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Hot Topic
Deep Space
New Planets
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First Light from Faraway Planet
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| Topic: New Planets |
04/30/05 |
| An international team of astronomers reports today confirmation of the discovery of a giant planet, approximately five times the mass of Jupiter, that is gravitationally bound to a young brown dwarf. This topic has spawned a year long discussion on the nature of this object. |
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Questioning Terrestrial Planets
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| Topic: New Planets |
04/27/05 |
| Looking for biosignatures that would be characteristic of intelligent life is not always about extrapolating the most intelligent things a species might be doing. For instance, would one look for pollutants in the atmosphere? |
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Crunching the Numbers
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| Topic: New Planets |
04/18/05 |
| Maggie Turnbull, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution, has spent many years thinking about what kind of stars could harbor Earth-like planets. Her database of potentially habitable star systems could be used as a target list for NASA's forthcoming Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission. |
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Explaining Eccentricities
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| Topic: New Planets |
04/15/05 |
| When astronomers discovered that the planets around Upsilon Andromedae had very strange orbits, they weren't sure what could have caused it. Researchers from Berkeley and Northwestern have developed a simulation that shows how an additional planet could have given the other planets the orbital kick. |
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The Wolf: New Planet or Brown Dwarf Star?
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| Topic: New Planets |
04/12/05 |
| Located in the Lupus I (the Wolf) cloud, a region of star formation about 400 or 500 light-years away, a young T-Tauri star may be either a new planet or a failed star. Although the borderline between the two is still a matter of debate, one way to distinguish between the two is by their mass. |
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Surfing the Wavelengths
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| Topic: New Planets |
04/11/05 |
| Maggie Turnbull, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution, has spent many years thinking about what kind of stars could harbor Earth-like planets. Her database of potentially habitable star systems could be used as a target list for NASA's upcoming Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission. |
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Dying Stars, Melting Planets
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| Topic: New Planets |
03/29/05 |
| Dying stars may warm previously frozen worlds around them to the point where liquid water temperature exists long enough for life to form, according to a new analysis of the evolution of habitable zones around stars by an international team of astronomers. |
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First Light from Extrasolar Planets
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| Topic: New Planets |
03/22/05 |
| Most of the 150 known extrasolar planets are discovered and studied through techniques such as finding the telltale wobble of a star tugged by an orbiting planet, or the blink of a star as a planet passes in front of it. Now for the first time scientists have observed an extrasolar planet through the light it emits in the infrared. |
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Twinkle, Twinkle...Large Planet
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| Topic: New Planets |
03/08/05 |
| An international team of astronomers has accurately determined the radius and mass of the smallest core-burning star known until now. It is the first time that direct observations demonstrate that stars less massive than 1/10th of the solar mass are of nearly the same size as giant planets. |
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A Dozen New Planets Found
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| Topic: New Planets |
02/17/05 |
| The past four weeks have been heady ones in the planet-finding world: Three teams of astronomers announced the discovery of 12 previously unknown worlds, bringing the total count of planets outside our solar system to 145. |
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