It is always exciting to discover new planets beyond our Solar System. Now a planetary astrophysicist is using a star’s chemistry to predict which ones are likely to host giant planets.
Astronomers have found the first observational evidence for a disc of material around a giant young planet at a distant star. It’s a place they think moons can form.
Jonti Horner, University of Southern Queensland and Stephen Kane, University of California, Riverside
Science is full of surprises. While searching for planets orbiting nearby stars, researchers stumbled across the remains of a star that once outshone the Sun.
Josh Calcino, The University of Queensland and Jake Clark, University of Southern Queensland
Life could exist in another solar system in a different part our galaxy. Or in another galaxy far away. We don’t have the perfect technology yet to study such far away places but we’re still trying.
Jonti Horner, University of Southern Queensland and Jake Clark, University of Southern Queensland
The new planet is believed to be orbiting Barnard’s Star, a red dwarf that’s not visible to the naked eye but one of the closest stars to our Solar System.
There are probably more than a million planets in the universe for every single grain of sand on Earth. That’s a lot of planets. My guess is that there probably is life elsewhere in the Universe.
Anish Kapoor made “Cloud Gate”, a giant bean-shaped mirror in Chicago. Visitors play with the light in the city and its surroundings, where our future lays.
We are in the Milky Way. If you travelled on an extremely fast spaceship for more than two million years, you would reach our neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy. All other galaxies are even further away.
The new planet-hunting telescope TESS was successfully launched today by NASA, and Australia will play a key role in checking out any new worlds it discovers.
When NASA first started planning the Kepler mission, no one knew if the universe held any planets outside our solar system. Thousands of exoplanets later, the search enters a new phase as Kepler retires.
There are plenty of astronomical things to watch out for this year beyond this week’s lunar eclipse, including new Moon landings and a space station falling back to Earth.
Google’s artificial intelligence has been taught to look for planets around other stars. It’s already making new discoveries that scientists have missed.