One of the most ambitious missions in the history of space goes into high-risk mode on Monday when Europe rouses a comet-chasing probe from years of hibernation. "The most important alarm clock in the Solar System" will end the scout ...
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Astronomers have used ESO's HARPS planet hunter in Chile, along with other telescopes around the world, to discover three planets orbiting stars in the cluster Messier 67. Although more than one thousand planets outside the Solar System are ...
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The Kepler team today reports on four years of observations from the W. M. Keck Observatory targeting Kepler's exoplanet systems, announcing results this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington. These observations, ...
Tags: Kepler team, W.M.Keck Observatory, exoplanet systems, observations
An international team of astronomers has discovered a surprising new class of "hypervelocity stars" – solitary stars moving fast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way galaxy. The discovery of this new set of ...
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University of Hawaii at Manoa astronomer Regina Jorgenson has obtained the first image that shows the structure of a normal galaxy in the early universe. The results were presented at the winter American Astronomical Society meeting being ...
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Two new views from NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, showcase the telescope's talent for spying objects near and far. One image shows the energized remains of a dead star, a structure nicknamed the "Hand of God" after ...
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An object discovered by astrophysicists at the University of Toronto (U of T) nearly 500 light years away from the Sun may challenge traditional understandings about how planets and stars form. The object is located near and likely ...
Tags: brown dwarf, new object, star formation, young planet
Today the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) Collaboration announced that BOSS has measured the scale of the universe to an accuracy of one percent. This and future measures at this precision are the key to determining the ...
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Poring through data from a large sky survey, astronomers have found more than 100 small, dwarf galaxies with characteristics indicating that they harbor massive black holes feeding on surrounding gas. The discovery confounds a common ...
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Gemini Planet Imager's first light image of Beta Pictoris b, a planet orbiting the star Beta Pictoris. The star, Beta Pictoris, is blocked in this image by a mask so its light doesn't interfere with the light of the planet. In addition to ...
Tags: Gemini Planet Imager, image faint planets, exoplanet camera
An international team of astronomers using the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) has discovered a pulsar that is orbited by two white dwarf stars. Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that can be used like precision astronomical clocks. This ...
Galaxies can be remarkably dusty places and supernovas are thought to be a primary source of that dust, especially in the early Universe. Direct evidence of a supernova's dust-making capabilities, however, has been slim and cannot account ...
Tags: supernovas, dust-making, Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array
Earth may not have possessed the continents it does now if not for life, instead becoming a planet covered nearly entirely in ocean. If not for life, Earth may not have possessed the continents it does now, instead becoming a planet ...
Tags: planet, extraterrestrial life, alien worlds
An international team of astronomers has discovered the first Earth-mass planet that transits, or crosses in front of, its host star. KOI-314c is the lightest planet to have both its mass and physical size measured. Surprisingly, although ...
Tags: Earth-mass planet, KOI-314c, gaseous atmosphere, gas giants
The first of a set of unprecedented, super-deep views of the universe from an ambitious collaborative program called The Frontier Fields is being released today at the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C. ...
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