News by Subject Space & Planetary

An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has discovered two new Earth-like planets near one of our closest stars. 'Teegarden's star' is about 12.5 light years away and is one of the smallest known stars. It is about 2,700°C and about 10 times lighter than the sun. The star wasn't discovered until 2003. The scientists observed the star for about three years. The results were published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The sun's rotation rate in its first billion years is unknown. Yet, this spin rate affected solar eruptions, influencing the evolution of life. A team of NASA scientists think they've figured it out by using the moon as critical evidence.

When massive stars die at the end of their short lives, they light up the cosmos with bright, explosive bursts of light and material known as supernovae. A supernova event is incredibly energetic and intensely luminous -- so much so that it forms what looks like an especially bright new star that slowly fades away over time.

A survey of 300 stars in search of exoplanets finds that massive, Jupiter-like gas giants are found just about where Jupiter is in our own solar system. Most such massive planets occur around stars weighing 1.5 solar masses, with few around sun-like stars. Though the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey found just six planets and three brown dwarfs around these 300 stars, the survey provides much-needed statistics on large planet masses and orbits.

Analysis from halfway through the Gemini Planet Imager's planetary survey hints that our solar system may have rare qualities which could possibly be related to the habitability of Earth.

Allison Kirkpatrick of the University of Kansas will announce a breakthrough finding that overturns assumptions about the maturation of galaxies and may represent a phase of every galaxy's life cycle that was unknown until now.

NGC 7773 is a beautiful example of a barred spiral galaxy. A luminous bar-shaped structure cuts prominently through the galaxy's bright core, extending to the inner boundary of NGC 7773's sweeping, pinwheel-like spiral arms. Astronomers think that these bar structures emerge later in the lifetime of a galaxy.