Sentences with phrase «distant planetary systems»

But to fully understand the architecture of distant planetary systems, astronomers must map the entire distribution of planets around a star.

The discovery still doesn't provide direct evidence of the exocomets» existence, but it could pave the way for a better understanding of comets in distant planetary systems and our own solar system.

Not exact matches

In November a team led by Washington State University astrobiologist Dirk Schulze - Makuch devised the Planetary Habitability Index, or PHI, a scoring system for distant worlds that measures their suitability for any kind of life, not merely life as we know it.

Eruptions on distant stars hold clues about the number of planetary systems there are in the Universe

«NASA first mission to distant Pluto will also be humankind's first close up view of this cold, unexplored world in our solar system,» said Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division at the agency's Headquarters in Washington.

The goal of the ARIEL mission is to investigate the atmospheres of several hundreds planets orbiting distant stars in order to address the fundamental questions on how planetary systems form and evolve.

Until now, it has been generally accepted that a meteor constitutes a time capsule — a relic of the early creation of the solar system that has fallen to Earth, allowing us to delve into the distant past by looking at the composition of the essentially unchanged material that formed the basis of planetary formation.

Studies of extrasolar planetary systems have shown that many distant systems likely experienced similar chaotic collisions early in their formation, too, which led to doubts about the amount of liquid water on some of these worlds.

It is being done by the people who launched the Kepler satellite to detect small dips in the brightness of distant stars in order to detect the presence of now ~ 1000 new planets in the last several years, completely re-writing the textbooks on the parameter space of planetary atmospheres, solar system formation, etc..