Sentences with phrase «probably rocky planets»

Among the new additions to the catalog are several small, probably rocky planets that reside in the habitable zone — at a distance from their star that allows liquid water to exist on their surface.

They say that Kepler - 452b, which is about 60 percent bigger in diameter than earth and is part of a solar system 1,400 light years from Earth, is probably a rocky planet, similar to ours.

Owing to its extremely small size, similar to that of Earth's Moon, and highly irradiated surface, Kepler - 37b is probably a rocky planet with no atmosphere or water, similar to Mercury.

Not exact matches

Of the trillions of stars (most of which probably have some rocky planets orbiting it from the leftovers of its formation) there are probably plenty of planets orbiting their stars at the same distance as ours with varying conditions, ours just happened to be right for humans to evolve and be here today.

«In order to figure out whether these planets, the most common in our galaxy, are mostly rocky and potentially habitable or mostly gaseous and probably not very habitable, we have to perform these measurements to learn where exactly this transition occurs and how broad it is.»

I understand that they have determined that all of these planets are probably rocky.

We've been looking and looking for solid rocky planets like Earth ever since, and we've found a lot of them but there's a new announcement that is probably the most exciting one we've heard yet.

Until then, all the known exoplanets (planets circling other stars) were big and gaseous, but this one is probably made of rocky materials — the first world like ours found in an alien solar system.

«There's a good chance it could be rocky,» Borucki says, although he adds that the planet would probably contain huge amounts of compressed ice, too.

What little rocky material occurs in today's ring system probably is the debris of collisions between icy ring particles and asteroids and comets swept up by the planet's huge gravitational field, says Canup.

Although the planet is probably rocky like Earth, it lies so close to Alpha Centauri B that its surface is surely molten.

The researchers also had to determine whether the planets were the right size: If they were giant, they'd probably be gaseous, like Jupiter or Saturn, and not rocky like Earth.

The interior of Venus is probably very similar to that of Earth, with an iron core about 6,000 km (3,700 miles) in diameter radius and a molten rocky mantle comprising most of the planet.

Exceptions include a number of planets discovered orbiting burned - out star remnants called pulsars, such as PSR B1257 +12, [14] the planets orbiting the stars Mu Arae, 55 Cancri and GJ 436, which are approximately Neptune - sized, and a planet orbiting Gliese 876 that is estimated to be about six to eight times as massive as Earth and is probably rocky in composition.

Using a lower bound of two Earth - masses, astronomers have been increasingly relying on the label «super-Earth» for extra-Solar planets that are probably too large to be very «Earth - like,» despite their search for planets with characteristics closer to the Solar System's four rocky inner, «terrrestrial» planets than gas giants.

As a result, Vesta «differentiated» into a relatively dense metallic core (of approximately 136 miles or 220 kilometers across), lighter mantle, and crust, like the rocky inner planets, many large planetary satellite's like the Earth's Moon, and probably most, if not all, of the newly named «dwarf planets» like Ceres.