The movements of more than 300 000 stars surveyed by ESA's Gaia satellite reveal that rare close encounters with our sun might disturb the cloud of comets at the far reaches of our solar system, sending some towards Earth ...
Astronomy
Aug 31, 2017
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Ever since enthusiasm started growing over the possibility that there could be a ninth major planet orbiting the sun beyond Neptune, astronomers have been busy hunting it. One group is investigating four new moving objects ...
Astronomy
Apr 19, 2017
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Since its launch five years ago, there have been three forces tugging at NASA's Juno spacecraft as it speeds through the solar system. The sun, Earth and Jupiter have all been influential—a gravitational trifecta of sorts. ...
Space Exploration
May 30, 2016
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(Phys.org) —A pair of astronomers with the University of California has demonstrated via computer simulation that the reason some hot or warm Jupiter exoplanets orbit their star so closely is because they are pulled there ...
(Phys.org) —Saturn's moon Pan, named for the Greek god of shepherds, rules over quite a different domain: the Encke gap in Saturn's rings.
Space Exploration
Apr 21, 2014
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In the time it takes you to complete a single workday, or get a full night's sleep, a small fireball of a planet 700 light-years away has already completed an entire year.
Astronomy
Aug 19, 2013
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One of the biggest mysteries in contemporary particle physics and cosmology is why dark energy, which is observed to dominate energy density of the universe, has a remarkably small (but not zero) value. This value is so small, ...
General Physics
Aug 9, 2013
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Saturn's F ring is certainly a curious structure. Orbiting the giant planet 82,000 kilometers above its equatorial cloud tops, the F ring is a ropy, twisted belt of bright ice particles anywhere from 30-500 km wide. It can ...
Space Exploration
Jun 3, 2013
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Observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have revealed some of the most distant and actively star forming galaxies in our universe, thanks to an effect called gravitational lensing, which ...
Astronomy
May 30, 2013
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NASA missed the chance to visit Halley's Comet in 1986 when the famed sentinel swung close to Earth, as it does every 76 years. Luckily for history, the Europeans flew Giotto past it on this day (March 13) in 1986, and some ...
Space Exploration
Mar 14, 2013
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