Forty light-years away is no small distance. But an announcement of the discovery of two planets at that separation that have been determined to be rocky and Earth-sized adds a significant new twist to the ever-growing collection of relatively close-by exoplanets that just might be habitable. The two planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system orbit what …
Continue reading "Rocky, Close and Potentially Habitable Planets Around a Dwarf Star"
In every planet-forming disk there's a point where the heat from a host star needed to keep H2O molecules as vapor peters out, and the H2O be becomes a solid crystal. This is the snow line, and it looms large in most theories of planet formation. Most broadly, planets formed inside the snow line will …
In every planet-forming disk there's a point where the heat from a host star needed to keep H2O molecules as vapor peters out, and the H2O be becomes a solid crystal. This is the snow line, and it looms large in most theories of planet formation. Most broadly, planets formed inside the snow line will …
It hardly seems possible, but researchers have detected a planet in apparently stable orbit within a three star system -- a configuration now known as a trinary. The ubiquity of binary stars has been understood for some time, and the presence of exoplanets orbiting around and within them is no longer a surprise. But this …
It hardly seems possible, but researchers have detected a planet in apparently stable orbit within a three star system -- a configuration now known as a trinary. The ubiquity of binary stars has been understood for some time, and the presence of exoplanets orbiting around and within them is no longer a surprise. But this …
It took a while -- almost five years since launch -- but the Juno spacecraft is now at Jupiter and orbiting the giant planet. A 35-minute rocket burn to slow Juno down from its record-breaking 130,000 mph entry speed led to a successful insertion into orbit just minutes before midnight, making it another July 4th …
It took a while -- almost five years since launch -- but the Juno spacecraft is now at Jupiter and orbiting the giant planet. A 35-minute rocket burn to slow Juno down from its record-breaking 130,000 mph entry speed led to a successful insertion into orbit just minutes before midnight, making it another July 4th …
Early in the Curiosity rover's trek across Gale Crater on Mars, team member and Los Almos National Laboratory planetary scientist Nina Lanza reported finding surprisingly high concentrations of the mineral manganese oxide. It was showing up as a blackish-purple fill to cracks in rocks, and possibly as a surface covering to others. Lanza, who had …
Continue reading "Exoplanet Biosignatures: Crucial and Confounding"
Early in the Curiosity rover's trek across Gale Crater on Mars, team member and Los Almos National Laboratory planetary scientist Nina Lanza reported finding surprisingly high concentrations of the mineral manganese oxide. It was showing up as a blackish-purple fill to cracks in rocks, and possibly as a surface covering to others. Lanza, who had …
Continue reading "Exoplanet Biosignatures: Crucial and Confounding"
The last NASA mission to orbit Jupiter, the Galileo, was designed, flown and its data analyzed as if it was circling the only Jupiter in the sky. This is hardly surprising since the spacecraft launched in 1989, before the exoplanet era had arrived. Ironically, Galileo entered its Jupiter orbit in late 1995, just a few …
Many Worlds 