NEW SCIENTIST– Buried in the flood of data from the Kepler telescope is a planetary system unlike any seen before. Two of its apparent planets share the same orbit around their star. If the discovery is confirmed, it would bolster a theory that Earth once shared its orbit with a Mars-sized body that later crashed into it, resulting in the … Read More
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Rocky Exoplanet: An Earth-like World
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BBC NEWS – Astronomers have discovered the smallest planet outside our Solar System, and the first that is undoubtedly rocky like Earth. Measurements of unprecedented precision have shown that the planet, Kepler 10b, has a diameter 1.4 times that of Earth, and a mass 4.6 times higher. However, because it orbits its host star so closely, the planet could not … Read More
Probability of Finding Aliens Is Now Three Times Higher
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GIZMODO– The total number of stars in the Universe “is likely three times bigger than realized.” Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum says there are “possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars,” dramatically increasing the possibility of finding alien civilizations. According to the new study just published in Nature, new observations on the red end of the optical spectrum at … Read More
Antimatter Atom Trapped For First Time, Say Scientists
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BBC– Antimatter atoms have been trapped for the first time, scientists say. Researchers at Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have held 38 antihydrogen atoms in place, each for a fraction of a second. Antihydrogen has been produced before but it was instantly destroyed when it encountered normal matter. The team, reporting in Nature, says the ability to study … Read More
Diamond Star Thrills Astronomers
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BBC– Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats, astronomers have discovered. The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 4,000 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus.It’s the compressed heart of an old star that was once bright like our Sun but has since faded and shrunk. … Read More
