Sentences with phrase «for planets orbiting those stars»

After a decade of searching for planets orbiting stars like our sun, astronomers had found nothing but giant planets, most of them gas balls like Jupiter, around other stars.

Title: Variations in the Composition of Cool Stars Abstract: Understanding the chemical composition of cool stars in the solar neighborhood is vital to answering key formation and evolutionary questions for not only our local universe, but also for planets orbiting those stars.

Understanding the chemical composition of cool stars in the solar neighborhood is vital to answering key formation and evolutionary questions for not only our local universe, but also for planets orbiting those stars.

Not exact matches

The planets orbit an «ultracool dwarf,» a star much smaller and cooler than the sun, but still possibly warm enough to allow for liquid water on the surfaces of at least two of the planets.

Of the trillions of stars (most of which probably have some rocky planets orbiting it from the leftovers of its formation) there are probably plenty of planets orbiting their stars at the same distance as ours with varying conditions, ours just happened to be right for humans to evolve and be here today.

Oh, so in the vast known Universe, which reaches out for 15 BILLION light years in all directions, with over 100 BILLION galaxies, containing an average of 100 BILLION stars each, with most of those stars now thought to have multiple planets orbiting around them, you can't imagine that there would be at least ONE little planet SOMEWHERE with the right conditions for life without divine intervention?

After a lot of time on a small planet orbiting a minor star at the outskirts of a nondescript spiral galaxy, out of those billions of billions of planets, had the right conditions (right energy and matter flux, etc) for biology to emerge from chemistry.

Calculations indicate that in several ways it is quite an Earth - like planet: its radius is 1.2 to 2.5 times that of Earth; its mass is 3.1 to 4.3 times greater; and, crucially, its orbit lies within its star's «Goldilocks zone», which means its surface temperature is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water - and therefore potentially life - to exist on its surface.

The KELT monitors bright stars in large sections of the sky, searching for planets that orbit extremely closely.

The discovery of seven Earth - sized planets orbiting a single cool star fuels a debate over what counts as good news in the search for life outside the solar system.

The International Astronomical Union defines «planet» as a celestial body that, within the Solar System that is in orbit around the Sun; has sufficient mass for its self - gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape; and has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit; or within another system, it is in orbit around a star or stellar remnants; has a mass below the limiting mass for thermonuclear fusion of deuterium; and is above the minimum mass / size requirement for planetary status in the Solar System.

UP, UP AND AWAY NASA's TESS telescope launches from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on April 18 on a mission to search for planets orbiting nearby, bright stars.

A far - flung star's extra wink, spotted in data from the Kepler space telescope and further probed by the Hubble Space Telescope, may be the first evidence for an exomoon — a moon orbiting a planet orbiting a distant star.

Following a novel, looping path that gives it an unobstructed view, the orbiting TESS will scan the sky for planets around nearby bright stars.

«This also allows for searches for transmitters that are many orders of magnitude less powerful than those that would be detectable from a planet orbiting even the most nearby stars.»

We're being surprised over and over again: circumbinary planets, which orbit two stars instead of one, for example, or compact multi-planet systems.

Because planets that are close to their stars are easier for telescopes to see, most of the rocky super-Earths discovered so far have close - in orbits — with years lasting between about two to 100 Earth days — making the worlds way too hot to host life as we know it.

John Tobin of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, and colleagues found that the disc's motion mirrors the way planets orbit stars, hinting that it has all the right moves for planet formation (Nature, doi.org/jxm).

First, planets like our own orbit relatively close to their stars, where bright illumination more than compensates for the nearby glare.

«It might even have consequences for life on planets orbiting binary stars.»

The Kepler team has already pulled off that feat for two planets orbiting a star called Kepler - 9, about 2,000 light - years from Earth.

And this is just the latest in a series of stunning finds from Kepler, a space telescope designed to search for Earth - size planets orbiting other stars in what is called «the Goldilocks zone.»

If the orbits of these bodies are disturbed — by a passing star, for example — they return to paths close to the planets of the solar system and can become active comets.

If astronomers spotted such a planet orbiting another star, they would conclude it was an ideal place to search for life.

For years, astronomers expected to see elsewhere what they saw in our own orderly solar system: rocky planets close to a star and gas giants farther away, all in neat, nearly circular orbits.

With knowledge only of the luminosity of the star (1/600 that of the sun), the mass of the planet (1.3 times that of Earth), and the length of its orbit (11.2 days), the team was able to predict that, with a variety of possible atmospheres, it would be possible for Proxima b to harbor liquid water on its surface.

After years of scrutinizing the closest star to Earth, a red dwarf known as Proxima Centauri, astronomers have finally found evidence for a planet, slightly bigger than Earth and well within the star's habitable zone — the range of orbits in which liquid water could exist on its surface.

A team of astronomers at the University of Chicago and Grinnell College seeks to change the way scientists approach the search for Earth - like planets orbiting stars other than the sun.

It looks for planets using the transit method: You just wait for a planet to cross in front of its star as it's orbiting.

«It's not so much the numbers of planets that we care about, but the fact that they are orbiting nearby stars,» says Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge and deputy science director for TESS.

For decades we have blindly checked the sky overhead or targeted stars that are old enough, metallic enough and stable enough to have rocky planets in the right orbits.

On 16 April, the agency plans to launch the US$ 337 - million Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which will scrutinize 200,000 nearby bright stars for signs of orbiting planets.

That's plenty of time for life to arise and evolve on any planets orbiting these stars.

The first evidence for an exomoon — a moon orbiting a planet orbiting a distant star — may have been spotted in data from the Kepler space telescope.

A SCIENCE - FICTION scene could be playing out for real about 4900 light years from Earth, where astronomers have spotted the first known pair of planets jointly orbiting a binary star system (Science, doi.org/h8h).

The catalyst for this epochal transition is Proxima b, a newfound small planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, which at just over four light - years away is the star nearest to our solar system.

With planets orbiting M dwarfs quickly becoming the darlings in the search for life beyond our solar system, a new generation of observatories are poised to discover hundreds of worlds around these stars.

More importantly, the two planets have orbital periods of 30 days and 61 days, so that the inner planet orbits the star twice for every one orbit of the outer one.

«William Borucki, of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California,» won the astronomy prize for «conceiving the observational technique of transit photometry that raised the tantalizing prospect of sighting Earth - like planets orbiting other stars, and [for] leading the 25 - year - long development of the Kepler mission.»

In space, above our atmosphere, stars do not twinkle; in space a telescope is also beyond day and night and can thus stare at the same star for weeks on end, gradually teasing from its light the barely perceptible but regular flickers caused by a small orbiting planet.

For the first 15 years of DISCOVER's existence, if you wanted to hear about planets orbiting other stars, you had your choice of sources: Star Wars and Star Trek.

Under K2, Kepler won't stare at the same patch of sky for as long, so it will be restricted to hunting for planets that orbit their stars much more closely than Earth does the sun.

We are just a species of ape living on a smallish planet orbiting an unremarkable star in one galaxy among billions in a universe that had been around for 13.8 billion years without us.

They carefully monitored 88 selected stars in Messier 67 [3] over a period of six years to look for the tiny telltale motions of the stars towards and away from Earth that reveal the presence of orbiting planets.

But for half a decade, we've known that big planets close to other stars can have orbits that are tilted at all sorts of weird angles.

While searching for Earth - like planets, NASA's Kepler spacecraft has come across 10 that share one very un-Earth-like quality: They orbit two stars, instead of one.

Such worlds orbit stars in so - called «habitable zones,» regions where planets could hold liquid water that is necessary for life as we know it.

Reaching for the Stars The enterprise got a boost on Aug. 24 when astronomers at the European Southern Observatory in Chile announced the discovery of an Earth - like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, one of three stars in the Alpha Centauri syStars The enterprise got a boost on Aug. 24 when astronomers at the European Southern Observatory in Chile announced the discovery of an Earth - like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, one of three stars in the Alpha Centauri systars in the Alpha Centauri system.

The much - anticipated James Webb Space Telescope — often referred to as Hubble's successor — for example, will likely only study worlds that hug their host stars, making observations of planets with wider orbits like Mars or even Earth out of the question.

The Kepler spacecraft, launched last March, orbits the sun while scanning upward of 150,000 stars for signs of a slight dimming — a sign that a planet has crossed its face.