milky way News

milky way News From AOL News

Hey ET, Are You Out There? Kepler Helps SETI Tune In

The needle-in-a-haystack search for extraterrestrial signals has narrowed a bit, thanks to NASA's Kepler spacecraft. Scientists announced that, of the 1,235 candidate planets discovered by Kepler, 54 of them were in what's known as the Goldilocks zone, a region close enough to its home sun where a planet may harbor...

Cosmic Census Finds Crowd of Planets in Our Galaxy

WASHINGTON -- Scientists have estimated the first cosmic census of planets in our galaxy and the numbers are astronomical: at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way. At least 500 million of those planets are in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold zone where life could exist. The numbers were extrapolated from the early...

Huge Black Hole Discovered in Small Galaxy

Which came first: the black hole or its home galaxy? This chicken-and-egg analogy is an issue raised with the discovery of a massive black hole inside a tiny, dwarf galaxy, and it may provide clues to the formation of the universe. A little Astronomy 101 would help here. We live on a planet that's part of a solar system...

Ancient Star Key to Our 'Unusual' Solar System

(Jan. 8) – We owe our existence to a star that exploded long, long ago. That's the conclusion of a study that aimed to solve the mystery of why our solar system is enriched in a rare form of oxygen. The study suggests that the sun and the material for what became the eight major planets formed in the vicinity of...

Background on milky way

The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains the Earth. This name derives from its appearance as a dim "milky" glowing band arching across the night sky, in which the naked eye cannot distinguish individual stars.

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