Sentences with phrase «planets tug»

The way the planets tug at each other, the way the skin of the Earth moves, the way those motions affect climate and the evolution of life and intelligence, they all combined to give us the means to turn the mud of those river deltas into the first civilizations.

Astronomers spotted variations of just a few microseconds in the timing of these pulses, revealing that at least two small planets tug the pulsar back and forth as they orbit.

The two planets tug on each other, slightly changing the times that they transit their star.

Such instruments don't actually watch stars jiggle in the sky; instead they precisely measure the color of the star's light, which becomes bluer or redder as a planet tugs its star closer to or farther from Earth, similar to the Doppler shift that changes the pitch of an ambulance's siren as it approaches and speeds past.

These telescopes rely on detecting any Doppler shifting of the parent star caused by an orbiting planet tugging it this way and that, but this method is vulnerable to interference from eruptions on the star's surface and other distractions.

For this, TESS is relying on follow - up studies by ground - based telescopes, which can watch for tiny periodic Doppler shifts in the frequency of a star's light caused by an orbiting planet tugging on it.

As a world circles its sun, the planet tugs back and forth on it.

Not exact matches

Here, tugged and flexed by the planet's huge gravitational pull, as well as that of the more distant moons Europa and Ganymede, friction keeps Io piping hot.

Known as the Doppler method, it measures the gravitational tug exerted on a star by a planet — a planet that could not be seen directly because it would be lost in the glare of its star.

The innermost region of the Earth's outer core periodically flows faster or slower, and this action «tugs» at the planet's magnetic field, says Gillet.

Our planet could be tugging on the core of Venus, exerting control over its spin.

That rotation is mainly due to gravitational tugs from the other planets.

To find smaller planets, which exert barely perceptible tugs on their parent stars, astronomers are developing instruments to detect ever - tinier motions.

A star tugged by an orbiting planet will wobble slightly, which can be detected as a regular shift in the star's color corresponding to the time the planet requires to complete an orbit.

Astronomers like Marcy watch a star to see if it waltzes back and forth, indicating the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet.

Mikko Tuomi, of the University of Hertfordshire in England, and his colleagues examined data taken by telescopes in Chile, Hawaii and Australia that looks for wobbles in a star's movement that could be due to planets» gravitational tug.

Most planet hunters watch for wobbles in the light from stars, which arise from the back - and - forth gravitational tugs of unseen companions.

The several dozen detected so far have betrayed themselves by tugging their parent stars back and forth, creating a small, oscillating signal in the starlight — a technique sensitive only to massive, Jupiter - like planets.

Due to gravitational effects in the solar system, such as the tug of other planets, Mercury's oval - shaped path around the sun slowly turns, or precesses.

They use ground telescopes to look for the gravitational tug the planet would make on its star.

The gravitational tug - of - war between a star and its orbiting planets means that the worlds must be spaced at particular distances or else their orbits become unstable.

A close - in planet will have a stronger gravitational tug on its star, making it easier to detect the star's wobble.

For now, astronomers have yet to actually see this new planet — instead, they have simply measured how its to and fro orbital tugging causes Proxima Centauri to wobble back and forth in the sky.

For starters, measurements of Jupiter's gravity, determined from the tug of the planet on the spacecraft, suggest that the planet doesn't have a solid, compact core, Bolton and colleagues report in one of the new papers.

The two main methods — measuring the wobble of stars caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet and measuring the periodic dimming of a star as a planet passes in front — both favor big planets in close orbits.

As Phobos gets closer to the planet, the tugs are enough to actually pull the moon apart, the scientists say.

The planet — Proxima b — was discovered by astronomers who spent years looking for signs of the tiny gravitational tug exerted by a planet on its star, after spotting hints of such disruption in 2013.

Vogt's group, led by Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley, has already detected more than 100 planets this way, but the tugs produced by small, Earth - like worlds are particularly elusive.

The sun and moon tug on the planet, while the drift of continents, changes in ocean currents, and the rebounding of the crust since the retreat of ice age glaciers all shift mass around, altering Earth's moment of inertia and therefore its spin.

Adjust the sail's trim and you could travel almost anywhere in the Solar System — without heavy rocket propellants or a helpful gravitational tug from a nearby planet.

Huge rocket engines allowed the designers to ignore any gravitational effects more subtle than the tug of the planet they were leaving and that of the planet they were headed to.

The gravity of the other giant planets also tugs on Uranus, so this must be taken into account.

Kepler - 76b Dubbed «Einstein's planet,» researchers found this hot Jupiter in May using a technique based on the special theory of relativity: The gravitational tug of the exoplanet upon its star produces minor stellar brightening and shape - distorting effects.

Those daredevil moves let astronomers measure the difference in the gravitational tug the probe experienced from Saturn alone and from the rings and the planet together.

Ground - based telescopes will measure the gravitational tug of a planet on its host star to learn the planet's density, which is a clue to its composition.

The planet's swooping flybys create tidal waves on the host star, which combine with the gravitational tug of its companion star to pull on the planet in unpredictable ways.

To catalog it, the planet - finding astronomers added a lowercase b, after other classification schemes that deem the star itself A. Astronomers used the «wobble» method to detect 51 Pegasi b, in which the planet's gravitational tug alters its star's light.

The giveaway is a slight but regular slowing and speeding of the star along the line of sight as it's tugged by the planet's gravity.

Using a new computer technique that accounts for the planets» gravitational tugs on each other, astronomer Simon Grimm of the University of Bern in Switzerland and his colleagues calculated the seven planets» masses with five to eight times better precision than before.

The rapid rate of discovery of exoplanets can be attributed to the maturity of Doppler spectroscopy, by which astronomers measure a planet's gravitational tug on its host star, and by a technique involving «transiting» planets — looking for planets that move between their host stars and Earth, the method used by Mandushev to find TrES - 4.

But smaller planets have less of a gravitational tug, so finding such worlds in this way is more difficult.

The two methods of detecting extrasolar planets, nicknamed «wobble and blink,» involve plotting tiny shifts in a star's motion caused by the gravitational tug of its orbiting planets, and catching the slight dimming in a star's light that occurs whenever a planet passes between the star and an observer's telescope.

But Batygin says that galactic gravitational tugging is an inefficient process and that the Planet Nine explanation remains a less convoluted way of achieving the same result.

Earth's oceans and rivers, pushed by wind and tugged by the moon and sun, ebb and flow over more than 70 percent of the planet, but only recently have researchers and scientists developed the materials and methods to finally harness some of that kinetic energy.

HARPS is an instrument that measures the wobble caused by a planet's gravitational tug on its host star, so it can be used to estimate planetary mass.

They then calculated the size, position and mass of K2 - 229b by measuring the radial velocity of the star, and finding out how much the starlight «wobbles» during orbit, due to the gravitational tug from the planet, which changes depending on the planet's size.

Long before Star Trek's Mr. Spock (inset), many astronomers during the 19th and early 20th centuries thought a planet named Vulcan circled the sun inside the orbit of Mercury (shown transiting the sun, main image) and tugged on the latter, accounting for peculiarities in Mercury's motion.

Update on 16 September 2009: After observing the host star for 70 hours to measure how it wobbled in response to tugs from orbiting planets, astronomers have pinned down the mass of COROT - Exo - 7b.

To do that, researchers must search for the subtle wobbles the orbiting planet induces in its host star, a difficult task since the star's own roiling activity can mask the subtle gravitational tugs of a lightweight planet.

If space scientists hoping to send manned missions to distant planets were given one wish, many would ask for a convenient source of water outside the tug of Earth's gravity.