Sentences with phrase «orbits of the planets»

In addition to Monday's rendezvous, Messenger is scheduled to pass Mercury again this October and in September 2009, using the pull of the planet's gravity to guide it into position to begin a planned year - long orbit of the planet in March 2011.

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.

«The precisely timed orbits of these planets places strong constraints on how they could have formed,» Ford said.

The calculated orbit of Planet Nine.

Due to the close binary orbital interactions of the host star with Alpha Centauri A and Star B's own increased stellar activity during recent years, the astronomers were only able to detect the radial - velocity variations of host star B that were caused by the 3.236 - day orbit of the planet (with a semi-major axis of 0.04 AU) only after more than four and a half years of careful observation.

But while Brown and Batygin have figured out the rough orbit of Planet Nine, they don't know the planet's precise location.

Abstract: We report on the masses, sizes, and orbits of the planets orbiting 22 Kepler stars.

We know that the apparently reliable orbits of the planets are unstable in the long run, because their weak gravitational effects on one another can add up in unpredictable ways.

Many orbits of these planets show that they could not have evolved in any conceivable way.

The ExoMars orbiter is preparing to make its first scientific observations at Mars during two orbits of the planet starting next week.

Ronald Garan, Jr. is a retired NASA astronaut who has traveled 71,075,867 miles in 2,842 orbits of our planet during more than 178 days in space and 27 hours and 3 minutes of EVA during four spacewalks.

However, the development of an Earth - like planet in this zone could have been disrupted by the eccentric orbit of planet b. Astronomers would find it very difficult to detect an Earth - type planet in the water zone of this star using present methods.

The swirls within the wrap remind me greatly of elliptical orbits of planets, the theoretical shape of galaxies, and even the accretion disc of the black hole.

Based on an analysis of the Kepler brightness measurements, along with high - resolution imaging and spectroscopy, Doppler spectroscopy, and (for 11 stars) astero... ▽ More We report on the masses, sizes, and orbits of the planets orbiting 22 Kepler stars.

Well, there are obvious elements of physics, ecosystems, energy from the sun, animal life, the atmosphere, orbits of the planets, etc etc etc that ALL must be in place for our planet to be survivable and support the life of humans.

I can explain climate change as a result of a natural cycle caused by the masses and orbits of the planets, but I don't go around calling believers in humans causing climate change idiots simply because I know what actually causes it.

To measure the orbit of a planet we must record not only the position of the planet relative to us but also the exact time we observe the planet.

Newton explained many things and allowed us to calculate the orbits of planets with his laws of motion, yet his idea of a static universe was wrong - like wise Einstein with his energy equation for many years thought / claimed the universe was static rather than dynamic.

In this foldout image from the medieval encyclopedia Liber floridus (Book of Flowers), Earth is depicted surrounded by the orbits of the planets, which cut into an early example of a graph depicting planetary motion through time (the red diagonal, seen at an oblique angle).

David Koch, a physicist at Ames who had been working on the mission with Borucki since 1991, suggested Kepler, after the great 17th - century astronomer who discovered the laws governing the orbits of planets around the sun.

From the orbits of the planets to the flexing of your muscles, every movement in the macroscopic world arises from the interplay of these two aspects of nature.

The specific issues that I addressed in my Ph.D. thesis were all associated with, or at least motivated by, problems in theoretical astrophysics, gravitational dynamics in particular: the evolution of the orbits of planets in the solar system and the evolution of structure in galaxies.

Smolin and Woit believe that its recent absorption into a richer conjecture called M - theory has turned the former beauty of strings into mathematical structures as ugly as the epicycles Ptolemy invented to explain the orbits of planets as they circle the earth.

Passing stars may jostle the orbit of a planet so often that it feels repeated pushes and pulls from its parent star, like the tortured body of Jupiter's inner moon Io.

Because the disk inside the orbit of a planet rotates faster than the planet around the star, it pushes that planet outward.

And that made it pretty easy because you could just take any basic astronomy textbook and look in the back and see exactly the masses and the orbits of the planets.

When I was in elementary school, I corrected a teacher about the orbits of the planets.

He wondered whether the orbits of the planets might lose energy over time by emitting waves into the gravitational field that their mass created.

Now an Israeli physicist predicts that a similar but far more subtle anomaly in the orbits of the planets, if detected, might prove his own theory, known as modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND.

Newton, who formulated the universal law of gravity and used it to explain a wealth of phenomena, including the orbits of planets, the tides of the ocean, and the flattening of Earth at its poles, did not need to know the value of G. Nor, for that matter, do NASA engineers who plot the paths of space probes with breathtaking precision.

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

Kepler and NGTS both do this by transits: If the orbit of the planet is oriented favorably, it will periodically pass in front of its star, causing the star to dip in brightness.

Ancient Greek mathematicians and astronomers were using geometry around the same time, but only to make calculations involving real, 3D space, such as using circles torepresent the orbits of planets around Earth.

That rotation dictates the future spin of the sun and the orbit of its planets.

From the theoretical work, scientists previously predicted a loss of one - tenth of a percent of the Sun's mass over 10 billion years; that's enough to reduce the star's gravitational pull and allow the orbits of the planets to spread by about half an inch, or 1.5 centimeters, per year per AU (an AU, or astronomical unit, is the distance between Earth and the Sun: about 93 million miles).

Like the waistband of a couch potato in midlife, the orbits of planets in our solar system are expanding.

Even some «simple» motions, like the rotation of a sphere or orbit of a planet, are nonuniform, as they constantly change direction and are therefore accelerating.

Einstein's theory explained a famous observation that Newtonian gravity could not: a subtlety in the orbit of the planet Mercury.

New research supports the hypothesis: Scientists studied the sound waves emitted by the stormy surfaces of 102 stars to estimate their radii and in turn judge the sizes and orbits of their planets.

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).

Scientists using NASA's Kepler space telescope identified a regular pattern in the orbits of the planets in the TRAPP... read more

Unfortunately, current estimates of the masses and orbits of Stars A and B — whose large margins of errors result in significant uncertainty — suggest that the orbit of a planet in the habitable zone of Star A could be disrupted.