As 2019 comes to a close, it's time to review some of the biggest space science stories of the year.
From a world with three suns in its sky to lots of possibly habitable real estate, the past year has seen some incredible exoplanet discoveries. Here are 10 of the most memorable.
Related: The Greatest Spaceflight Moments of 2019
More: Kaboom! The Biggest Space Bloopers of 2019
Quite a lot has been going on:
'Cotton Candy' Planet Mysteries Unravel – Nothing Like Them Exists in Our Solar System
This illustration depicts the Sun-like star Kepler 51 and three giant planets that NASA’s Kepler space telescope discovered in 2012–2014. These planets are all roughly the size of Jupiter but a tiny fraction of its mass. This means the planets have an extraordinarily low density, more like that of Styrofoam rather than rock or water, based on new Hubble Space Telescope observations. The planets may have formed much farther from their star and migrated inward.
Planetary pleasure - Winnipeg Free Press
For most of us, thinking about other planets isn’t something we do every day. If we glance up from our phones while walking between cars and malls late at night, we might see a bright light in the night sky and wonder what it is, but beyond that, what’s up there doesn’t seem all that important.
But that bright point of light is likely a planet, probably Jupiter or Venus, and its history and importance to us on Earth may be much more significant than we realize.
A new way to hunt for planets: Follow the gas - Times of India
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15 Strangest Discoveries on the Red Planet Mars
The planet is named after the Roman god of war. It was similarly known as Nergal by Babylonians and Areos aster, or ‘star of Ares,’ by the Greeks.
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Starting in the ’60s, we started using technology to study the planet scientifically. The first successful mission to land on the planet was NASA’s Viking 1 in 1975 . Since then, many successful missions have been carried out, which landed rovers on Mars.
But we did find some interesting photographs that piqued the public interest in Mars exploration. Let us take a look at a few.
Hello, Venus! Parker Solar Probe Makes Second Planetary Flyby. | Space
The sun is right there in the name of NASA's Parker Solar Probe , but a second mission of opportunity may make the spacecraft just as vital to Venus scientists as to those studying our local star.
"The Venus flybys are like, if you have like a 48-hour layover in Paris, not leaving the airport," Shannon Curry, a planetary physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Space.com. "It would be crazy not to turn on [the instruments]." Curry and her colleagues made her case, and the Parker Solar Probe will gather its second batch of Venus data today (Dec. 26), as the probe makes its closest approach to the planet at 1:14 p.m. EST (1814 GMT).
OSCAR CAINER says you should prepare for a planetary phenomenon in 2020 | Daily Mail Online
The new decade kicks off with a once-in-a-generation event as Saturn, the great cosmic teacher, aligns with Pluto, the hidden transformer.
Occurring in mid-January, at the same time as the Sun and Mercury converge at the Lunar Eclipse, this is a Stellium — or planetary pile-up — that will change the world.
And this is only the first in a series of three major 2020 conjunctions involving the planetary heavyweights Saturn, Pluto and Jupiter; each particularly affecting those in positions of power.
Massive gas disk raises questions about planet formation theory
Recent advances in radio telescopes have yielded a surprise in this field. Astronomers have found that several debris disk still possess some amount of gas. If the gas remains long in the debris disks, planetary seeds may have enough time and material to evolve to giant planets like Jupiter. Therefore, the gas in a debris disk affects the composition of the resultant planetary system.
"We found atomic carbon gas in the debris disk around 49 Ceti by using more than 100 hours of observations on the ASTE telescope," says Aya Higuchi, an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). ASTE is a 10-m diameter radio telescope in Chile operated by NAOJ. "As a natural extension, we used ALMA to obtain a more detailed view, and that gave us the second surprise. The carbon gas around 49 Ceti turned out to be 10 times more abundant than our previous estimation.
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