Sentences with phrase «orbit around an object»

Dwarf planet Ceres continues to puzzle scientists as NASA's Dawn spacecraft gets closer to being captured into orbit around the object.

Normally, to maintain a simple circular orbit around an object, a rocket needs to find an exact balance between its tendency to fly outward into space and its inward attraction toward the moon or planet it circles.

The star exhibits weird fluctuations in its brightness, leading a few astronomers to propose — among many other ideas — that maybe a swarm of alien megastructures is orbiting around the object.

On July 15, 2011 (probably near 10 pm, PDT), NASA's Dawn spacecraft became the first probe to enter orbit around an object in the Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Not exact matches

When a small object orbits a big object in space, the less massive one doesn't travel in a perfect circle around the larger one.

He was forced to recant his discoveries by the catholic church because they were inconsistent with the prevailing beliefs that all celestial objects orbited around the earth.

Haumea is an interesting object: it rotates around the Sun in an elliptic orbit which takes it 284 years to complete (it presently lies fifty times further from the Sun than the Earth), and it takes 3.9 hours to rotate around its axis, much less than any other body measuring more than a hundred kilometers long in the entire Solar System.

The spacecraft then will attempt to redirect the object into a stable orbit around the moon.

It gives further evidence of how Titan, despite its location in orbit around a gas giant in the outer Solar System, is one of the most Earth - like objects ever studied.

The team relied on a timeworn technique called parallax, which measures the apparent shift in an object's celestial position when seen from opposing sides of the Earth's orbit around the sun.

The object, if it exists, orbits a planet slightly larger than Jupiter around a star about 4,000 light - years away.

But only six decades after Sputnik's launch into pristine skies, the orbit around Earth is now filled with nearly 18,000 objects tracked by the United States Strategic Command.

On August 16, the union's seven - member Planet Definition Committee released a draft Planet Definition Resolution, which stated that round objects in orbit around the sun are planets.

Pluto is a round object in orbit around the sun.

The region of space around an object where a satellite could orbit indefinitely is called the Hill sphere, roughly defined as where the object's gravitational field is stronger than that exerted by another object outside the sphere.

The worlds are aptly named «circumbinary planets» («circum» meaning around, and «binary» referring to two objects), and in this type of binary system, the two stars orbit each other while the planet orbits the two stars (pictured above).

Xena is the most distant object ever seen in orbit around the sun — 10 billion miles away.

For one thing, they explain changes seen in an unusual object discovered in 1974, thought to be a binary pulsar, in which two neutron stars (one of them a pulsar) orbit closely around one another.

Despite many careful searches, no rings had been found around smaller objects orbiting the Sun in the Solar System.

He's the man who recently stirred up a hornet's nest by finding lots of new objects orbiting in the outer reaches of the solar system, one of which — Eris — is around 1,400 miles wide, about the same size as Pluto.

One is geodetic precession, in which the curvature of space - time around a massive object, such as Earth, induces a slight wobble in an orbiting gyroscope.

In 1915, Einstein explained that gravity arises because massive bodies warp space and time, or spacetime, causing free - falling objects to follow curved paths such as the arc of a thrown ball or the elliptical orbit of a planet around its sun.

This is the first time ion engines have been used to send a spacecraft into orbit around a distant object in the solar system.

Runyon and his co-authors argue for a definition of «planet» that focuses on the intrinsic qualities of the body itself, rather than external factors such as its orbit or other objects around it.

Around younger stars, however, many of these newly formed objects have yet to settle into stately orbits and routinely collide, producing enough rubble to spawn a «second - generation» disk of debris.

By studying the dance of two Earth - orbiting satellites, Italian physicists have detected the subtle twisting of spacetime around a massive, spinning object.

PASADENA, CALIFORNIA — The solar system has gained a new extreme object: L91, a small, icy world with one of the longest known orbits, taking more than 20,000 years to go around the sun.

The Broucke - Hénon solutions are the most complex: Two objects dash back and forth on the inside, while the third object orbits around the outside.

This means that the whole orbit will change orientation around the central object.

The object around the star 51 Pegasi appeared to be 150 times the size of Earth, yet had an orbit tighter than the path of Mercury around the sun.

The as - yet - unconfirmed world, thought to be around the mass of Mars, would explain the wonky orbits of a group of icy objects in a region known as the Kuiper belt.

Previous spacecraft launched under New Frontiers include New Horizons, which surveyed Pluto and is now due to visit MU69, an icy object in the farthest reaches of the solar system; Juno, now in orbit around Jupiter; and OSIRIS - REx, launched last year, which will collect samples from an asteroid and return them to Earth.

Over time, the gravitational yanks of passing stars jostled the orbits of the objects, leaving no hint of their formerly neat, flat paths around the sun.

Because the asteroid's orbit closely resembles the path of the Earth around the sun, says Paul Chodas of JPL, the object may turn out to be a rocket booster discarded from an earlier space flight.

Scattered Kuiper Belt Objects have very eccentric and tilted orbits that carry them from around 3.3 billion miles from the sun to almost 100 billion miles out.

These objects have corkscrew orbits, slowly looping around Earth, while following its orbital motion around the Sun.

Over time, the gravitational yanks of passing stars jostled the orbits of the outer Oort cloud objects, leaving no hint of their formerly neat, flat paths around the sun.

General relativity predicts that two massive objects in a tight orbit around each other will spiral in, slowly at first and then faster until they merge, distorting space - time in perturbations that ripple in all directions.

Jupiter and Neptune may have collected their Trojans about 3.8 billion years ago, at a time when the orbits of these planets were shifting and their gravity was flinging vast numbers of comet - like objects around the solar system (see The solar system, but not as we know it).

Comparing that data with orbit calculations from the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft suggested that the blip could be another object around MU69.

Now observing the mass of a black hole (at least indirectly) is easy: you measure how fast things orbit around it, just the same as any other massive astronomical object.

The failure, thus far, to find large substellar objects like brown dwarfs or a Jupiter - or Saturn - class planet in a «torch» orbit (closer han the Mercury to Sun distance) around 107 Piscium — with even the highly sensitive radial - velocity technique of Geoffrey W. Marcy and R. Paul Butler — bodes well for the possibility of Earth - type terrestrial planets around this star (Cumming et al, 1999).

That is, rather being spread uniformly around a stream (an elliptical path similar to that of the parent object), instead there are groupings or concentrations within that orbit.

To get powerful gravitational waves, you want objects each with a very big mass that are orbiting around each other at very high speed.

Eventually, it was determined that no substellar objects around CM Draconis larger than about three Jupiter - masses are orbiting closer than one AU (Doyle et al, 2000).

The VLA data were used to track the orbit of the smaller Southern star around the larger Southern object, presumed to be a pair of stars orbiting each other closely.

The initiative also involves getting the spacecraft to redirect the object into a stable orbit around the moon.

In March 2015, NASA's Dawn spacecraft is expected to enter orbit around Ceres to study the object like never before.

Currently designated 2004 XR190 (or XR 190) but nicknamed «Buffy,» the object takes about 440 years to move around the Sun at an average distance (semi-major axis) of 57.4 AUs in a relatively circular orbit (e = 0.11) that is inclined about 46.7 ° to the ecliptic.

When a celestial object is in an elliptical orbit around another body, an apsis (plural apsides) is a point on the orbit at greatest or least distance from the center of attraction, which is generally the center of mass of the system.