Astronomer David Bennett and his colleagues at the University of Notre Dame have discovered a new type of planets. They are dark bodies, with a mass similar to Jupiter, that float isolated in space, away from any hot stars. The researchers, publishing their finding in the journal Nature, suspect that these planets were expelled from developing solar systems.
More than 1,235 exoplanets await exploration outside the solar system, according to scientists who run NASA's Kepler space telescope. This graph, created by Jasson Rowe of NASA's Ames Research Center, shows the candidate stars ordered by size, with transiting exoplanets ahead of them.
What information can be gleaned from a single grain of dust? Scientists from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia have developed a laboratory to study the dust particles obtained from the tails of comets, the desert or the Icelandic Eyjafjällajokull volcano.
This is the conclusion reached by a team of astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, after studying 166 stars of type G (like the Sun) and type K, less than 80 light years away from our planet, with help from the Keck telescopes of Hawaii.
New supercomputer simulations developed by NASA and based on monitoring the interactions of thousands of dust grains show what the solar system would look like to hypothetical alien astronomers searching for planets.
Using the HARPS spectrograph, installed in the 3.6-meter telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in La Silla (Chile), a team of astronomers has discovered a planetary system with at least five planets similar to Neptune - between 13 and 25 Earth masses - orbiting the star HD 10180, very similar to our Sun.
Certain gaseous worlds, such as Jupiter, are covered by stripes parallel to the equator that occupy their surface from one pole to the other. In these regions, winds flow at different speeds. Astronomers assumed that they were caused by a phenomenon of convection, which arose as a consequence of the tendency of hot gases to rise and cold gases to fall.
Saturn's spectacular rings are made up mostly of icy water. This conclusion has been reached from data sent by the Cassini probe, the result of collaboration between NASA's Ames Center, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI).
Danni Büchner is invited to Sam Dylan's Halloween party. But the "Goodbye Germany" emigrant has no desire for many other party guests. And find clear words.
