Word: planetsized
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Think it's hard counting the census here on Earth? Try it when you're keeping track of the population of the sky. There are more than 70 sextillion - or 70 thousand million million million - stars in the cosmos, and that doesn't include uncountable moons and asteroids and comets...
There was never much doubt that planets other than the known nine (or the known eight, now that Pluto has been demoted) existed, but it wasn't until 1995 that the first of these so-called exoplanets was discovered. The vast distance between stars makes a comparatively small body like...
Mayor himself was the one who spotted that first exotic world, and in the years since, he and other investigators have counted about 270 more. But land in the cosmic exurbs is decidedly inhospitable. Almost all of the newly discovered planets were huge, hot and gassy, Jupiter-like bodies lying...
Thanks to the evocatively named High-Accuracy Radial-Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), a telescope mounted atop La Scilla Mountain in Chile, Mayor and his team were able to detect a litter of new planets, some as small as four times the mass of Earth - tiny by exoplanet standards. One star...
For its part, the MoD has said in a statement it does not consider questions about life on other planets; it tracks the sightings "solely to establish whether U.K. airspace may have been compromised by hostile or unauthorized military activity." So why release the files now? A spokeswoman says the...