Tag Archives: planet

While the official date for Earth Day is April 22, Google has posted its 2017 Earth Day Google doodle a day early. To celebrate this year’s Earth Day, the Google doodle team has created a slide show of animated images reminiscent of a children’s book. Designed by doodler Sophie Diao, …

With every new exoplanet discovery, we seem to get that much closer to finding evidence of extraterrestrial life. A new exoplanet identified in orbit of a nearby star could be the best place to look yet. Astronomers have confirmed a star 39 light-years away plays host to a planet that …

If you’re looking for an Earth-like planet with an atmosphere, you need only go outside. Alternatively, you could travel some 39 light-years toward the constellation Vela. That’s where astronomers have discovered an exoplanet called GJ 1132b, which appears to have an atmosphere. While it might not be particularly hospitable to …

Kirby Runyon, a PhD candidate in planetary geology at the Johns Hopkins University, and co-authors are proposing to rewrite the textbooks to say that the Solar System has 110 planets. Every discovered planet in the Solar System under 10,000 km in diameter, to scale. The geophysical definition of planet includes …

It is stars that affect planets, for the most part, and not the other way around. But researchers now claim to have found the first example of stellar pulsations caused by an exoplanet. The star HAT-P-2 is emitting visible pulses that seem to be a result of a particularly large …

Northwest Africa (NWA) 7635 — a Martian meteorite found in Algeria in 2012 — has given planetary researchers information about volcanic activity on the Red Planet, and it’s not like anything we’ve ever seen on Earth. Hand sample images of the cut NWA 7635 stone and a representative backscattered electron …

New observations from NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) show that Ceres does not appear to have the carbon-rich surface composition that space- and ground-based telescopes previously indicated. The results were published in the Astronomical Journal on Jan. 16, 2017. Cross section of Ceres showing the surface layers that …

If you’ve spent time following companies like Orbital Insight and Descartes Labs, you might assume the geospatial analytics race has been won. But TellusLabs thinks, on the contrary, that the table hasn’t even started to cool. Armed with $3 million in new seed funding from IA Ventures, the Boston-based startup wants its …

Ceres presented mysteries before the NASA Dawn spacecraft even reached it. Long range images of Ceres taken by the probe revealed unexpected points of light on the surface. There was speculation this could be ice, but now the consensus is leaning toward salt. That doesn’t mean Ceres is lacking in …

Watch David Attenborough’s epic sign off as the acclaimed Planet Earth II came to its conclusion on Sunday night on BBC One. See more from Planet Earth II here.