(CNN) Our galaxy is filled with potentially habitable planets -- at least 300 million of them, according to NASA.
Many things are taking place:
There could be around 5 billion habitable planets in the Milky Way | New Scientist
A team led by Steve Bryson at NASA's Ames Research Center in California analysed data from the Kepler space telescope , searching for rocky planets within the habitable zone of stars the same size as our sun. The habitable zone is found at the distance from a star where it isn’t too hot or too cold for liquid water to exist.
Stars and planets grow up together as siblings -- ScienceDaily
Astronomers have found compelling evidence that planets start to form while infant stars are still growing. The high-resolution image obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) shows a young proto-stellar disk with multiple gaps and rings of dust. This new result, just published in Nature , shows the youngest and most detailed example of dust rings acting as cosmic cradles, where the seeds of planets form and take hold.
An international team of scientists led by Dominique Segura-Cox at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Germany targeted the proto-star IRS 63 with the ALMA radio observatory. This system is 470 light years from Earth and located deep within the dense L1709 interstellar cloud in the Ophiuchus constellation.
7 planets in solar system will be visible in night sky this week
We may not yet know what’s written in the stars for the 2020 presidential election, but the planets of our solar system are gathering in our sky for a watch party this week.
November’s cosmic spectacle instead will take an entire night to spot each planet as it comes and goes over the horizon between sunset and sunrise — still less time than it’s going to take America to learn the results of the election.
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Saturn and Jupiter are the headliners in November as the two giants approach their 20-year reunion, called the great conjunction, in our sky next month. This year is special: 2020 will be their closest brush since 1623.
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Lighting a path to Planet Nine
"You really can't see them without using this kind of method. If Planet Nine is out there, it's going to be incredibly dim," said Rice, lead author of a new study that has been accepted by The Planetary Science Journal .
Rice, a Ph.D. student in astronomy and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, presented the findings Oct. 27 at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences.
The possibility of a ninth planet in Earth's solar system, located beyond the orbit of Neptune, has gained momentum among astronomers in recent years as they've examined the curious orbits of a cluster of small, icy objects in the Kuiper Belt. Many astronomers believe the alignment of these objects—and their trajectories—point to the influence of an unseen object.
Ask Astro: Why do the planets orbit the Sun counterclockwise? | Astronomy.com
Q: The Sun orbits the center of our galaxy in a clockwise direction, but the planets in the solar system orbit the Sun in a counterclockwise direction. Why is this?
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A: The planets of our solar system orbit the Sun in a counterclockwise direction (when viewed from above the Sun’s north pole) because of the way our solar system formed. Our Sun was born from a cloud of dust and gas, the remnants of which — called the solar nebula — became the planets. As that cloud collapsed into the Sun, it also began to spin. It’s a matter of chance that it ended up spinning in a counterclockwise direction when viewed from the top down.
Solar system may have KICKED OUT an ice giant planet | Science | News | Express.co.uk
Researchers have discovered evidence that there was once another ice giant like Neptune which used to sit between Saturn and Uranus on the edge of the solar system. This would mean there may have been nine planets in the solar system, or 10 if you include Pluto before it was downgraded to a dwarf planet in 2008.
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However, the more massive planets, such as Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, played gravitational tug of war, giving way to the order of the solar system.
Hell Planet: Scientists Have Basically Found Darth Vader's Lava Homeworld Mustafar - IGN
"K2-141b belongs to a subset of rocky planets that orbit very close to their star. This proximity keeps the exoplanet gravitationally locked in place, meaning the same side always faces the star. The night side experiences frigid temperatures of below -200 C. The day side of the exoplanet, at an estimated 3000 C, is hot enough to not only melt rocks but vaporize them as well, ultimately creating a thin atmosphere in some areas."
Vader castle concept art from The Empire Strikes Back (Image from The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back)
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