in data gathered by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The star is about 1.7 times the mass of Earth's sun, and scientists determined that HD74423's weird pulsing is caused by a second, smaller star. "I've been looking for a star like this for nearly 40 years, and now we have finally found one," study co-author Don Kurtz, an astronomer at the University of...

The problem with Polaris is that no one can agree on how big or distant it is. Astrophysicists have a few ways to calculate the mass, age and distance of a star like Polaris. One method is a stellar evolution model...Researchers can study the brightness, color and rate of pulsation of the star and use that data to figure out how big and bright it is and what stage of life it's in. These models are especially precise for cepheids, because their rate of pulsing is directly related to their luminosity, or brightness. That makes it easy to calculate the...

SETI@home is shutting down. In an announcement posted yesterday, the project stated that they will no longer send data to SETI@home clients starting on March 31st, 2020 as they have reached a "point of diminishing returns" and have analyzed all the data that they need.

Astronomers have spotted a cosmic blast that dwarfs all others. A gargantuan explosion tore through the heart of a distant galaxy cluster, releasing about five times more energy than the previous record holder, a new study reports. "In some ways, this blast is similar to how the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain," study lead author Simona Giacintucci, of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "A key difference is that you could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into...

By watching for a special kind of flare, astronomers have identified the fingerprints of an Earth-size planet orbiting a distant star.The planet orbits its host star, a dim “M dwarf,” just at the edge of the habitable zone — the region where liquid water could exist. Jupiter’s moon Io — the solar system’s most volcanic world — has inspired a new way to find distant exoplanets. As the moon orbits Jupiter, it tugs on the planet’s magnetic field, generating bright auroras in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Even if we couldn’t see Io itself, the enormous auroras, pulsing to the beat of...

Three Earth-sized planets orbiting a cool, dim star called Trappist-1 in the constellation of Aquarius will be high up on the hit list. Computer models suggest the Trappist-1 system is among the most promising for finding planets with atmospheres and temperatures that would enable liquid water to exist on the surface. “The James Webb Telescope will be able to tell us whether they have atmospheres like the Earth or Venus,” said Meadows. “It gives us our first real chance to search for gases given off by life on another planet. We’re basically going to get to study Earth’s cousins.”

The UK's Astronomer Royal, Professor Lord Rees, is the chair of the organisation's international advisory group. He told the BBC that, given that the multi-billion pound Large Hadron Collider had not yet achieved its aim of finding sub-atomic particles beyond the current theory of physics, governments should consider modest funding of a few million pounds for Seti. "I'd feel far more confident arguing the case for Seti than for a particle accelerator," he said. "Seti searches are surely worthwhile, despite the heavy odds against success, because the stakes are so high". Nasa once funded the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence to...

Astronomers have never before seen fast radio bursts being emitted in such a regular pattern, and still don't know their origin. Astronomers have detected alien signals - that is, signals from a foreign galaxy - being emitted in an unusually regular 16-day cycle. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are not in and of themselves unusual - the first was detected in 2007 - but previous observations have shown them to be mostly emitted at random. While there have been some bursts which repeated, as astronomers discovered previously, they have never been seen repeating in such a steady cycle. The origin of...

A fascinating essay that lay hidden for decades reveals Winston Churchill’s views on alien life. The never-published essay has been in the archive of the National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri since the 1980s, when it was given to the museum by the wife of Churchill’s publisher, who had died. Last year the museum invited Israeli astrophysicist Mario Livio to review the essay, which he discusses in an article published in the science journal Nature. Livio notes the British wartime leader’s passion for science and technology in the 1939 essay, as well as Churchill’s thoughts on extraterrestrials. Apparently influenced by...

A newly unearthed essay by Winston Churchill shows Britain's wartime leader was uncannily prescient about the possibility of alien life on planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. The 11-page article was drafted on the eve of World War Two in 1939 and updated in the 1950s, decades before astronomers discovered the first extrasolar planets in the 1990s. Yet Churchill pinpointed issues dominating today's debate about extraterrestrial life, proving that the former prime minister "reasoned like a scientist", according to an analysis of his work published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

A new exoplanet only 4.2 light years away would prove that there's plenty left to discover in our own cosmic backyard. Scientists have found evidence of a new exoplanet candidate orbiting our closest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri. This exoplanet candidate, Proxima c, likely has a mass six times that of Earth. But it's unlikely that life would survive on the planet, given its frigid temperatures. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The red dwarf star Proxima Centauri is our closest stellar neighbor; the star system is a measly 4.2 light years from Earth and can be seen with the naked eye. Because of this proximity,...