Sentences with phrase «of planets beyond our solar system»

Astronomers craving their first image of a planet beyond our solar system now have fresh targets to explore: newly identified siblings of Beta Pictoris, the most famous dust - shrouded star in the sky.

Participating in the conversation were Russlynn Ali, assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education; Joan Steitz, a molecular biophysicist at Yale University who studies RNA; Shirley Malcom, head of the directorate for education and human resources at AAAS; and Sara Seager, a planetary scientist and physicist at MIT who studies the atmospheres of planets beyond the solar system.

One of the big questions in the study of planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, is whether or not they are habitable.

All of our knowledge of planets beyond our solar system is therefore somewhat indirect; it comes from analyzing the much brighter light from a planet's host star, influenced by the planet in some way.

The knowledge and tools NASA has developed to study life on Earth will be a great asset to the study of planets beyond our solar system.

Mautner believes there may be hundreds of planets beyond our solar system that are good candidates, perhaps including the recently discovered, «Earth next door.»

«Geoff Marcy is undeniably the most prominent exoplanet researcher in the U.S.,» he said, referring to the study of planets beyond our solar system.

Not exact matches

NASA scientists on Monday announced the discovery of 219 new objects beyond our solar system that are almost certainly planets.

But other planetary scientists, including Jonathan Lunine of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, note that JWST will also use its infrared eyes to peer at planets both inside the Solar System and beyond.

At the ends of the Solar System, beyond the orbit of Neptune, there is a belt of objects composed of ice and rocks, among which four dwarf planets stand out: Pluto, Eris, Makemake and Haumea.

The collection will help scientists to better understand not only how the atmospheres of the outer planets function, but also the atmospheres of Earth and planets beyond the solar system.

Using data from our solar system and observations of huge planets far beyond the visual range of any telescope, astrophysicists René Heller and Ralph Pudritz have shown that some moons of those planets could be habitable.

«With a long, intricate dance around the Saturn system, Cassini aims to study the Saturn system from as many angles as possible,» said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. «Beyond showing us the beauty of the Ringed Planet, data like these also improve our understanding of the history of the faint rings around Saturn and the way disks around planets form — clues to how our own solar system formed around the sun.»

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.

Such an event could enable bacteria and other forms of life to make their way from one planet in the solar system to another and perhaps beyond.

Hundreds of exoplanets — planets beyond our solar system — have already been detected from the ground and from other spacecraft via transit searches and other methods.

Astronomers will be searching for direct evidence of a ninth planet in the far reaches of the solar system; its existence was inferred this year from its gravitational effects on icy objects beyond Pluto.

With them it will peer through the creaking, dusty cosmic eons to study much that astronomers using Hubble and other telescopes have barely begun to glimpse: the universe's very first galaxies, nascent stars and planets in mid-creation in nebulous wombs, the atmospheres of worlds both within and beyond our solar system.

NASA's Kepler mission has added five new planets to a growing roster of more than 400 beyond our solar system — and none of the newbies is remotely hospitable to life.

Astronomers have recently found hundreds of new exoplanets, or planets beyond our own solar system.

«A magnetic field protects the atmosphere of a planet or moon, and the atmosphere protects the surface,» says study coauthor Sonia Tikoo, a planetary scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. Together, the two protect the potential habitability of the planet or moon, possibly those far beyond our solar system.

One of our solar system's five dwarf planets, Makemake — an icy, 1400 - kilometer - wide orb that circles the sun far beyond Pluto — was discovered in 2005.

It envisions the great reshuffling as a brief, violent affair that not only put the outer planets where they are today but also created the Kuiper belt of small icy bodies beyond Neptune, gave the planets scores of oddly orbiting moons, and bombarded the solar system with a rain of asteroids and comets so fierce that it would have cooked all but the deepest subterranean life on early Earth.

The presence of water in liquid form still guides our searches for extraterrestrial life: on Mars, on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter or on extrasolar planets (beyond our Solar System).

A SUBTLE anomaly in the orbit of the planets in our solar system could prove a controversial idea that goes beyond Einstein.

The idea of finding planets beyond the solar system was considered borderline crazy just a few decades ago, until Didier Queloz ran headlong into the first one

Following the discovery of the first extrasolar planet beyond our solar system in 1992, the number of samples has now reached hundreds.

Comet Wild - 2 used to orbit beyond the orbit of Jupiter, but it made an unusually close approach to the giant planet in September 1974 and got catapulted into the inner solar system.

The collaboration was inspired by the recently proposed ninth planet, possibly orbiting at the fringes of our solar system beyond Pluto.

Researchers use a concept known as the habitable zone to distinguish between these two types of planets, which exist beyond our solar system.

With its twin, Voyager 2, it was sent to explore the outer planets of our solar system and what lies beyond, in interstellar space.

Some of these planets, all located far beyond Earth's solar system, could contain vast deposits of graphite or diamonds, and their apparent abundance prompts new questions about the implications of carbon - intense environments for climate, plate tectonics, and other geological processes, as well as for life.

Bruce Dorminey is a science journalist and author of «Distant Wanderers: The Search for Planets beyond the Solar System.»

The belt, which consists of antiprotons trapped by Earth's magnetic field several hundred kilometers above the planet's surface, may ultimately become a key source of fuel for missions venturing beyond the solar system.

Observations verify that at least two planets with Earth - like masses — the first confirmed beyond our solar system — orbit a whirling neutron star that spits out fierce pulses of radiation, according to a report here 29 May at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Kepler - 10b was the first «iron - clad proof of a rocky planet beyond our solar system» back in 2001.

Learn about the formation and origin of the Solar System and go beyond our neighborhood to investigate exoplanets (planets around other stars) in this video of class 11 of Bruce Betts» Introduction to Planetary Science and Astronomy class.

Kepler lead scientist William Borucki, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, said he's not surprised by the finding of the European team, which uses a light - splitting spectrograph called HARPS on a telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile to look for planets beyond the solar system.

Sharing the story, the science, and the adventure of NASA's scientific explorations of our home planet, the solar system, and the universe beyond!

This episode of «Hubble at 25» uncovers Hubble's key role in the study of planets beyond our own solar system.

The Kuiper belt is an enormous cluster of small bodies like comets and minor planets located in the outer reaches of our solar system, beyond Neptune.

If this finding is correct, that would mean the Milky Way is home to tens of billions of planets in habitable zones, concludes a team of scientists using an Earth - based telescope to look for planets beyond the solar system.

Calculations by to Weigert and Holman (1997) indicated that the distance from the star where an Earth - type planet would be «comfortable» with liquid water is centered around 0.73 to 0.74 AU — somewhat beyond the orbital distance of Venus in the Solar System — with an orbital period under an Earth year using calculations based on Hart (1979).

The discovery, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, puts the planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST - 1 at the top of astronomers» list of places to look for life beyond the solar system.

The new worlds present an incredible spectrum of what planets beyond our solar system can look like.

Beyond the Sun, its eight planets, and their larger moons, the solar system is home to a myriad of other, smaller bodies, including dwarf planets, asteroids, trojans, centaurs, and comets, all the way down to interplanetary dust particles.

On 6 October 1995, astronomers started a revolution with the discovery of 51 Pegasi b — the first planet found orbiting a Sun - like star beyond our solar system.

An international team of astronomers using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made an unparalleled observation, detecting significant changes in the atmosphere of a planet located beyond our solar system.

Because stars and planets beyond our solar system are too distant and unreachable, a team of scientists created a technique that could determine which exoplanets have the potential to accommodate human life.

Other solar system bodies that are possibly dwarf planets include Sedna and Quaoar, small worlds far beyond Pluto's orbit, and 2012 VP113, an object that is thought to have one of the most distant orbits found beyond the known edge of our solar system.