WASHINGTON, D.C. During a press conference last month, NASA released a slew of odd sound recordings and video from the Messenger probe just moments before it’s impact on Mercury. Scientists are working to decipher the meaning of the data, but some agree that the recordings sound like human voices crying out in agony. The Messenger probe had been orbiting Mercury […]
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There’s a controversy in planetary science — some researchers propose that the Solar System has a ninth planet with a distant orbit around the Sun. In search of a ninth planet has been on astronomers minds for some time. They suggest that there is a planet nine since some strange orbits have been found in our solar system. Researchers believe […]
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Some new thinking may have brought astronomers a step closer to solving the mystery of how our moon formed. Researchers have long believed that the moon was cleaved from a Mars-sized planet that collided with Earth some 4.5 billion years ago. Yet recent tests of lunar rock samples suggest that the moon’s chemical makeup is too similar to Earth’s to […]
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Scientists say there may be a ninth planet out past Pluto at 8 billion miles from the sun. Since its not within the gravitational pull of three of the big planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune it may go out as far as 200 billion miles away from the sun in the future. This giant planet may be 10 times […]
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Have we found Earth’s twin? For the first time, astronomers have identified a planet outside our solar system that is both Earth-size and orbits its star in the so-called Goldilocks zone, where temperatures may be “just right” for supporting liquid water—and, therefore, life. Researchers discovered the planet while reviewing data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which has spent the past […]
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Astronomers have discovered the largest rocky planet yet, and its existence has profound implications for our understanding of the early universe and the potential for extraterrestrial life. Kepler-10c, which was spotted by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, has a diameter of roughly 18,000 miles—more than twice that of Earth —prompting scientists to create a new class of planets, dubbed “mega-Earths.”The body’s […]
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An international team of astronomers has detected a colossal black hole that is 12 billion times more massive than the sun—so big that it is challenging accepted cosmological thinking. Scientists discovered the enormous celestial body, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, at the center of a brilliantly glowing quasar, a cloud of gas that gets superheated and gives off […]
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Astronomers have found that Tabby’s Star has been at it again – going through a dimming phase. Tabby’s star is located in the constellation Cygnus which is about 1600 light years away. Researchers have come up with the explanation that this star at one time ate a planet which is causing it to flicker. Some also think that its possibly […]
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It’s a little bit less certain that the inner planets— Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—will still be around to die that way. “There is a one percent chance the inner solar system will go dramatically unstable during the next five billion years,” says Laughlin. The problem is a weird long-distance connection between Jupiter and Mercury. When Jupiter’s closest approach to […]
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Astronomers have discovered two clouds of gas some 12 billion light-years away that appear to preserve the primordial conditions of the universe in the minutes after the big bang. The clouds contain just hydrogen and its isotope deuterium, making them “the first examples to fit precisely” into what scientists think the early universe was like, University of California astronomer Jason […]
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