News by Subject Space & Planetary

An international team of astronomers have made the most precise test of gravity outside our own solar system.

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have helped to find the last reservoir of ordinary matter hiding in the universe.

Scientists have been able to prove the existence of small black holes and those that are super-massive but the existence of an elusive type of black hole, known as intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) is hotly debated. New research coming out of the Space Science Center at the University of New Hampshire shows the strongest evidence to date that this middle-of-the-road black hole exists, by serendipitously capturing one in action devouring an encountering star.

It's impossible to obtain images of an exoplanet, so dazzling is the light of its star. However, astronomers led by UNIGE have the idea of detecting molecules that are present in the planet's atmosphere in order to make it visible, provided that these same molecules are absent from its star. Thanks to this innovative technique, the device is sensitive to the selected molecules, making the star invisible and allowing the astronomers to observe the planet.

New work from an international team of astronomers including Carnegie's Jaehan Bae used archival radio telescope data to develop a new method for finding very young extrasolar planets. Of the thousands of exoplanets discovered by astronomers, only a handful are in their formative years. Finding more baby planets will help astronomers answer the many outstanding questions about planet formation.

Two independent teams of astronomers have uncovered convincing evidence that three young planets are in orbit around an infant star known as HD 163296. Using a new planet-finding strategy, the astronomers identified three discrete disturbances in a young star's gas-filled disk: the strongest evidence yet that newly formed planets are in orbit there.

University of Groningen astronomers have discovered relics of merger events in the Milky Way halo. Five small groups of stars appear to represent mergers with smaller galaxies, while a big 'blob' comprising hundreds of stars appears to be the remnant of a large merger event. These results were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on 12 June.

Experiments conducted at Berkeley Lab helped to confirm that samples of interplanetary particles -- collected from Earth's upper atmosphere and believed to originate from comets -- contain dust leftover from the initial formation of the solar system.