planets News

planets News From AOL News

Pluto's Atmosphere Doubles in a Decade [VIDEO]

Kepler Spacecraft Finds 2 Planets Sharing Same Orbit

To date, the telescope on the Kepler spacecraft has detected 1,235 planet candidates, and while Earth-bound telescopes are trying to determine if 54 of those planets may have conditions that could harbor life, one unique planetary system may have been uncovered. Unique because it's the first time scientists have...

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...

Tyche: Does the New Mega-Planet Exist or What?

The possible discovery of a new planet called Tyche certainly got our attention this week. But is it real? A fresh round of skepticism is countering the claim, made by astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire, that a hydrogen-and-helium-based planet four times larger than Jupiter is lying in the far reaches of our...

Background on planets

A planet () is a celestial body orbiting a star or stellar remnant that is massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, is not massive enough to cause thermonuclear fusion, and has cleared its neighbouring region of planetesimals.

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