Alien Planet Smaller Than Earth May Be Lava World

In a surprise find, astronomers have discovered a planet possibly covered with oceans of magma “right around the corner.”

Even more exciting to scientists is its size: about the same as Mars’s, which would make the new world the closest known planet smaller than Earth.

Astronomers discovered the newfound alien planet, known as UCF-1.01, using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The diminutive world is just 33 light-years away, making it a near neighbor of Earth in the cosmic scheme of things.

Large planets are easier to find, but they’re generally gas giants that don’t have a rocky surface or an atmosphere like Earth’s. So scientists are scanning the skies for smaller worlds, which should be more likely to support life as we know it. Learn more here or here.

Solar system’s “enlarged” twin found

Astronomers have detected our “grotesque” twin: A planetary system arranged much like our own solar system.

Dubbed GJ676A, the system has two rocky planets orbiting close to its host star, and two gas giants orbiting far away. This means the system is arranged like our system—though in GJ676A, everything is much larger.

For instance, the smallest rocky planet in GJ676A is at least four times the mass of Earth, while the largest gas giant is five times the size of Jupiter.

Other multiple-planet systems have been discovered, such as HD10180, which has been called the richest exoplanetary find ever because of the seven to nine planets orbiting its host star.

But HD10180′s planets are all gas giants in relatively close orbits, while GJ676A has both rocky and gas planets like our own solar system. Learn more here.

Planet Found in Nearest Star System to Earth

Meeting the neighbours is normally easier than this. After years of searching, astronomers have finally spotted an Earth-mass planet in Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our own. Although the planet orbits too close to its parent star to host life, its discovery ups the chance of the system also hosting hospitable worlds.

Alpha Centauri looks like a single point of light from Earth, but it contains two bright stars that share a relatively close binary orbit, including one that looks a lot like our sun. This binary pair is in our cosmic backyard, about 4.3 light years away, spurring great interest in its ability to host planets.

If you’re hoping to visit the neighbours, though, you may want to pack a few books for the trip. Even with the current record holders for the world’s fastest spacecraft, the Helios sun probes, the journey to Alpha Centauri would take 19,000 years – and that’s assuming you travel at top speed for the whole journey, which is unlikely. Learn more here, here, here or here.

New moon discovered around Pluto

Pluto may not be a planet any more, but the discovery of its fifth moon means it can boast more satellites than the inner four planets combined. The finding could reignite the debate over the icy rock’s planetary status – or lack of. The find also suggests that the neighbourhood surrounding Pluto may be extremely dusty, which is bad news for those trying to a plot a safe course for spacecraft.

The new moon, which showed up as a tiny speck in images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is 10 to 25 kilometres across and has the temporary name of P5. It travels around Pluto in a 95,000-kilometre-wide orbit in the same plane as the other moons in the dwarf planet’s entourage – Charon, a 1200-kilometre-wide beast of a moon, and the more diminutive Nix and Hydra. Learn more here, here or here.

First planet with four suns found

Love to watch the sun set? You would be spoiled for choice on new-found planet PH1, the first world discovered in a four-star system. The unique planet circles a pair of stars that orbit each other, known as a binary, which are in turn orbited by another distant stellar pair. That gives PH1 two more suns than Tatooine, the fictional world that appears in the Star Wars saga.

PH1 is thought to be a gas giant with a radius around six times that of Earth, making it larger than Neptune. The planet orbits a pair of stars, one slightly larger than the sun and one smaller, roughly every 138 days. Further out, at a distance of around 100 billion kilometres, about 1000 times the gap between Earth and the sun, a second pair of stars orbits the first. Learn more here, here or here.

The First Photo From Space

The grainy black and white photo below was the very first photo from space. It was taken from an altitude of 105 kilometres (65 miles) by a 35 mm camera aboard a V-2 rocket on October 24, 1946.

The US military launched dozens of these V-2 rockets, captured from the Germans at the end of World War II, from the White Sands Missile Range. They wanted to learn about how to build their own rockets, but invited scientists to hitch along instruments to study the Earth’s upper atmosphere while they’re launching them anyway.

Before this, the highest photo of Earth ever taken was from the 1935 Explorer II balloon, which went up 22 kilometres (13.7 miles) (the Kármán line of 100 km or 62 miles is considered the boundary of outer space).

Learn more here.

1 billion hydrogen bombs’ worth of energy

When a solar flare erupted recently, scattering a billion atomic bombs’ worth of energy into space, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory was staring at the sun. They recorded this video, which NASA released.

The footage shows the flare in three different wavelengths of light.

The flare itself affected Earth directly for about an hour, causing problems on some radio frequencies.

A Tour of the Moon

Although the moon has remained largely unchanged during human history, our understanding of it and how it has evolved over time has evolved dramatically. Thanks to new measurements, we have new and unprecedented views of its surface, along with new insight into how it and other rocky planets in our solar system came to look the way they do. See some of the sights and learn more about the moon here …

Star life cycle

A star is a basically a big ball of gas in outer space, made mostly of hydrogen and a little bit of helium plus other elements. Stars spend about 90% of their lives fusing hydrogen to produce helium in nuclear reactions that emit heat and light.

When stars use up their supply of hydrogen, their outer layers expand and cool to form a red giant.

An average-size star, like our Sun, will blow away its outer atmospheres to form a planetary nebula. Their cores will remain behind and burn as a white dwarf until they cool down. Eventually, what will be left is a dark ball of matter known as a black dwarf.

If the star is massive enough, the collapse will trigger a violent explosion known as a supernova. If the remaining mass of the star is about 1.4 times that of our Sun, the core is unable to support itself and it will collapse further to become a neutron star. The matter inside the star will be compressed so tightly that its atoms are compacted into a dense shell of neutrons.

If the remaining mass of the star is more than about three times that of the Sun, it will collapse so completely that it will become a ball of matter with an intense gravity called a black hole.

Interestingly, it has been discovered that the outer crust of a neutron star is the strongest known material in the universe.

It seems that the crust of a neutron star can withstand a breaking strain up to ten billion times the pressure it would take to snap steel. In other words the crusts of neutron stars are 10 billion times stronger than steel! Read more here or here.

Huge Eruption on the Sun

This video by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captures a dramatic filament eruption on Aug. 31. Shown in the video in extreme ultraviolet light, the filament collapsed and exploded in spectacular fashion. The segment shown in red covers nearly 3 hours.