Asteroids Could Be Fractured by Sunlight
	It's not often that astronomers find asteroids made out of a single massive piece, but rather containing two or more objects loosely bound together or orbiting each other, tumbling through the immensity of space. The cause to this particularity remained a subject of debate for a long time, although now a new study proposes that energy emitted from the Sun could force the asteroid into a spin which will eventually determine it to split ... [read more >>]
	10 July 2008, 05:41GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Rosetta Powers Up for Encounter with Mysterious Asteroid
	Europe's comet chaser, the Rosetta spacecraft, was powered up last week in anticipation for the fly-by around asteroid 2867 Steins scheduled to take place on September 5th, 2008. Rosetta was originally designed and launched in order to approach and study the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, with which the spacecraft will meet somewhere around the first half of 2014. Rosetta was launched into space by the European Space Ag ... [read more >>]
	07 July 2008, 03:30GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Voyager 2 Confirms Asymmetric Heliosphere Theory
	Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are two of the most important spacecrafts in the history of space and solar system exploration, and currently the only two man-made objects to go beyond the limits of the solar system. Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock, the area of space where solar wind and interstellar radiation collide, towards the end of 2004, followed closely by Voyager 2 which exited the solar system in August last year. In fact, acco ... [read more >>]
	03 July 2008, 03:20GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Millimeter-Sized 'Bohr Atom' Is a First
	In 1913, Danish physicist Niels Bohr proposed for the first time a model describing the atom as a system inside which the electrons revolve around a central bundle of matter called nucleus, similarly to the way planets in the solar system move around the Sun. Nearly a decade later, Bohr would receive the Nobel Prize for physics for his contribution in the study of the atom, although quantum mechanics later proved that electrons don't ... [read more >>]
	01 July 2008, 04:43GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Strange Objects Pop up While Probing for Dark Energy
	While searching for supernova explosions that occurred in the early universe, in hope to probe dark energy, astronomers discovered two new objects in the solar system, one orbiting somewhere between Uranus and Neptune while the other lurking in the outer regions of the system. The search for supernova explosions mostly involves finding faint light sources, albeit sometimes objects in the solar system get in the way and are accidentally dis ... [read more >>]
	04 June 2008, 04:08GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Other Star Systems in Danger of Being Contaminated with Earth Life
	There are already several tens of spacecrafts wandering through the solar system, each one a possible carrier of microbes originating on Earth. It’s no secret that some life forms on Earth are extremely resilient to space radiation and may possibly reach other planets and their moons to colonize them. In the case of these vehicles there is nothing much that we can do to prevent a future contamination, although researchers believe that the ... [read more >>]
	24 May 2008, 06:10GMT | (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

Solar Nebula Homogeneity Contested
	According to solar system formation theory, the Sun and the planets all emerged from a homogeneous cloud of dust and gas, called the solar nebula, which collapsed on itself about 5 billion years ago. Chondritic meteorites are believed to be among the first objects that were formed in the solar nebula, some of which being in the composition of the planets while others are still wandering through the solar system. Because the premise of ... [read more >>]
	29 April 2008, 04:28GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Solar System Stable for the Next 40 Million Years
	According to astrophysicists, the Sun is about 5 billion years old and will continue to shine for at least as much time before exploding into a supernova to destroy the whole solar system. Latest calculations reveal that the inner rocky planets, including Earth, will be destroyed long before the Sun even swells into a red giant star. To be more precise, uncertainties in the orbits of the planets ensure that the solar system will ... [read more >>]
	23 April 2008, 05:48GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New Class of Bright Objects Found in Kuiper Belt
	The first of these objects, 2003 EL61, was discovered back in 2005 and appears to be a strange shaped body rotating rapidly and chaotically about its axis. The fact that other five objects were found in the same orbit in 2007 suggests that all may have originated from a larger object destroyed during a collision about a billion years ago. Recent observations reveal that the brightness of these objects varies very slightly in rela ... [read more >>]
	23 April 2008, 02:49GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New Solar Wind Sail for Space Travel Developed
	Traditional propulsion systems are highly inefficient when it comes to space travel, mostly because they have to carry fuel on board, thus after covering a fair amount of distance, spacecrafts often find themselves drifting helplessly through the immensity of space. The effect can be clearly observed even with satellites locked in Earth's orbit, which usually have a lifespan of only a few years, or decades at best, before consuming mo ... [read more >>]
	17 April 2008, 05:05GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Earth: 170 Known Impact Craters
	Earth, unlike the other rocky planets in the solar system, is extremely geologically active, constantly shifting and remodeling the surface through plate tectonics shifts, volcanic eruptions and erosion, and mountains formation. This basically means that any evidence of old meteorite and asteroid impacts are mostly hidden away under the surface and underwater. Currently, there are 170 known craters all over the Earth according to ... [read more >>]
	14 April 2008, 08:30GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Revealing the Mysteries of Mercury
	Mercury is probably the solar system's most extreme planet. It is the oldest of all, the densest, the smallest, the closest to the Sun and, ironically, the least studied. Except the Messenger spacecraft (or the Mercury surface, space environment, geochemistry and ranging spacecraft), only one probe has been ever sent to st ... [read more >>]
	10 April 2008, 04:54GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Astronomer Looks for Planet, Finds Comet
	You know how they say you'll never find what you're actually looking for? It’s true, don't try to prove otherwise because I don't think you can. Last year during late October, comet Holmes suddenly suffered an outburst, thus enhancing its brightness more than one million times in the matter of a few days. In the following weeks, Holmes came to be the biggest object in the solar system, exceeding even the diame ... [read more >>]
	04 April 2008, 03:33GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

A Planet in the Making
	At this moment there are 277 planets known to exist outside our solar system, most of which are either gas giants or too inhospitable for life. A very little number of these exoplanets have rocky surfaces or bear a small resemblance to our planet. Astronomers from the University of St Andrews in collaboration with colleagues from the US reveal that they have discovered a planet into its early formation stage, still surrounded by a cloud of ... [read more >>]
	03 April 2008, 02:52GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Ten New Exo-Planets Found
	The Wide Area Search for Planets international collaboration announced that it had found 10 new extra solar planets, by using of robotic camera systems, which survey solar systems other than our own, in the hope of understanding how planets are formed around stars. Astronomers are expected to detail their findings today at the Royal Astronomical Society's national Astronomy meeting. The robotic cameras use a detection technique re ... [read more >>]
	02 April 2008, 04:22GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Giant Planet is Taking Shape in Star System
	The star system we talk about is located around a well-studied star known as AB Aurigae. The star is relatively young and surrounded by a disk of material created from a gas and dust cloud that seems to be forming some kind of object inside it, like the gas giant of a brown dwarf star. Co-author of the study, Ben R. Oppenheimer of the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History argues that the object may have a mas ... [read more >>]
	27 March 2008, 05:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Asteroids: the Oldest Bodies in the Solar System
	It is widely known that ancient space rocks floating through the solar system are amongst the oldest bodies in the solar system. Meteorites found on Earth are proof for this. However, now astronomers using the Mauana Kea telescope in Hawaii claim to have discovered three asteroids that seem to be the oldest objects in the solar system, even older than the meteorites found on Earth. Jessica Sunshine of University of Maryland, the ... [read more >>]
	21 March 2008, 05:46GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Planet X: Earth-sized Planet May Lie Beyond Neptune
	There is definitely something out there, orbiting in the outer edge of the solar system. Maybe a planet with a size comparable to that of Earth, locked in a highly elliptical eccentric orbit, hidden away from our keen eyes. But what if we're looking in the wrong place? According to professor Tadashi Mukai from Kobe University, there are more than 1,100 currently classified objects beyond the orbit of Neptune, most of them having large ... [read more >>]
	18 March 2008, 05:37GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Distant Solar System Looks Like Our Own
	It's becoming rather clear now that our solar system is not quite as unique in the universe as previously believed. Only 12 years ago we didn't even know if other planets, except those in our solar system, exist in the universe or not, now there are more than 270 other planets that we know about. Extra-terrestrial life seems to follow the same general trend. Organic molecules can be found throughout the whole solar system,[ADMARK ... [read more >>]
	14 March 2008, 03:52GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Meteorite Fragments May Be Dwarf Planet Remnants
	The Earth is continuously bombarded by space rocks and small cosmic bodies, probably swallowing up to a few tens of tons of matter each day. Most of these rocks go unnoticed because they burn high up in the atmosphere before reaching the surface of the planet, albeit from time to time larger meteorites and asteroids penetrate all the way to the ground level. Such examples can be found throughout the history; the last known event took place ... [read more >>]
	13 March 2008, 04:19GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Astronomers Find Scaled Solar System
	The newly discovered solar system lies 5,000 light years away from Earth and seems to contain two gas giants slightly smaller that the two biggest planets in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, evidence that solar systems similar to our own might be more abundant in the Milky Way than previously thought. One of the planets has about 70 percent of the mass of Jupiter, while the other has a mass of about 90 percent of that of Sat ... [read more >>]
	28 February 2008, 04:07GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Look Towards Saturn Now! The Timing is Ideal
	Although it is not the biggest planet in the solar system, it is certainly one of the most spectacular: truly a miniature solar system, with more than 63 moons orbiting around it and a beautiful ring of debris hovering above its equator. A unique feature, even though Uranus also has a dim ring around it. As of 24 of February, Saturn will be in an ideal position on the night sky for ground observation. It is currently in the L ... [read more >>]
	27 February 2008, 04:28GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Earth Is Doomed!
	Forget about global warming, the ice ages, asteroids or any other impending disaster waiting to happen. Earth will burn! Literally! Astronomers approximate the age of the Sun to a rough 5 billion years and is mostly believed that it will continue to burn hydrogen at least as much time before becoming too unstable to maintain its current form. Our planet, on the other hand, will probably be swallowed by the Sun in 7.6 billion year ... [read more >>]
	27 February 2008, 02:37GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

One More Orbit Around the Sun. But Is That All It Is?
	We have taught ourselves to believe that all the planets have roughly circular orbits around stars and have changed much over the years, but the truth is far from this presumption. Planets, like all bodies in the universe have highly elliptical orbits, where the 'central' orbited body is situated in one of the focal points of the ellipse. Not only that, but these elliptical orbits tend to oscillate in shape more and mor ... [read more >>]
	11 February 2008, 06:35GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Comet Wild 2 Has Asteroid-like Composition
	The Stardust mission brings surprising new evidence once again. After the initial sample analysis revealed that most of the material inside comet Wild 2 originated in the inner regions of the solar system, now scientists have shown that, against general belief that comets are fluffy dust objects, they could instead have similar composition to that of the asteroids. In 2004 the Stardust mission succeeded in approaching the main bo ... [read more >>]
	25 January 2008, 03:46GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Pluto or Neptune?
	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 Neptune, meaning that Neptune would be farthest away from the Sun. Unfortunately, Pluto is no longer a planet now and we don&# ... [read more >>]
	22 January 2008, 08:21GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

MESSENGER Makes Historic Comeback to Mercury
	More than 33 years after the last fly-by around the smallest planet in the solar system, made by the Mariner 10 spacecraft, NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft executed its first fly-by around Mercury on the 14th of January. During this first close encounter, MESSENGER had the mission of taking multiple pictures of Mercury's surface and vast land areas unseen before. In fact, more than half of the surface of the planet is not m ... [read more >>]
	16 January 2008, 05:42GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

A Few Facts About the Gas Giants
	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, the solar system consists of eight planets, four inner rocky planets and four gas giants. Jupiter is the close ... [read more >>]
	15 January 2008, 09:54GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Mysterious Mercury
	Unbelievable as it may seem, one of the most closest planets to Earth may pose some of the deepest mysteries about the solar system. Mercury, the smallest of all the planets in the solar system, having the closest orbit to the Sun, is the least studied of all. More than half of the planet's surface is not yet catalogued, virtually nothing is known about its magnetic field and its inner structure, what lies between the planet and the S ... [read more >>]
	14 January 2008, 08:56GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Weird Disk of Matter Takes the Shape of a Giant Moth
	It seems that the shape of the evolving young solar system, forming a 35.2 billion kilometer structure in the form of a moth, is determined by the relative motion of the young stars through the interstellar space. As it is traveling through space, the developing solar system encountered a massive cloud of interstellar dust, which causes the distortions in the protoplanetary disk, as it is being dragged behind the star. The S ... [read more >>]
	12 January 2008, 04:57GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Earth Is Barely Habitable
	I wonder when would the spree of lucky events that led to the appearance of life on Earth stop, as it seems more and more that we owe our existence to a chain of randomly occurring events. On the other hand, taking into consideration the large scale of the universe, with its billions and billions of stars and possibly planets, the possibility that intelligent life would appear and evolve on a single planet doesn't look so remote after ... [read more >>]
	10 January 2008, 08:54GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Old Stars can Form Planets too!
	That's like having an 80 year old woman giving birth to a baby. The natural process of planetary formation, as astronomical observations proved in multiple situations, usually takes place in the first 10 to 100 million years of the star's life. However, it seems that this is not always the case. Old stars, presenting a population of planets orbiting around them, could, in fact, trigger a second planet formation process ... [read more >>]
	10 January 2008, 06:31GMT | (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

Doomsday Asteroid Will Miss Mars
	After nearly two months of observations on the trajectory of asteroid 2007 WD5, astronomers finally succeeded in calculating the exact trajectory of the object which only a few days ago had a chance of 1 in 28 to hit the Red Planet. Asteroid 2007 WD5, discovered on November 30 last year, is now expected to pass through the vicinity of Mars at a distance of about 30,000 kilometers. Incredibly, the object estimated to have a d ... [read more >>]
	09 January 2008, 02:34GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Messenger Will Execute Scheduled Fly-by Around Mercury on January 14
	The Messenger spacecraft will be the second space vehicle ever to execute a fly-by maneuver of the smallest planet in the solar system, Mercury, after the spacecraft Mariner 10, which made a total of three during its study of the two inner planets. Launched in 1975, Mariner 10 was the first spacecraft to execute a controlled fly-by through the close proximity of a planet in order to obtain the so-called 'gravitational slings ... [read more >>]
	08 January 2008, 03:44GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA Celebrates Fifty Years of Solar System Exploration
	Fifty years have passed since the launch of the third artificial satellite into space, and the first ever American satellite. Commonly known as the Explorer-1 program, the satellite 1958 Alpha liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force State on January 31st, 1958, thus announcing the beginning of a long series of space launches of the United States. The program started in the wake of the launch of the two soviet satellites, Sputnik 1 and 2 ... [read more >>]
	07 January 2008, 08:58GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Facts About Our Rocky Planets
	The solar system currently consists of four rocky planets and four gas giants, or at least that's what the international scientific community says. Do you notice a pattern? Me neither, not ever since the planet Pluto has been demoted from its status, to the position of minor planet. The four rocky planets in the order from the inner region of the solar system to the outer regions are Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The only common ... [read more >>]
	04 January 2008, 10:53GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Stardust Reveals Comets Origin
	A new study involving the origin of the material that composes a comet shows that cometary dust is created in the close proximity of a star during its first stages of life, which is being dissipated towards the outer regions of the solar system as the planetary formation process draws to an end. Material for these new finding was provided by the Stardust spacecraft, launched by NASA in 1999, which rendezvoused with comet Wild-2 i ... [read more >>]
	04 January 2008, 06:35GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Protoplanetary Disks Harbor Organic Molecules
	Tholins are a class of molecules indispensable for life, and are derivates of simple molecules such as methane and ethane, that form through a process of ultraviolet irradiation from the Sun. Although in great abundance all over the solar system, these polymers must have existed on Earth as well during its primitive state, but are not occurring naturally now due to high affinity towards our oxygen rich atmosphere which destroys t ... [read more >>]
	04 January 2008, 04:45GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Kuiper Belt Shines Rainbow Colors
	Now, we consider that the outer solar system lies somewhere beyond the orbit of the planet Neptune, meaning for example the Kuiper belt, thought to be the source of the short-period orbit comets, and the Oort cloud lying more than one light year away from the Sun, which could probably be the location where long-period orbit comets originate. Although the Oort cloud hasn't been detected yet, and mostly remains a theoretical ... [read more >>]
	03 January 2008, 05:39GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Phaethon Spied During Close Earth Approach
	The asteroid responsible for the Geminid meteor shower which takes place every December, 3200 Phaethon, made its closest passing through the vicinity of the planet Earth since its discovery in 1983. The event, which took place on the 10th of December last year, was anticipated by the Arecibo Observatory, which pointed its telescope towards the cosmic object on December 8. Most of the meteor showers which take place on Earth ... [read more >>]
	03 January 2008, 04:39GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Astronomers Observe Youngest Planet Around Sun-Like Star
	Compared to the age of our own planet, the Earth, which is about 4.5 billion years old, the newly discovered exoplanet is a baby, estimated to be somewhere between 8 to 10 million years old and orbiting a star very similar to the Sun. Expect no further resemblance to our solar system however, as the new exoplanet has a mass at least ten times that of the planet Jupiter, circling its sun once every 3.56 days. Located at a dis ... [read more >>]
	03 January 2008, 02:49GMT | (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

Facts About Comets
	The past civilizations on Earth mostly regarded the comets as messengers of destruction and rarely as bringers of good or prosperity, while the scientists today think they might have played a key role in the formation of our planet and view them as carriers of possible information about the galaxy, and the formation of the solar system. These dusty-icy objects were presumed to have delivered the water on Earth during collisio ... [read more >>]
	27 December 2007, 05:15GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Earth's Moon Is Younger than Thought
	The collision of the original Earth with another planet dimensioned similarly to Mars, which resulted in the creation of our large Moon, might have taken place later in the stages of solar system formation, new studies show. Because it is the most credible explanation of the Moon's birth – since other models cannot predict the formation of such a large body – the planetary collision scenario has now become largely accepted in the scie ... [read more >>]
	20 December 2007, 03:05GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Fast Rotating Star Also Has Sunspots
	This is the first time when astronomers are able to view sun spots and mass ejection due to solar activity, on a star outside the solar system. Having a spin speed rotation about 66 times that of our Sun, the star named 'Speedy Mic' is located about ten million times farther from Earth, than our own star. Similar to ours, it has a mass of about 90 percent of that of the Sun, and it is in its early stages of life, which makes it ... [read more >>]
	19 December 2007, 10:48GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Puzzling Facts about Asteroids
	Asteroids, like most of the bodies in the solar system, have stable orbits around the Sun, as all of them have their origins in the debris left behind by the planet formation process. They are spread through all over the solar system, but are mostly concentrated in an area of space called the asteroid belt, situated between the planets Mars and Jupiter. They are commonly referred to as minor planets, and while we know many things about the ... [read more >>]
	17 December 2007, 09:27GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Planetary Rings Older Than the Sun
	Saturn's rings are one of its most distinct features, and although other planets in the solar system present rings of particles, they are not so obvious. They where first predicted to exist in the middle of the 17th century by Christian Huygens and viewed for the first time by Galileo Galilei with his telescope. Even today, the rings that surround the equatorial region of the planet can be relatively easy viewed with a pair of regular ... [read more >>]
	13 December 2007, 03:36GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Inside the Strangest Moon Under Study
	The Moon is probably the strangest body in the solar system, as it has the largest size relative to that of the planet it orbits. Available theories about how it might have formed involve a possible catastrophic collision between an embrionary planet slightly larger than our own, or the original Earth if you will, and a body somewhere around the size of planet Mars. Eventually, the remnant debris of the collision was pulled together by ... [read more >>]
	12 December 2007, 05:28GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia