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News tagged with giant star

Planets around stars are the rule rather than the exception

There are more exoplanets further away from their parent stars than originally thought, according to new astrophysics research.

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jan 12, 2012 | popularity 4.4 / 5 (9) | comments 4 | with audio podcast

New class of planetary systems: Astronomers find two new planets orbiting double suns

Using data from NASA’s Kepler Mission, astronomers announced the discovery of two new transiting “circumbinary” planet systems -- planets that orbit two stars. This work establishes that such ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jan 11, 2012 | popularity 5 / 5 (10) | comments 12 | with audio podcast

Image: Active Galaxy Centaurus A

(PhysOrg.com) -- Resembling looming rain clouds on a stormy day, dark lanes of dust crisscross the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A.

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jan 04, 2012 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (4) | comments 0

Can Earth-sized planets survive their star's expansion?

Two Earth-sized planets have been discovered circling a dying star that has passed the red giant stage. Because of their close orbits, the planets must have been engulfed by their star while it swelled up ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Dec 21, 2011 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (12) | comments 18 | with audio podcast

Caltech-led team of astronomers finds 18 new planets

Discoveries of new planets just keep coming and coming. Take, for instance, the 18 recently found by a team of astronomers led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Dec 02, 2011 | popularity 3.9 / 5 (15) | comments 6 | with audio podcast

A star with spiral arms

For more than four hundred years, astronomers have used telescopes to study the great variety of stars in our galaxy. Millions of distant suns have been catalogued. There are dwarf stars, giant stars, dead ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Nov 01, 2011 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (11) | comments 17 | with audio podcast

Three new planets and a mystery object discovered outside our solar system

(PhysOrg.com) -- Three planets -- each orbiting its own giant, dying star -- have been discovered by an international research team led by a Penn State University astronomer. Using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, astronomers ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Oct 27, 2011 | popularity 4.3 / 5 (12) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

Nearby planet-forming disk holds water for thousands of oceans

(PhysOrg.com) -- For the first time, astronomers have detected around a burgeoning solar system a sprawling cloud of water vapor that's cold enough to form comets, which could eventually deliver oceans to ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Oct 21, 2011 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (13) | comments 35 | with audio podcast

Blue stragglers: Astronomers discover how mysterious stars stay so young

(PhysOrg.com) -- Mysterious "blue stragglers" are old stars that appear younger than they should be: they burn hot and blue. Several theories have attempted to explain why they don't show their age, but, until ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Oct 19, 2011 | popularity 4.3 / 5 (3) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

Giant star expels multiple dust shells

An international team led by Leen Decin, a K.U. Leuven (Belgium) astronomer, has discovered a series of dust shells in the vicinity of CW Leonis, a dying giant star. The star expelled the shells in the course of its long ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Sep 28, 2011 | popularity 4.3 / 5 (4) | comments 2

Rocky planets could have been born as gas giants

When NASA announced the discovery of over 1,200 new potential planets spotted by the Kepler Space Telescope, almost a quarter of them were thought to be Super-Earths. Now, new research suggests that these ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Sep 16, 2011 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (11) | comments 38

Alien world is blacker than coal

(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers have discovered the darkest known exoplanet - a distant, Jupiter-sized gas giant known as TrES-2b. Their measurements show that TrES-2b reflects less than one percent of the sunlight ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Aug 11, 2011 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (14) | comments 21 | with audio podcast

Exoplanet aurora: An out-of-this-world sight

Earth's aurorae, or Northern and Southern Lights, provide a dazzling light show to people living in the polar regions. Shimmering curtains of green and red undulate across the sky like a living thing. New ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jul 21, 2011 | popularity 4.4 / 5 (5) | comments 3 | with audio podcast

Twisted tale of our galaxy's ring

(PhysOrg.com) -- New observations from the Herschel Space Observatory show a bizarre, twisted ring of dense gas at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Only a few portions of the ring, which stretches across ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jul 20, 2011 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (11) | comments 17 | with audio podcast

Building galaxies

(PhysOrg.com) -- Galaxies frequently collide with one another. Our own Milky Way galaxy, for example, and its nearest giant neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are heading towards each other at a rate of about ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jul 11, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (2) | comments 10 | with audio podcast