Deep Impact Gets Alien Glimpse of Earth
	NASA's comet chaser Deep Impact became famous on July 4, 2005 as the first spacecraft in the history of space exploration to collide an impactor into the nucleus of a comet in order to study its internal composition. As it turns out, Deep Impact provided recently two short films showing how our planet and its moon look like from a distance of about 50 million kilometers away, or 0.3 astronomical units, allowing us to see how our Earth ... [read more >>]
	18 July 2008, 07:03GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Finding Extrasolar Moons
	Until now, several hundred planets have been found orbiting around nearby stars while the number of moons remained at a constant zero. It’s not that they're not there, it’s just that we can't see them with today's technology. To put it even simpler, the smallest planet ever found was a terrestrial one, at least three times the mass of the Earth, but finding a moon today is more like finding a specific molecule of water insid ... [read more >>]
	09 June 2008, 09:59GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Astronomers Set Record for Smallest Found Exoplanet
	The newly discovered object, dubbed MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb, is a terrestrial planet roughly three times as heavy as Earth orbiting a star called MOA-2007-BLG-192L located about 3,000 light years away from us. The finding also marks the discovery of the smallest star to have a planet orbiting around it, since it only weighs an estimated 6 percent of the mass of the Sun, thus being unable to sustain nuclear fusion reaction in the core. [ADMAR ... [read more >>]
	03 June 2008, 03:32GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

MARVELS to Find Hundreds of Exoplanets
	Only a few decades ago, astronomers weren't even sure if other solar systems aside ours exist in the universe. Since then, a couple of hundreds of solar systems have been discovered, mostly composed of gas giants. When trying to learn about other solar systems, astronomers often make analogies to our own. If our solar system is so varied, imagine how fascinating other worlds could be. A new study set to start in the fall of ... [read more >>]
	10 May 2008, 07:02GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Alien Worlds Might Have Collided, Then Merged
	The study of exoplanets and other solar systems is in high gear ever since the discovery of the first extrasolar planet back in 1996, finding new and interesting facts about solar systems formation processes. The same thing is available for an object orbiting a distant star, found nearly four years ago. The gas giant 2M1207B orbits around an old brown-dwarf star located at a distance of about 170 light years away from Earth, in t ... [read more >>]
	10 January 2008, 04:45GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Light Polarization Reveals Exoplanet Characteristics
	While twelve years passed since the first planet that orbits around another star was discovered, we have developed multiple detection techniques such as studying the wobble of the star produced by the gravitational pull of the planet, or comparing the light emitted from the star in the hope that we might catch the object as it passes in front of its sun. However, the ability to actually study the planet has been mostly reduced to ... [read more >>]
	27 December 2007, 06:10GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Huge Planet with 31-Hour Year Discovered Around Distant Star
	The most recently discovered exoplanet is a true giant, being only six times smaller than the star it orbits. It's located in the constellation Hercules about 10 degrees west of Vega, the brightest star in the summer skies and was discovered by an international team of astronomers with the help of a network of small automated telescopes in Arizona, California and the Canary Islands. "TrES-3 is an unusual planet as it orbits i ... [read more >>]
	01 June 2007, 10:20GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Strange Planet Puzzles Astronomers
	A newly discovered exoplanet puzzles astronomers. Named XO-1b, the planet is the most massive found orbiting extremely close to its star, but it doesn't have a circular orbit, like most astronomers would have expected, but an elliptical one, which is very unusual, considering the short distance to its sun. Discovered by a team of amateur and professional astronomers, the planet is a Goliath of gas giants, weighing 13 times more th ... [read more >>]
	31 May 2007, 02:46GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New Extrasolar Jupiter-like Planet Discovered
	Finding planets orbiting stars at great distances from our solar system is not an easy job, but there seem to be many of them out there, according to recent observations. And that's a great thing, since it's actually harder than finding a needle in space hay stack. It's more like looking for a firefly flying in front of a lighthouse. Until now, astronomers have found about 230 planets beyond our own solar ... [read more >>]
	07 May 2007, 03:55GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

We Could Find Earth's Twin
	Until now, scientists have used various techniques to detect more than 200 exoplanets. Most of these exoplanets are from five to 4,000 times more massive than Earth, and are either too hot, too cold or too much of a giant gas ball to be considered likely habitats for life. So far, no one has managed to capture an image of an exoplanetary system that resembles our own solar system. While detecting exoplanets is relatively easy, actually ... [read more >>]
	12 April 2007, 08:18GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Water Detected in an Alien Planet's Atmosphere
	For the first time in history, an alien planet outside our solar system is proven to have water in its atmosphere. Previous theories said water vapor should be present in the atmospheres of nearly all the known extrasolar planets. Travis Barman, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, said water vapor has been found in the atmosphere of a large, Jupiter-like gaseous planet located 150 light years from Earth ... [read more >>]
	11 April 2007, 04:02GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia