Astronomers May Have Spotted A Moon Orbiting an Extrasolar Planet
According to NASA, more than 1,000 extrasolar planets have been confirmed in recent years. There are also thousands more potential planets beyond our solar system that are waiting to be discovered. Now, an international group of astronomers think they may have found the first exomoon, or moon circling an exoplanet, some 1,800 light years away […]
NASA, ESA Ramp Up Planet-hunting Missions
NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler mission stirred up excitement this week when mission officials announced they’d hit the proverbial jackpot – discovering and confirming a record 715 new planets orbiting 305 stars. Nearly 95 percent of these newly found planets are smaller than Neptune, but four are about 2.5 times bigger than Earth and are located within […]
Volunteers, Home Computers Help Identify Gamma Ray Pulsars
A network of 40,000 volunteer researchers, along with 200,000 personal computers worldwide, has helped scientists from the Max Planck Institutes for Gravitational Physics and Radio Astronomy – the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI) discover four gamma-ray pulsars. Pulsars are compact and rapidly rotating neutron stars which are the remains of stars that have exploded. The discoveries […]
Hubble Spots Farthest Supernova Yet
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has found the farthest known supernova discovered to date. Nicknamed “SN Wilson,” after the American President Woodrow Wilson, scientists say supernova UDS10Wil, exploded more than 10 billion years ago, about 3.77 billion years after the Big Bang. SN Wilson is in a special class of exploding stars known as “Type Ia […]
Third Radiation Belt Discovered Around Earth
NASA scientists have discovered a third radiation belt briefly surrounded Earth for about a month before being blasted away by an interplanetary shock wave from the sun. Experts had long thought there were only two distinct regions of trapped radiation. But the third ring was spotted by twin Van Allen radiation probes NASA launched in 2012 […]
Research Casts Doubt on NASA ‘New Life Form’ Claim
New research throws scientific cold water on NASA’s purported 2010 discovery of a new form of life which lives and thrives off of arsenic rather than phosphorus, an important element that supports life as we know it. In December 2010, NASA announced its researchers, led by Dr. Felisa Wolfe-Simon, had found bacteria in California’s Mono […]