Word: planetsized
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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...
But a handful of theorists already had a better explanation at hand. The giant planets could have formed in a much more sensible location, like Jupiter did, and then migrated inward, establishing a stable orbit there. It all made sense, except for one tiny problem: this same model also suggested...
"It's a problem," admits Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, an astronomer at New York's American Museum of Natural History. Or, rather, it was a problem - but Mac Low and his collaborators may have solved it. In a paper recently submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, they say that the old...
It's that precision, plus the fact that Kepler is staring, unblinking and unceasingly, at 150,000 mostly sunlike stars in the Milky Way, that makes astronomers confident that Earths are in Kepler's future. As for any signs of life on those Earths, their detection will undoubtedly have to...
Still, Kepler has had some tantalizing news on the biology front too. While looking for planets, the probe has been taking note of the behavior of the stars themselves. Our sun is remarkably steady, without dramatic changes in warmth and brightness that might have prevented the emergence and evolution of...