Sentences with phrase «questions for astronomers»

The results, which were reproduced in March by a separate European team, raise serious questions for astronomers as well as physicists.

The discovery has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, but National Geographic reports that the origin of the dust is puzzling in its own right, raising still more questions for astronomers.

The next question for astronomers: Do the planets have atmospheres, and — if so — what are they made of?

This immediately resolved one open question for astronomers.

Not exact matches

Rees's eligibility for the prize originates from his looking at the «big questions» of the universe from an astronomer's stand - point.

«Ours isn't the only group looking for planets around young stars, and my hope is that astronomers can find enough of them to shed light on some of the nagging questions about planet formation,» Johns - Krull said.

This question has baffled astronomers for decades.

Kepler's bureaucratic history was even more tortured than Corot's, but the spacecraft is headed for launch on April 10, 2009, and astronomers are counting on it to settle the question of just how common Earths are — a result that will guide the whole future search for life in the universe.

Last week researchers reported they had traced a cosmic blast of radio waves back to its source for the first time — but now another team of fast - acting astronomers has called the result into question.

Never mind a delay of weeks or months — pity poor Thomas Hales, an American mathematician who has been waiting for five years to hear whether the mathematical community has accepted his 1998 proof of astronomer Johannes Kepler's 390 - year - old conjecture that the most efficient way to pack equal - size spheres (such as cannonballs on a ship, which is how the question arose) is to stack them in the familiar pyramid fashion that greengrocers use to stack oranges on a counter.

The question of how many rocky worlds exist in the galaxy has perplexed astronomers for the better part of a century.

This is very closely analogous to a question that astronomers have discussed for thousands of years, concerning the Earth and the sun.

To help settle the question, astronomer Donald Campbell of Cornell University and his team trained the world's most powerful radio observatory — the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico — on the moon's south pole, particularly its large Shackleton Crater, searching for signs of water like those detected on Mercury and elsewhere.

The day of NASA's announcement, Thursday 23 April, was an especially testing one for many astronomers because they had to respond off the cuff to questions from journalists, without knowing the details of the COBE findings.

«It clearly took a while after that primordial explosion for clouds of gas to congeal into a form dense enough for stars and quasars to ignite, and the Sky Survey is already prompting astronomers to question some of the assumptions about how that process unfolded [i.e, the big bang theory].»

The question had been a subject of raging debate among astronomers for more than a quarter of a century.

It will answer many of the questions at the forefront of astrophysics today and will pose new and unanticipated riddles for future generations of astronomers.

For this study, the scientists had one driving question, said UC Berkeley astronomer and lead author Erik Petigura: Among all these different types of planets, how common were the ones that were sized like Earth?