by admins | Jul 7, 2016 | EOS Blog
The solar system formed when an enormous cloud of gas and dust began to collapse and rotate. As it spun faster and faster, it formed a disk which helped feed into forming the young sun in the center of it all. From this disk, small particles of dust started sticking...
by apai | Jul 4, 2016 | EOS Blog
From the DistantEarths blog of Daniel Apai After two hours of hike up on a rocky trail in the Italian Alps, finally I stand at an elevation just above 2,500 meters, staring at a breathtaking and unique mountain range, the Dolomites, that holds an exciting clue to the...
by Kevin Wagner | Jul 1, 2016 | EOS Blog
We know of a lot of exoplanets. Most, though, we know of only by indirect means – typically via the planet occulting some of the starlight during an eclipse or changing the star’s velocity due to the planet’s own gravity. As of today (June 29, 2016) the exoplanet...
by admins | Jun 22, 2016 | EOS Blog
The planets of our solar system formed out of a swirling disk of gas and dust billions of years ago. The material that accreted to become the Earth lacked water and organic material because it formed at a distance that was too close to the sun for such...
by apai | Jun 16, 2016 | EOS Blog
By Daniel Apai Includes interview with Nick Siegler and Shawn Domagal-Goldman Over the weekend, at the Hilton on the San Diego Bay, a small group met to speak about the present and future of NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration program. To someone not in the field of...
by admins | Jun 8, 2016 | EOS Blog
Just before 4 a.m. on June 2, Arizona’s night sky seemed to momentarily catch fire. A meteor, about 5-feet across, burned through the atmosphere at 40,200 mph, according to NASA estimates. The small debris that reached the Earth’s surface are called meteorites, and...
by apai | Mar 29, 2016 | EOS Blog
The Sun’s planetary system, like the many other systems discovered in the last 2 decades, formed out of a protoplanetary disk. These disks are a natural by-product of star formation (almost every young star has one) and consist of a lot of gas (mostly hydrogen) and a...
by admins | Feb 18, 2016 | EOS Blog
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have measured the rotation rate of an extreme exoplanet by observing the varied brightness in its atmosphere. This is the first measurement of the rotation of a massive exoplanet using direct imaging. “The...
by apai | Feb 17, 2016 | EOS Blog
The curious case of KIC 8462852 by Theodora Karalidi Discovering the first planet, other than our Earth, that hosts life is one of the holy grails of astronomy. This is a difficult task since planets that could host life are pretty small compared to their...
by apai | Feb 12, 2016 | EOS Blog
Exoplanets around Red Dwarf Stars by Gijs Mulders Since the discovery in 1995 of the first exoplanet over two-thousand exoplanets have been discovered. Most exoplanets, such as those discovered by the Kepler spacecraft, orbit stars similar in mass to the sun....
