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A summary of decades of research on a rather 'out-there' idea involving viruses from space raises questions on just how scientific we can be when it comes to speculating on the history of life on Earth. It's easy to throw around words like crackpot, rogue, and maverick in describing the scientific fringe, but then papers like this one, from 2018, come along and leave us blinking owlishly, unsure of where to even begin. A total of 33 names were listed as authors on this review, which was published by Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology back in August 2018. The...

Interstellar space is a graveyard of lost souls. Adrift far from any star, these planets float in the darkness like ghost ships in the night. Catching sight of one requires patience, and a good eye. But a new approach based on tens of thousands of images collected by the European Southern Observatory's facilities has resulted in the identification of as many as 170 potential 'rogue' worlds in our corner of the galaxy. If a good fraction of them are confirmed to be planets, it would suggest the Milky Way is swarming with solar exiles. "There could be several billions of...

The number of known exoplanets made a big jump up in November 2021, when astronomers announced a whopping 301 newly confirmed planets and an additional 366 new planet candidates. NASA’s Kepler planet-hunter – a space observatory – gathered the data. Kepler launched and began operations in 2009. It ran out of fuel and was retired in late 2018. But astronomers are still mining the mission’s data, making new discoveries of distant worlds... Overall, the Kepler mission was immensely successful. As of December 6, 2021, astronomers recognize 4,888 confirmed exoplanets. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Kepler single-handedly discovered most...

Explanation: It's not the big disk that's attracting the most attention. Although the big planet-forming disk around the star PDS 70 is clearly imaged and itself quite interesting. It's also not the planet on the right, just inside the big disk, that’s being talked about the most. Although the planet PDS 70c is a newly formed and, interestingly, similar in size and mass to Jupiter. It's the fuzzy patch around the planet PDS 70c that's causing the commotion. That fuzzy patch is thought to be itself a dusty disk that is now forming into moons -- and that has never...

Habitable Planets With Earth-Like Biospheres May Be Much Rarer Than Thought TOPICS:AstrobiologyAstronomyAstrophysicsExoplanetRoyal Astronomical SocietyBy Royal Astronomical Society June 26, 2021A new analysis of known exoplanets has revealed that Earth-like conditions on potentially habitable planets may be much rarer than previously thought. The work focuses on the conditions required for oxygen-based photosynthesis to develop on a planet, which would enable complex biospheres of the type found on Earth. The study was recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.The number of confirmed planets in our own Milky Way galaxy now numbers into the thousands. However, planets that are...

Astronomers have long been looking into the vast universe in hopes of discovering alien civilisations. But for a planet to have life, liquid water must be present. The chances of that finding scenario have seemed impossible to calculate because it has been the assumption that planets like Earth get their water by chance if a large, ice asteroid hits the planet. Now, researchers from the GLOBE Institute at the University of Copenhagen have published an eye-opening study, indicating that water may be present during the very formation of a planet. According to the study's calculations, this is true for both...

This surprising orbital architecture was caused by the protoplanetary disk in which the two planets formed being tilted by the second star in this system. "In any planetary system, the planets are thought to form in a spinning, circular disk of material that swirls around a young star for a few million years after the star itself is born, the so-called protoplanetary disk. Usually, the disk and the star are spinning the same way. However, if there is a neighboring star (where 'neighboring' in astronomy means within a light-year or so), the gravitational force from the neighboring star might tilt...

WASP-12b is one of the more interesting exoplanets we know of. Orbiting a yellow dwarf star a little bigger than the Sun 1,410 light-years away, the ultra-black planet is what's known as a "hot Jupiter" - a gas giant exoplanet with similar mass and size to Jupiter, but so close to the star that it's scorching hot. WASP-12b has never exactly been in the most secure position. With an orbital period of just over a day, the gas giant exoplanet is so close to its star that a constant stream of material is being siphoned away from its atmosphere. But...

A Russian astronomer observed the planets thru a telescope made of ice. Henry describes his observations. Ever wondered what the opinion of equality of the sexes was in 1789? Henry's position is that "Love, and all its delectable concomitants was utterly unknown there [on Venus]; as that passion exists but where equality is found or understood." Interesting?

The most common type of star in the galaxy is the red dwarf star. None of these small, dim stars can be seen from Earth with the naked eye, but they can emit flares far more powerful than anything our Sun emits. Two astronomers using the Hubble space telescope saw a red dwarf star give off a powerful type of flare called a superflare. That’s bad news for any planets in these stars’ so-called habitable zones. Red dwarfs make up about 75% of the stars in the Milky Way, so they probably host many exoplanets. In fact, scientists think most...

For centuries, human beings have wondered about the possibility of other Earths orbiting distant stars. Perhaps some of these alien worlds would harbor strange forms of life or have unique and telling histories or futures. But it was only in 1995 that astronomers spotted the first planets orbiting sunlike stars outside of our solar system. In the last decade, in particular, the number of planets known to orbit distant stars grew from under 100 to well over 2,000, with another 2,000 likely planets awaiting confirmation. Most of these new discoveries are due to a single endeavor—NASA's Kepler mission. Kepler is...

In an incredible world first, astrophysicists have detected multiple planets in another galaxy, ranging from masses as small as the Moon to ones as great as Jupiter. Given how difficult it is to find exoplanets even within our Milky Way galaxy, this is no mean feat. Researchers at the University of Oklahoma achieved this thanks to clever use of gravitational microlensing. The technique, first predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity, has been used to find exoplanets within Milky Way, and it's the only known way of finding the smallest and most distant planets, thousands of light-years from Earth. As...

According to a new study in Astronomy & Astrophysics, water could be common among the planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The quest continues to learn more about the TRAPPIST-1 system, seven roughly Earth-sized planets orbiting a dwarf star about 39 light-years away. Whether life could exist on these planets is a matter of speculation at the moment, but scientists are honing in on measurements that could tell us if some of these alien worlds are habitable. The planets are rocky and some are the correct distance from their host star for liquid water, but they are probably tidally locked...

This artist's concept depicts a planetary system. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech An international research team led by Université de Montréal astrophysicist Lauren Weiss has discovered that exoplanets orbiting the same star tend to have similar sizes and a regular orbital spacing. This pattern, revealed by new W. M. Keck Observatory observations of planetary systems discovered by the Kepler Telescope, could suggest that most planetary systems have a different formation history than the solar system. Thanks in large part to the NASA Kepler Telescope, launched in 2009, many thousands of exoplanets are now known. This large sample allows researchers to not only...

Unusual composition of star suggests it swallowed planets that came too closeIt was a star with a hefty appetite. Astronomers say the sun-like star about 320 light-years from Earth may have eaten several of its planets, leading them to give it the nickname Kronos, after the Greek god who ate his sons. The star — with the official name of HD 240430 — is believed to be part of a wide binary star system, two stars that share a central point of orbit. Because the stars travel together in space, astronomers refer to them as co-moving stars. While the stars...

Tau Ceti is the center of the nearest solar system that's similar to ours, an assumption made stronger by the discovery of four rocky super-Earths orbiting the star just 12 light years away. Two of the four planets are in the habitable zone around the star where temperatures could be just right for liquid water, and perhaps alien life, to be present. An international team of scientists devised a new, more accurate and sensitive method of detecting planets by looking for "wobbles" in the star's movement caused by the minute gravitational tug of orbiting planets, while also better ruling out...

While small, cool, and relatively dim compared to our Sun, red dwarf star systems are where many of the most recent and promising exoplanet finds have been made. These include Proxima b, the seven rocky planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1, and the super-Earth discovered around LHS 1140b. Unfortunately, red dwarf stars pose a bit of a problem when it comes to habitability. In addition to being variable in terms of the light they put out, they also known for being unstable. According to a new study by a team of scientists – which was presented the this week at the annual meeting...

Solar system could have over 100 planets with new criteria Posted on March 19, 2017 by Kathy Fey Solar System A new classification system for what may be considered a planet would result in over 100 planets occupying our solar system. 178 SHARES ShareTweetGoogleReddit Our solar system could contain over 100 planets if a new classification system is approved. Tech Times explains that the definition of a planet was last changed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 2006 when the new criteria famously demoted Pluto from the rank of a planet to dwarf planet and Kuiper Belt Object. Space...

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water. The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system. All of these seven planets could have liquid water – key to life as we know it – under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the...

Planet-hunters are always on the lookout for worlds that look like Earth—rocky planets that are not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to flow on the surface. Now scientists have hit the jackpot, discovering seven Earth-size exoplanets orbiting a single star just 39 light-years away. The star, named TRAPPIST-1, was thought to be home to three exoplanets. But with the help of a variety of observatories—including the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (a.k.a. TRAPPIST, the star's namesake), the Very Large Telescope in Chile, and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope—researchers found four more planets in the system. The...