Word: planetful
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...easy to rush to condemn projects like these that seem counterintuitive to the very logic of the CDM. But the planet's atmosphere is perfectly happy with the tradeoff, says Derwent of the IETA, "just as much as it would be happy with the reduction of CO2 over a long period by the adoption of wind power in the place of coal." What matters is the absolute reduction in carbon emissions, regardless of the source, he says. "That's what markets do, they find the cheapest, most cost-efficient way of producing whatever it is that's demanded," says Derwent...
Astronomers have been finding planets around distant stars for more than a decade now, and the count is currently around 400. But the vast majority of these so-called exoplanets have been seen indirectly - by their gravitational effects or by the dimming caused when they pass in front of their parent stars. To really understand what a planet is like in detail, you have to see it directly, and that's incredibly hard to do with today's technology. (See pictures of the launch of NASA's Ares rocket...
...international team has done it. In May and August, using the powerful Subaru telescope in Hawaii, which is equipped with a new, state-of-the art planet detector, astronomers from Japan, the U.S. and Germany snapped pictures of an object they're calling GJ 758 B orbiting a sunlike star called GJ 758, about 50 light-years from Earth and between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. Scientists have narrowed their estimate of the mass of GJ 758 B to only about 10 to 40 times the mass of Jupiter. If it were more than 13 Jupiter masses, it would probably...
...could be a planet, though even if it isn't, there's plenty of reason to be excited. For one thing, astronomers got an image of it. The reason it's so tough to image a planet is its proximity to the blinding light of its star, which in this case is about a million times brighter. It would be like trying to see a candle burning next to the beam of a million-candlepower searchlight. Further, the blurring caused by Earth's atmosphere makes it tough to separate closely paired objects - such as a star and planet - even when...
...signing of the Antarctic Treaty dedicated the continent entirely to research, from which have come a slew of discoveries about our planet. British scientists discovered the gaping, man-made hole in the ozone layer in the 1980s, while studies of Antarctic ice have contributed to our understanding of climate change - and increased concerns over catastrophically high sea levels if the continent's thick glaciers were to melt. One of the most integral aspects of Antarctic scientific study remains, surprisingly, meteorites: the continent is a collecting ground for them, preserved well because they naturally bury into the ice for thousands...