Sentences with phrase «orbits around stars nearer»

Based on the numbers of such planets that astronomers have found in tight orbits around stars nearer to our sun, Gilliland's colleagues expected to see 15 or 20 planets in 47 Tucanae.

Not exact matches

It is one of six planets discovered around this star, all of which have near - circular orbits.

Captured by Kepler's digital sensors, transformed into bytes of data, and downloaded to computers at NASA's Ames Research Center near San Francisco, the processed starlight slowly revealed a remarkable story: A planet not much bigger than Earth was whipping around its native star at a blistering pace, completing an orbit — its version of a «year» — in just over 20 hours.

As the orbit of Mercury around the Sun is tilted compared with the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the planet normally appears to pass above or below our nearest star.

«New Horizons is the latest in a long line of scientific accomplishments at NASA, including multiple missions orbiting and exploring the surface of Mars in advance of human visits still to come; the remarkable Kepler mission to identify Earth - like planets around stars other than our own; and the DSCOVR satellite that soon will be beaming back images of the whole Earth in near real - time from a vantage point a million miles away.

Most stars near the center manage to stay out of the clutches of the hole, though, simply by virtue of being in ultrafast orbits around it.

During the relatively brief, combined giant phases of the two stars at present, however, a planet could orbit the Aab pair far enough out for the two stars to act as a single gravitational source and near enough for it to receive enough energy to sustain life, possibly around 12.5 AUs out from the binary.

According to a NASA announcement on Friday, «TESS will use an array of telescopes to perform an all - sky survey to discover transiting exoplanets ranging from Earth - sized to gas giants, in orbit around the nearest and brightest stars in the sky.

KELT - 9b has an extremely short orbital period, a near - polar orbit and travels around a star that is oblate, not spherical, co-author Karen Collins, a post-doctoral fellow at Vanderbilt, noted.

The best evidence for a central dark mass of a few million solar masses comes from near - infrared (NIR) studies with ground - based 8 - m class telescopes, where the development of adaptive optics has provided the ability to track the motions of individual stars orbiting around Sgr ~ A * over several decades.

For the transit method to work, a planet must pass almost perfectly along our line of sight, the chances of which are around 0.5 percent for an Earth - sized planet (in an Earth - sized orbit) and 10 percent for a Jupiter - sized planet (if it orbits near its star)[source: Ames Research Center, FAQ].

It moves around Star A at an average distance of less than 0.05 AUs (a semi-major axis well within Mercury's orbital distance) in a near circular orbit (e = 0.23 + / - 0.015) that takes 3.312 days to complete.

HD 85512 b has some 3.6 Earth - masses and appears to orbit near the estimated inner edge of the habitable zone around its host star, where liquid water, and possibly life, may exist under favorable conditions (more).