Sentences with phrase «terrestrial planets orbiting»

Other terrestrial planets orbiting other stars should behave similarly, although the transition point between climate states may differ for stars that are brighter and dimmer than the sun.

Kepler launched in March to seek out worlds like our own — terrestrial planets orbiting sunlike stars at a temperate distance where liquid water could persist.

Not exact matches

NASA's Messenger spacecraft orbited Mercury from 2011 to 2015 and revealed a battered, scarred landscape made of different material than the rest of the terrestrial planets (SN: 11/19/11, p. 17).

These exoplanets — terrestrial and larger planets orbiting other stars — are detected with help from NASA's Kepler spacecraft, which launched in March 2009 with the goal of using the transit technique to detect exoplanets.

Based on humankind's admittedly limited experience, habitability seems to mean a small world — a terrestrial planet rather than a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn — orbiting its star at a comfortable «Goldilocks» distance that allows water to persist in liquid form.

So has the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or Stereo, a pair of satellites tagging along with Earth in its orbit around the sun — one just ahead of our planet, one just behind.

«This supports the idea that the star originally had a full complement of terrestrial planets, and probably gas giant planets, orbiting it — a complex system similar to our own.»

The failure, thus far, to find large substellar objects like brown dwarfs or a Jupiter - or Saturn - class planet in a «torch» orbit (closer han the Mercury to Sun distance) around 107 Piscium — with even the highly sensitive radial - velocity technique of Geoffrey W. Marcy and R. Paul Butler — bodes well for the possibility of Earth - type terrestrial planets around this star (Cumming et al, 1999).

The team's computer simulations indicate that the planet's orbit isn't face - on, which constrains its mass to one to 2.7 times that of Earth, implying that it has a terrestrial composition but its tidally locked day side should be hot enough to melt lead (Ken Croswell, Science Magazine, March 11, 2015).

Stars A and B were selected as two of the top 100 target stars for NASA's indefinitely postponed Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) to directly image small rocky planets in Earth - type habitable orbits.

We show that a giant planet on a sufficiently eccentric orbit can excite extreme eccentricity oscillations in the orbit of a habitable terrestrial planet.

It's possible that instead of forming as terrestrial planets in place, rocky planets orbiting their stars every few days formed further out beyond the snow line where they accreted large amounts of gas before migrating and being stripped of their atmospheres.

NASA is particularly interested in identifying planets one half to twice the size of Earth — terrestrial planets rather than the gas or ice giants or hot - super-Earths in short period orbits that evidence suggests exist in large numbers — especially ones that are located in the habitable zone of their stars.

There is evidence that Earth has gone through at least one globally frozen, «snowball» state in the last billion years, which i... ▽ More Although the Earth's orbit is never far from circular, terrestrial planets around other stars might experience substantial changes in eccentricity that could lead to climate changes, including possible «phase transitions» such as the snowball transition (or its opposite).

We focus on planets and moons orbiting stars bright enough for future atmosphere follow - up, especially Mini - to Super-Earths (rocky terrestrial planets of 0.5 - 10 Earth masses) orbiting in the «Habitable Zones» around their host stars.

at this scale, the orbits of the inner terrestrial planets are very small, and thus can not be seen as clearly as the orbits of the outer planets.

The failure, thus far, to find large substellar objects like brown dwarfs or a Jupiter - or Saturn - class planet in a «torch» orbit (closer than the Mercury to Sun distance) around Xi Boötis A — with even the highly sensitive radial - velocity methods of Geoffrey W. Marcy and R. Paul Butler — bodes well for the possibility of Earth - type terrestrial planets around this star (Cumming et al, 1999).