Sentences with phrase «of giant comets»

Boyajian's original hypothesis was that transiting swarms of giant comets caused the star's dimming.

That episode, called the Late Heavy Bombardment, may have been connected to the migrating orbits of some of the planets, which exiled Pluto to its current position and shook loose a barrage of giant comets.

She also says their findings reinforce the hypothesis that the Taurids stream is a remnant of a giant comet that disintegrated.

Not exact matches

Mathematical models, combined with our understanding of how planets and comets form, suggest that the objects in the Oort cloud must have been flung there by one of the giant planets closer to the sun.

That's because the higher speed of comets and the high volatility of their constituents would create giant plumes on impact, so more of the iridium would escape into space, compared with impacts by rocky asteroids.

Comet Wild 2, the quarry of Stardust, became a Jupiter - family comet in 1974 when the gas giant's gravity shrank its orbit and corralled it inward, toward Mars and Earth.

This is because pockets of gas rich in heavy elements would be created if a comet in the outer regions of a solar system got vaporised by a dying star in its red giant phase or by the expanding planetary nebula that follows it (arxiv.org/abs/1001.4513).

- The giant radio telescopes of NASA's Deep Space Network — which perform radio and radar astronomy research in addition to their communications functions — were tasked with observing radio emissions from Jupiter's radiation belt, looking for disturbances caused by comet dust.

Based on studies of comets, researchers believe that these young solar systems swirl with ice crystals and wispy gases that coalesce into gas giants like Saturn and Jupiter.

Such a smash - up with a red giant would unleash much more energy than the decimation of a comet, so would have to occur in a distant galaxy to avoid appearing brighter than what was observed.

Speculation includes a comet swarm or a giant cloud of dust or gas.

«That's kind of one of the nice and bad things about comets; most of the really bright ones are first timers that come in out of the Oort Cloud» — a giant cloud of icy debris that surrounds the solar system — «and you can't predict those, they just show up,» he says.

But interactions with the newly formed giant planets ejected many of those comets into interstellar space, flung others out into what would become the Oort Cloud, and knocked some into elongated, somewhat shorter orbits in what is known as the scattered disk.

From the spread of the fragments, astronomers have calculated that the comet passed so close to Jupiter last July that it broke into at least 17 pieces, which now orbit the giant planet about once every two years (This Week, 17 April).

Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who collaborates with Stern on New Horizons, goes the other way and speaks of Pluto being «in some respects like a giant comet.»

Whizzing asteroids and comets have battered Earth and all the other solid bodies of our solar system over the eons, but the ethereal rings of the giant planets seemed immune.

This leaves plenty of elbowroom for undetected terrestrial planets to huddle close their star, just as Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars do.What's more, the gas giants could irrigate parched inner terrestrial planets with ices from comets and asteroids they perturb.

At the outer fringes of the system, the gravitational influence of a hypothetical giant planet (bottom left) captures comets into a dense, massive swarm (right) where frequent collisions occur.

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.

This allows it to study a variety of astronomical objects, such as the molecular gas in planetary nebulae, molecules on active comets, the heating mechanisms of red giants and the afterglows of gamma - ray bursts.

Others (such as Glenn Schneider of the University of Arizona and Scott Kenyon of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory), however, argue that a giant planet in the system could gravitationally deflect comets and asteroids away from inner planets that may support life in the liquid water zone, in the same way that Jupiter protects Earth in the Solar System.

All the giant planets and some moons and comets have methane in their atmospheres, so — for the same reasons — they may have (or had) life in the form of bacteria.

The launched material — comets, asteroids (including the irregular moons2 captured by the giant planets), and TNOs — totaled about 3 % of Earth's mass.

A great comet shines over the Minecraft World, and he knows that his fate is to succeed.However... the comet is not a good omen at all... It is the herald of doom.A terrible explosion lights up above him and his village and they all realize: the giant flaming rock carries something much more dangerous inside.A Demon King from another world, and his thousands - strong army.The Minecraft World is about to face its biggest ever threat.The tale of Dangerous Ascent...

Orc shamans called down giant comets to crush whole units of troops.

An international team of scientists, including Peter Schultz of Brown University, suggests that a comet or meteorite exploded over the planet roughly 12,900 years ago, causing the abrupt climate changes that led to the extinction of the wooly mammoth and other giant prehistoric beasts.

Yes its true, we can do a fantastic job of lowering CO2 output and just when we think we are done another giant CO2 comet comes along ruining all the work we did.

One planet out of eight is pretty good, and there lots of planets, moons and comets in the solar system that either have hardly been explored or won't be warm enough until later when the sun starts expanding into red giant - hood.