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Stories about: solar system |
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In addition to supplying space agencies with invaluable data on the moons of Saturn and the gas giant itself, the Cassini spacecraft is also helping in our quest to learn more about our solar system. As we move through the local Milky Way galaxy, the space probe is taking non-stop measurements as to the nature of our... |
20 November 2009
06:17 GMT |
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Scientists from the University of Arkansas (UA) have recently released a new report, claiming that the entire planet might have been formed out of meteoritic materials. They base their claims on the fact that the Earth's mantle exhibits the same set of isotopic signatures for magnesium as asteroids do, which wou... |
11 November 2009
05:02 GMT |
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For a great many years, scientists have believed that the oceans on our planet were formed from water vapors emitted during volcanic eruptions that condensed and fell to the ground over millions of years. But a scientist now proposes that this might not have been the case. He argues that water is not something that o... |
10 November 2009
08:53 GMT |
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Beneath the planet's surface, there lies a wealth of mineral diversity, with materials featuring elements that are extremely rare to come by and that cannot be found inside the crust. For a very long time, geologists have been puzzled by how these chemicals came to exist on the Earth, when geological records poi... |
19 October 2009
03:57 GMT |
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Data from satellites charged with producing a map of our solar system and its limits have revealed that our “bubble” ends with a very narrow ribbon of densely packed neutral atoms, rather than with an area of evenly distributed ones. The fringes of the solar system can only be imagined, astronomers say, i... |
16 October 2009
04:07 GMT |
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The image most of us have of Saturn is that of a gas giant closely surrounded by its rings, which are very thin, yet very wide. Now, astronomers prove us wrong, showing that the planet indeed has another, massive ring around it, which extends as much as 13 million kilometers away from it, around the moon Phoebe. This... |
7 October 2009
05:40 GMT |
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When someone begins to wonder where the coldest place in our immediate surrounding is, the Moon is not the first place to come to mind. But measurements taken with the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment (DLRE) instrument, aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), proved that, for now, the coldest place ... |
18 September 2009
06:43 GMT |
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British researchers have recently announced the creation of a new method of putting a time line on the most significant events that took place within our Solar System, relying on measuring concentrations of aluminum isotopes found in meteorites, comets, and other such bodies. In a new paper, published in the respecte... |
25 August 2009
04:33 GMT |
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Questions related to how the solar system appeared some 4.7 billion years ago have been around since the first people started using their brains for more than capturing their next meal. Science has only recently been able to provide some preliminary answers to this type of questions, although numerous ones still rema... |
21 August 2009
10:53 GMT |
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The concept of solar sails, devices that would rely on solar winds and photons to power up spacecraft traveling through the solar system and beyond, has been around for quite some time now. Although some of the materials theoretically needed for them have been developed, and even a few not-that-successful attempts ha... |
19 August 2009
02:21 GMT |
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The fact that the Sun will not last forever is now clear to the entire scientific community, and indeed most of the world. We know that it appeared about 4.57 billion years ago, and that, in about five billion years or so it will begin to swell into a red giant. This will happen because it doesn't have enough ma... |
3 August 2009
11:06 GMT |
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According to a new scientific study by experts at the Cardiff University, it may be that comets contain vast oceans of liquid water in their cores in the first million years of their existence. Additionally, the watery environment and the vast amounts of organic material already discovered in such a formation that cr... |
1 August 2009
05:01 GMT |
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According to a new scientific study, previous knowledge of how comets originate in the Kuiper's Belt, the exterior asteroid belt of our solar system, is wrong. The paper reveals that the “pathways” these celestial bodies use to get from their birth grounds in Earth's vicinity are fairly safe for... |
31 July 2009
04:02 GMT |
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The main asteroid belt lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and includes some of the oldest rocky formations in our star system. According to a new paper released by experts at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), it may be that some of the oldest asteroids in there were not formed around the Sun, but in ... |
21 July 2009
20:01 GMT |
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In a new research paper, appearing in the latest issue of the journal Meteoritic & Planetary Science, a team of experts from the Monash University, led by Dr. Maria Lugaro, proposes a new explanation for why the chemical composition of the early solar system looks the way it does in geological records. The scientists... |
20 July 2009
20:01 GMT |
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For a long time, people have hypothesized on the way our planet is going to eventually end up. While the science is clear, stating that, most likely, the Sun will engulf us as it swells up at the end of its burning cycle, others believe that our planet may end at the “hands” of a comet. A new theory, howe... |
11 June 2009
01:55 GMT |
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Since the beginning of the human race, people have looked at incoming comets as telltale signs of either a god's will, or an omen of an imminent catastrophe. Rooted in popular culture, the celestial bodies have gained a negative reputation over the years, as being able to destroy all life on Earth. This line of ... |
29 April 2009
14:01 GMT |
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A recent scientific study of white dwarfs has revealed that the dead stars, which are smaller and burn less intensely than main sequence ones, were actually the center of gravity for a number of solar systems. The way researchers figured that out was by measuring the amount of pollutants in the dead stars, by using t... |
21 April 2009
16:31 GMT |
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Our solar system was formed approximately six billion years ago, from what new pieces of evidence suggest was a well-blended “soup,” made up from the appropriate amounts of gas and dust, cobbled together by the forces of countless exploding stars around. The new theory came from researchers studying meteo... |
17 April 2009
06:33 GMT |
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Yesterday, March 13, Illinois' Senate passed a bill that re-instated Pluto to a full planetary status, despite the fact that the celestial body lost an “election” with the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) some three years ago, in which its classification was changed to t... |
14 March 2009
07:41 GMT |
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Despite the fact that Jupiter has a number of approximately 63 named satellites, only four of them are generally referred to as the planet's moons. These four celestial bodies, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, are also dubbed the Galilean Moons, in honor of the great Italian astronomer. Now, researchers have e... |
9 March 2009
04:28 GMT |
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At the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life conference, which took place in Florence, Italy, an astronomer proposed a somewhat unusual location of where life might have originated from. University of Giessen scientist Joop Houtkooper told colleagues and attendants that life on Earth might have re... |
5 March 2009
09:25 GMT |
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Progresses made in astronomy since the beginning of the Space Age are bound to change our world forever, astronomers say. But scouting the skies and sending missions to deep space is a highly-challenging task, and one that can easily be stopped by various interests. Because 2009 is UNESCO's International Year of... |
2 March 2009
04:59 GMT |
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Recent observations of the asteroid belt around the inner planets have led astronomers to believe that the group of celestial bodies still bears the “scars” of its encounter with Jupiter and Saturn, which left their original orbit billions of years ago, when the solar system was first created. According t... |
26 February 2009
03:49 GMT |
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In a newly-released picture, the Helix Nebula reveals parts of its rich galactic background, which looks amazing when compared to the eye-shaped galaxy. The European Southern Observatory (ESO)'s instrument, La Silla Observatory, based in Chile, has been used for this new picture, which has astronomers buzzing wi... |
26 February 2009
01:58 GMT |
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Over the last decades, our solar system has been experiencing a massive sand storm, not unlike those that can be found in the desert. All the planets orbited the Sun in a halo of sand particles that is now considerably larger than it was a century ago. The reason for these large amounts of cosmic debris has kept astr... |
10 February 2009
10:02 GMT |
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St Jacob, Illinois-based astronomer Gary Kronk announced that, sometime at the end of next month, most likely around the 24th of February, a new comet, Luluin, will visit our solar system. This may very well be the first time it reaches us, experts say, and it will pass fairly close to our planet, at a distance of ab... |
30 January 2009
13:01 GMT |
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The 4.6-billion-year history of our solar system is nowhere crystal clear, astronomers admit. Instead, it's filled with questions as to the origin of some of its most remarkable feats. Here is a top 6 of these mysteries, as compiled by New Scientist.When the solar system was first formed, immediately after the p... |
29 January 2009
10:59 GMT |
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HD 80606b, a gaseous exoplanet discovered in 2001 by a Swiss research team, offered astronomers a very interesting insight into its inner functions. Analysis revealed the fact that temperatures on the giant, which is four times the size of Jupiter, vary by as much as 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 555 Celsius) wit... |
29 January 2009
05:36 GMT |
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A single speck of lunar zirconium is all it took for geologists to pinpoint the exact age of the Moon, after countless controversies between proponents and critics of various lunar formation theories. The small sample was brought back by the Apollo 17 mission all those years ago, but, at the time, the technology to p... |
27 January 2009
13:01 GMT |
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Astronomers with the American space agency announced yesterday that they began receiving the first images sent by the Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) mission, consisting of two nearly-identical spacecrafts that orbit around the Sun and provide stereoscopic images of the star. Experts at NASA are now ... |
24 January 2009
03:41 GMT |
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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 |
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Astronomers have managed to discover the first exoplanet that features a mass roughly similar to that of our own planet. The new celestial body, dubbed MOA-2007-BLG-192-L b, was originally believed to weigh 3.3 Earth masses, but new research conducted on the star it orbits proves the old theory wrong. According to th... |
19 January 2009
03:01 GMT |
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The couple of meteorites was found in Antarctica during the 2007/2008 field season and constitutes a premiere for the scientific community – they are the first rocks from the solar system to have andesite on them, the heavy rock that forms the tectonic plates beneath our feet. Thus far, researchers believed tha... |
8 January 2009
06:09 GMT |
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Despite the fact that Venus and Earth both began with about the same amount of water when they were first formed, our planet is currently home to 100,000 times more water than there was on our neighbor. And while it's understandable that the super-heated surface of Venus cannot sustain water (with temperatures a... |
6 January 2009
04:32 GMT |
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A peculiar comet by the name of Machholz 1 was found more than two decades ago, in 1986, by Donald Machholz from Loma Prieta, California. So far, experts determined that, judging by its abnormal chemical composition, which requires assigning it to an entirely new category, it must have arrived here from somewhere wel... |
3 December 2008
08:34 GMT |
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Astronomers have puzzled the international scientific community once again by announcing that Earth and its surrounding solar systems may exist in some sort of “bubble,” inside which the flow of space and time is altered compared with the outside world. This contradicts the Copernican principle, which sta... |
1 October 2008
08:44 GMT |
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Astronomers still have trouble establishing once and for all the number of planets our system is comprised of. The recent conferences were of no help in this regard, as both a clear definition of the term "planet" and a reasonable delimitation line at the end of the planetary system eluded the scientists, while the c... |
23 September 2008
05:38 GMT |
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There are numerous comets orbiting through the inner solar system, but where this huge amount of objects comes from is largely unknown. Now astronomers have suggested that many short orbit comets could in fact be fragments of much larger objects that break up into multiple pieces as they enter the inner solar system ... |
28 July 2008
06:05 GMT |
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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 stu... |
10 July 2008
05:41 GMT |
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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 spacec... |
7 July 2008
03:30 GMT |
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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 collid... |
3 July 2008
03:20 GMT |
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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 ... |
1 July 2008
04:43 GMT |
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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 most... |
4 June 2008
04:08 GMT |
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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 cas... |
24 May 2008
06:10 GMT |
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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... |
10 May 2008
07:02 GMT |
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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 b... |
29 April 2008
04:28 GMT |
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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 ... |
23 April 2008
05:48 GMT |
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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 abou... |
23 April 2008
02:49 GMT |
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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 satell... |
17 April 2008
05:05 GMT |
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