“We tend to talk about Earth-like planets as a planet like ours is today,” said Doug Hudgins, program scientist for NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The planet has been radically different at times in the past.”
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Finding an answer is a high priority for NASA, but even posing the question – that is, interrogating the universe – quickly becomes an inventory of ingredients from astrobiology: chemistry, planetary science, and cosmology, strongly seasoned with statistics.
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Scientists Spot Giant Planet Orbiting Dead Star's Corpse - Scientific American
Astronomers have spotted signs of an intact giant planet circling a superdense stellar corpse known as a white dwarf , a new study reports.
The white dwarf in question, called WD 1856, is part of a three-star system that lies about 80 light-years from Earth. The newly detected, Jupiter-size exoplanet candidate, WD 1856 b, is about seven times larger than the white dwarf and zips around it once every 34 hours.
“WD 1856 b somehow got very close to its white dwarf and managed to stay in one piece," study lead author Andrew Vanderburg, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement .
The moon meets the planets | Hudson Valley One
The sharp sun rays reflected from planet Mars and the eclipsed Moon in July 2018 make a red pair in Melbourne’s western sky. (Wikimedia Commons/cafuego)
Unlike this spring and most of the summer, all four of the classic bright planets are now hovering close to their maximum possible brilliance. But just to make things unnecessarily easy, the moon is about to highlight each one by hovering alongside it. The show is cool, it's free, and it's easy, so make these notations on your calendar:
A No Man's Sky player found two planets that are smooshed together | PC Gamer
There have been lots of interesting discoveries since No Man's Sky's latest update, Origins , gave the galaxy a makeover. With a few billion new planets and lots of variety added to the wildlife and terrain, players are busy exploring and reporting back on what they find.
For instance, o0BaBaBoOeY0o on Reddit found two planets positioned so closely to each other they were nearly touching—they're so close, in fact, you can jetpack from one planet to the other, no spacecraft needed.
Many things are taking place:
First Evidence of a Planet in Another Galaxy | Discover Magazine
Since the first detection of the first exoplanet in 1992, astronomers have found thousands of others. Indeed, they estimate that the Milky Way is home to 40 billion worlds.
So it's easy to imagine that planets must be common in other galaxies, particularly those that seem similar to our own. But when it comes to spotting these planets, there is a problem.
Other galaxies are so far away and the stars crammed into such a small region of space, as seen from Earth, that it is hard to identify individual ones let alone the effects of any planets around them. So extragalactic planets have sadly eluded astronomers.
Photos of fiery Mars, nearly at its best in 2 years | Astronomy Essentials | EarthSky
Photos from the EarthSky community of the bright planet Mars, now nearly at its best. Earth will pass between Mars and the sun – bringing the planet to a once-in-two-years opposition – on October 13, 2020.
View at EarthSky Community Photos . | Veteran meteor observer Eliot Herman in Tucson used an automatic, all-sky camera to capture this cool image of a bright meteor and Mars over Tucson, Arizona, on September 22, 2020. He wrote: “Looks like it was shot from Mars – not really, of course – but it does look like Mars shot it toward Earth. First time I have caught such a conjunction.” View this image full-sized . Thank you, Eliot!
First candidate for an extragalactic planet identified
In most cases, identifying a planet at such a distance would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. But in this case, the work was made easier due to a host of unique candidate attributes. First, the object lies within a binary system that has either a black hole or neutron star at its center, which happens to be in the process of consuming another star. In so doing, it is emitting a huge X-ray signal, which caught the attention of the researchers. Such sources are rare in the night sky.
Where to next in the outer solar system? Scientists have big ideas to explore icy moons and more.
If you had a few billion dollars and some of the most talented space scientists and engineers in the world, where would you go?
There's no wrong answer, really. Even if you narrow it down to just the outer solar system — planets, moons, rings and other cosmic rubble — you'll never get bored. But that abundance of solar system destinations has downsides, of course, since there's little chance of ever flying all the missions scientists can dream of. But dreaming up those missions anyway is a vital piece of space exploration, and one that scientists do regularly.
Happening on Twitter
Are we alone in the universe? Finding an answer is a high priority for @NASA. Even posing the question quickly bec… https://t.co/TlrSJWb74a NASAExoplanets (from Beyond) Thu Sep 24 17:55:17 +0000 2020
Earth hasn't always looked the same. Over billions of years, it has gone from orange dot, to a snowball to the blue… https://t.co/HQinpwXcEs NASAExoplanets (from Beyond) Tue Sep 22 20:26:04 +0000 2020
Almost everywhere you look, Earth🌎 is teeming with life. But, as we look for life elsewhere, so far, well ... not e… https://t.co/oHpztFAyUE NASAExoplanets (from Beyond) Tue Sep 22 18:17:05 +0000 2020
Among Trillions of Planets, Are We 'Home Alone?' - https://t.co/ZBKzUjfYrp https://t.co/ouyF4KlDkg universetoday (from Courtenay, British Columbia) Thu Sep 24 04:30:17 +0000 2020
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