Word: planeters
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When astronomers began spotting planets around distant stars in the mid-1990s, they were baffled. Many of these early discoveries involved worlds as big as Jupiter or even bigger - but they orbited their stars so tightly that their "years" were just days long. Nobody could imagine how a Jupiter or anything like it could form in such a hostile location, where the radiation of the parent star would have pushed the light gas - which makes up most of such a planet's mass - out to the farthest reaches of the solar system before it could ever coalesce...
Anti-whaling activists accused a Japanese harpoon ship of intentionally ramming and sinking their high-tech boat, the Ady Gil, during what has become an annual confrontation between whale hunters and activists in the southern seas. One crew member, a cameraman hired by Animal Planet for the reality TV show Whale Wars, sustained minor injuries in the incident, but Australia's Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, said after the incident occurred on Wednesday that it was "miraculous that lives were not lost...
Borucki heads the Kepler Mission, a space-based planet-hunting telescope that went into solar orbit last spring to search for distant worlds like our own. While the first five worlds detected are nothing like Earth, nobody expected them to be. What's important, Borucki declared, was that "these five new exoplanets come from the first six weeks of data." An additional eight months of Kepler observations are already in the can and awaiting analysis, meaning many more planets are undoubtedly lurking on hard drives at the NASA Ames Research Center in California, where Kepler is headquartered. "We're going...
...dimming caused by an Earth-size planet would be easy enough for Kepler to notice too, and such smaller planets most likely exist. But to be in an orbit where the temperature is balmy enough to support life, the planet has to be about as far from its star as Earth is from the sun, making its orbit about a year long; and that, by definition, requires at least two years after the initial detection. "Have patience," said Jon Morse, director of NASA's astronomy and physics division, to the assembled crowd. (See pictures of Earth from space...
...many scientists, just watching the data come in is a pleasure all by itself. "Kepler is working so amazingly well," says Berkeley's Geoff Marcy, a champion planet hunter in his own right and a member of the Kepler science team, "that the light curves [that is, the dips in light caused by transiting planets] look like they come from a textbook, not a real instrument...