Some 234 years before the planet was officially found, Galileo may have made the earliest observations of Neptune, a new study of the famous astronomer's diary and notebooks reveals. Professor David Jamieson, the head of the University of Melbourne School of Physics, made the astonishing claim, after studying in... |
10 July 2009
02:18 GMT |
 |
|
A new world was recently discovered by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, orbiting a red dwarf just 120 light-years away from Earth. The planet, which is a bit larger than Neptune, has been dubbed HAT-P-11b, and preliminary calculations show that the new body has a mass roughly equivalent... |
21 January 2009
06:30 GMT |
|
|
Two years ago, Alice Quillen, an astronomer at the University of Rochester, estimated that a planet of a specific size is revolving in a precise orbit in the dust disk surrounding the Formalhaut star. A month ago, the Hubble Space Telescope took a very accurate image of the region, indicating that such a planet exist... |
12 December 2008
08:07 GMT |
|
|
The smallest of the Kuiper Belt Objects remain elusive for all the searches attempted over the past few years. Finding some would help explain a number of theories related to the solar system's formation and evolution. Since the icy ring of frozen bodies known as the Kuiper Belt was discovered beyond Neptun... |
4 October 2008
07:29 GMT |
|
|
More than two years ago, before Pluto was demoted from its status of planet to that of minor planet, it was still considered the most remote planet from the Sun. Or, was it? If you look closer to the orbits of Pluto and Neptune, you might observe something unexpected. Pluto occasionally comes closer to the Sun than N... |
22 January 2008
08:21 GMT |
|
|
Just before 2006, Pluto was still considered the most remote planet in the solar system. However, due to the discovery of a series of objects that had similar sizes and characteristics to that of Pluto, the object has been demoted from its status of planet to that of Kuiper belt object, or minor planet. Currently, th... |
15 January 2008
09:54 GMT |
|
|
The configuration of the solar system as observed today poses some serious questions about how the planets might have evolved from the protoplanetary disk spinning around the Sun, as current models cannot yet explain how a planet the size of Jupiter could have formed in only a few million years, while predictions reg... |
12 December 2007
04:40 GMT |
|
|
This week, you will be able to see two of the gas giants in the night sky. With the moon out of the way, and a pair of binoculars, Uranus and Neptune will be well in your reach. Normally, most people can see the five brightest planets, but there is still a sixth planet that can't be observed without any optical ... |
3 November 2007
06:07 GMT |
|
|
Diamonds are known to form on Earth under very specific conditions, like exposure of carbon-bearing materials to high pressure, ranging approximately between 45 and 60 times normal atmospheric pressure, conditions that can be found in the lithospheric mantle below relatively stable continental plates and at the site ... |
13 July 2007
10:50 GMT |
|
|
