Sentences with phrase «few earth masses»

Because a «small» protoplanet (up to a few Earth masses) lacks sufficient gravitational pull to open a gap in the protostar's disk, it will move inward as the disk lying inside the protoplanet's orbit transfers angular momentum to it at a slower rate than it is transferring angular momentum to the outer disk (through interactions with Lindblad resonances induced in the disk).

Not exact matches

But few authorities are planning for catastrophic solar storms — gigantic eruptions of mass and energy from the sun that disrupt Earth's magnetic field.

Dust appears to lie in a belt that extends a few hundred million kilometres from Proxima Centauri and has a total mass of about one hundredth of the Earth's mass.

But a simulation of super-Earths between a few times and 10 times Earth's mass suggests that high pressures will keep the core solid, according to Guillaume Morard of the Institute of Mineralogy and Physics of Condensed Matter in Paris, France, and his team (arxiv.org/1010.5133).

Scientists also claim that the impact of the asteroid would have filled Earth's atmosphere with sulphur trioxide, subsequently creating a gas cloud that would have caused a mass amount of sulphuric acid rain to fall in just a few days, making the surface of the ocean too acidic for upper ocean creatures to live.

«This planet candidate is our best bet for the next few decades, maybe even forever, to directly image an Earth - mass planet in the habitable zone,» says Heller.

As a result, Earth's mass has steadily shifted toward the poles — until a few years ago.

Her calculations suggest that this trapped interstellar «grit» adds up to at least a few times the mass of the Earth.

Of the more than 400 now known, many are large — 10 times the mass of Jupiter or more — and a precious few are small, just a few times Earth's mass.

The riddle posed by super-Earths (1 — 4 Earth radii, 2 — 20 Earth masses) is that they are not Jupiters: their core masses are large enough to trigger runaway gas accretion, yet somehow super-Earths accreted atmospheres that weigh only a few percent of their total mass.

Kepler has shown us that planets of a few times Earth - mass are not uncommon, while a 2013 study by Ravi Kopparapu (Pennsylvania State) found that about half of all M - dwarfs should have Earth - size planets in the habitable zone7.

Based on radial - velocity observations through 2009, no substellar companions were detected around Gl 433's habitable zone down to within a few Earth - masses (Zechmeister et al, 2009).

The shell, as we observe it from Earth today, began forming about 2,700 years earlier when U Antliae went through a short (a few hundred years) but rapid period of mass loss.

Their hypothesis states that a series of chance events or situations, such as living in the habitable zone of the sun, having a Jupiter - type planet to clear away comet and asteroid debris and having few mass extinctions, has allowed life to develop on Earth and would be unlikely to happen elsewhere.

One of the few things we know about Proxima b, besides that it is a rocky planet with a mass 1.3 times that of Earth, is that its orbit is in the so - called «Goldilocks zone» of its sun: not too hot nor too cold for liquid water, making it a potential host for life — alien, human or both.

Similarly, the terms Neptunes and hot Neptunes refer to planets less than about 10 percent of Jupiter's mass, and the term super-Earths refers to those planets that may well be rocky bodies only a few times as massive as Earth.

More than 20 percent of stars have somewhat smaller nearby planets, with sizes of several to a few tens of Earth masses and with orbital periods of less than three months.

While the Earth's iron core is about 30 percent of the planet's total mass, the Moon's core constitutes only a few percent of its total mass.

As his Michael Dawson and a few others are held hostage by a robber (Eduardo Yañez) in a middle - of - nowhere convenience store, Foxx has his moments, such as when a spontaneous rendition of Earth, Wind and Fire's «Reasons» spurs on a mass singalong.

I understand it is because in the last few years the temperature of the Earth has actually cooled so, rather than lose the momentum they had gained to make political inroads to underwrite global measures to control societies» behaviors when it comes to things like use of fossil fuels, proponents decided to cut their losses and change the term so they wouldn't be obviously wrong to the masses as it snowed on various global warming rallies.

First, the surface temperature of the Earth is roughly 60 F higher than it would otherwise be thanks to a few greenhouse gasses that collectively make up only about 3 percent of the mass of our atmosphere.

While there is some pro-northern hemisphere bias, the operators of Landsat 8 have made a concerted effort to distribute the collection of imagery more evenly over all of the Earth's land masses, with the exception of a few large areas that are chronically impaired by heavy haze, dust, smog, or cloud cover.

In the article and subsequent aimiable exchange with Nordhaus, Dyson touted no fewer than three possible crackpot mega-schemes as contingency «low - cost backstops» against global warming: «carbon - eating trees» covering fully a quarter of Earth's vegetated land mass, «carbon - eating phytoplankton in the oceans», and «snow - dumping in East Antarctica» (via «a giant array of tethered kites or balloons so as to block the westerly flow on one side only.»)

A «mass extinction» event is characterised as a period during which at least 75 % of the Earth's species die out in a period of a few million years or less.