What will it take to capture images and spectra of a distant world capable of harboring life? By Marc Kaufman Air & Space Magazine | Subscribe April 2021 Share to Facebook For all the excitement surrounding the search for distant exoplanets in recent years, the 4,000-plus planets confirmed so far have been unseen actors …
Continue reading "The Space Telescope That Could Find a Second Earth"
Once it became clear in the past decade that the surface of ancient Mars, the inevitable question arose regarding what happened to it all since the planet is today so very dry. And the widely-accepted answer has been that the water escaped into space, especially after the once thicker atmosphere of Mars was stripped away. …
Different methods of searching for and finding distant exoplanets give different information about the planets found. The transit method -- where an exoplanets passed in front of its sun and dims the bright sunlight ever so slightly -- gives astronomers not only a detection but also its radius or size. The radial velocity method -- …
Continue reading "A Close Exoplanet Found That May Have An Atmosphere Ideal For Study"
Mars is receiving visitors these days. Quite a few of them. The most prominent visitor is NASA's Perseverance rover, which made a difficult but smooth precision landing at 3.55 ET this afternoon. The rover now sits in Jezero Crater, in an area that clearly once had lots of water flowing. The site was selected, in …
Continue reading "NASA’s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars — The Third Martian Arrival in a Week"
Scientists have long held that many of the important compounds and elements that make life possible on Earth arrived here after the planet was formed and was orbiting the sun. These molecules came via meteorites and comets, it was thought, from the colder regions beyond Jupiter. But in a challenge to that long-accepted view, a …
Continue reading "New Insights Into How Earth Got Its Nitrogen"
In trying to tease out what a planet is made of, its density is of great importance. Scientists can use that measure of density -- the amount of matter contained in a given volume -- to determine what ratio of a planet is likely is gas, or water, or rocks, or rocks and iron and …
The more we learn about the billions upon billions of planets that orbit beyond our solar system, the more we are surprised by the wild menagerie of objects out there. From the start, many of these untolled planets have been startling, paradigm-breaking, mysterious, hellish, potentially habitable and just plain weird. Despite the confirmed detection of …
For almost 30 years now, the Hubble Space Telescope has transformed how we see the cosmos. In terms of scientific output as well as making visible the splendors of the sky above us, the Hubble has been arguably the most consequential telescope ever to peer into space. To commemorate 30 years of Hubble science and …
Continue reading "Sparkling Gifts From the Hubble Space Telescope, Thirty Years Into Its Mission"
When our sun was young, it was significantly less luminous and sent out significantly less warming energy than it does now. Scientists estimate that 4 million years ago, when the sun and our solar system were 500 million years old, the energy that the sun produced and dispersed was about 75 percent of what it …
When describing exoplanets that are potentially promising candidates for life, scientists often use the terminology of the "habitable zone." This is a description of planets in orbit where temperatures, as predicted by the distance from the host star, are not too cold for liquid water to exist on a planetary surface and also not to …
Continue reading "How Radioactive Elements May Make Planets Suitable or Hostile to Life"
Many Worlds 