Study: Pluto Should Be a Planet!
In 2006, members of the International Astronomical Union or the IAU, an organization recognized as the authority for naming celestial bodies, voted on a set of characteristics that define what makes a planet a planet. One of those traits required a planet had to “clear” its orbit; meaning it had to provide the greatest gravitational force in […]
Hubble Tracks Mysterious Storms on Neptune
When NASA’s Voyager 2 visited Neptune, in 1989, scientists noticed immense dark storms swirling in its atmosphere. Since then only the Hubble Space Telescope has had the ability to spot and track these mysterious storms. Hubble found a pair of these dark storms in the mid-1990s and then noticed they later had disappeared completely. The […]
Kepler Discovers More Exoplanets / Scientists Classify Types of Planets
NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler mission recently released what it calls the most comprehensive and detailed catalog of candidate exoplanets. Exoplanets or extrasolar planets are planetary bodies that exist outside of our solar system. The new and final Kepler catalog from data gathered from the spacecraft’s initial patch of sky view within the Cygnus constellation includes 219 […]
Hubble Spots Mysterious Vortex on Neptune
NASA says images gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope, a little over a month ago, confirm the existence of a mysterious dark vortex in Neptune’s atmosphere. While vortices on Neptune have been spotted several times before, dating back to the 1989 flyby of ‘Voyager 2’, this recent Hubble observation marks the first time the phenomenon […]
Learning More About Mysterious Planet 9
Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown at the California Institute of Technology generated a lot of excitement in the science world back in January when they announced that they had found evidence of a giant planet traveling in an odd, drawn-out orbit in the far reaches of the solar system. So far the new found planet, […]
Scientists Find Evidence of a Giant 9th Planet
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology – Caltech -are reporting that they have found evidence of a giant planet traveling in an odd and drawn out orbit in the far reaches of the solar system. If confirmed the newly found planet would be the solar system’s ninth planet. Pluto had that honor until it […]
New Maps Reveal Red Spot Changes and Odd New Features on Jupiter
Scientists have created two new maps of Jupiter with data and images gathered over a nearly 21-hour period on January 19, 2015 by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s high performance Wide Field Camera 3. The maps are a representation of two nearly continuous rotations of the Jovian planet. The maps and series of images will […]
Evidence of Water Vapor Found on Dwarf Planet Ceres
Scientists have found signs of water vapor on the dwarf planet known as Ceres. “This is the first time water vapor has been unequivocally detected on Ceres or any other object in the asteroid belt and provides proof that Ceres has an icy surface and an atmosphere,” said Michael Küppers of the European Space Agency. […]
New-found Planet Defies Scientific Theory
A newly-discovered planet outside of our solar system has scientists rethinking how planets form. The international research team said the new exoplanet, with the registration number HD 106906b, is not only huge, weighing 11 times Jupiter’s mass, but also orbits its sun from a distance of 650 au’s – astronomical units or 97,238,615,955 km. In […]