Friday, February 28, 2014

ScienceDaily: Stars News

ScienceDaily: Stars News


NASA's Kepler mission announces a planet bonanza, 715 new worlds

Posted: 26 Feb 2014 12:33 PM PST

NASA's Kepler mission announced Wednesday the discovery of 715 new planets. These newly-verified worlds orbit 305 stars, revealing multiple-planet systems much like our own solar system. Nearly 95 percent of these planets are smaller than Neptune, which is almost four times the size of Earth. This discovery marks a significant increase in the number of known small-sized planets more akin to Earth than previously identified exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system.

How small cosmic seeds grow into big stars

Posted: 26 Feb 2014 04:49 AM PST

New images provide the most detailed view yet of stellar nurseries within the Snake nebula. These images offer new insights into how cosmic seeds can grow into massive stars. Stretching across almost 100 light-years of space, the Snake nebula is located about 11,700 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus.

'Super-Earths' may be dead worlds: Being in habitable zone is not enough

Posted: 26 Feb 2014 04:49 AM PST

In the last 20 years the search for Earth-like planets around other stars has accelerated, with the launch of missions like the Kepler space telescope. Using these and observatories on the ground, astronomers have found numerous worlds that at first sight have similarities with the Earth. A few of these are even in the 'habitable zone' where the temperature is just right for water to be in liquid form and so are prime targets in the search for life elsewhere in the universe. New results suggest that for some of the recently discovered super-Earths, such as Kepler-62e and -62f, being in the habitable zone is not enough to make them habitats.

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