Sentences with phrase «knew of no planets outside our solar system»

«When I started teaching at UNLV in 1993, we didn't know of any planets outside our solar system,» he recalled.

Not exact matches

Created by chance, they have no place in the normal and orthodox evolution of astral matter; with the exasperating result that we know nothing for certain about the existence or frequency of occurrence of planets outside the solar system.

«We will know the masses [of these planets] better than any planet outside of our Solar System,» says lead author Matthew Holman from the Harvard - Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Since the discovery of planets outside our solar system in the 1990s, astronomers have tallied more than 400 extrasolar worlds, many unlike anything known before.

The new planet haul is the biggest yet, bringing the number of confirmed worlds outside our solar system over 3200 - and edges us closer to knowing how many stars host other Earths

That's why, ever since astronomers confirmed the first planet outside of our solar system in 1995, they have been looking for signs of water on the 200 - plus exoplanets now known.

This discovery marks a significant increase in the number of known small - sized planets more akin to Earth than previously identified exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system.

The Kepler 11 system is unique for several reasons: For starters, it is among the largest collections of worlds known outside our own solar system, and all six of the planets Kepler has found there are aligned so that their orbits carry them across the face of their host star from Kepler's vantage point.

In a field where small is good — small meaning less like Jupiter and more like Earth — the latest batch of planets netted by the space observatory includes five of the eight smallest worlds now known outside the solar system.

The technology, known as Laser Guide Star adaptive optics, will lead to important advances in the study of planets both inside and outside our solar system, as well as of galaxies, black holes, and how the universe formed and evolved, Ghez said.

We now know they might, thanks to discoveries since 1995 of planets outside our solar system.

An artist's conception of Kepler - 22b, a planet 600 light years away from Earth, and the first confirmed planet outside our solar system that could conceivably harbor life as we know it.

These planets outside our solar system — which are known as exoplanets — are companions to stars, swimming in their own sea of darkness.

For example, in 1990, we didn't even know if there were planets outside of our own solar system.

None of the approximately 750,000 known asteroids and comets in the Solar System is thought to have originated outside it, despite models of the formation of planetary systems suggesting that orbital migration of giant planets ejects a large fraction of the original planetesimals into interstellar space1.

NASA has selected a team to build a new, cutting - edge instrument that will detect planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, by measuring the miniscule «wobbling» of stars.

The closest known planet outside of our solar system is about 4.2 light years away from...

This chart compares artists» concepts of the smallest known exoplanets (planets orbiting outside the solar system) as of January 2012 to our own planets Mars and Earth.