Scienceblogtwo

All life on Earth depends on water, and the cycle of rain, rivers, oceans, and rain again is crucial to maintaining a stable and habitable climate. Planets with water are always at the top of the list when scientists discuss where to look for life throughout the galaxy. According to a recent study, there may be many more planets than previously believed that contain significant amounts of water, possibly even half of them being rock and half water. The problem? Instead of flowing as seas or rivers on the surface, all that water is likely entrenched in the rock. Rafael Luque, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago and the paper's first author, stated that it was unexpected to find evidence for so many water worlds orbiting the most prevalent form of star in the galaxy. It has significant ramifications for the search for terraforming planets. Scientists are discovering evidence of an increasing number of planets in distant solar systems as a result of improved telesco...

Saturn is a blatant indicator that the planet is rotating tilted. The belted giant rotates with respect to the plane of its orbit around the sun at a 26.7-degree inclination. Since Saturn's tilt precesses, like a spinning top, at almost the same rate as Neptune's orbit, astronomers have long hypothesized that this tilt results from gravitational interactions with its neighbor Neptune. Saturn may have once been in sync with Neptune, but according to a recent modeling research by scientists at MIT and other institutions, Saturn has since eluded Neptune's influence. What was responsible for this planetary realignment? The one carefully examined theory the team has is a missing moon. The team claims in a paper published in Science that Saturn, which currently has 83 moons, originally had at least one additional satellite that they have named Chrysalis. The researchers hypothesize that Chrysalis, together with its siblings, orbited Saturn for several billion years while exerting...

According to astronomers, planets are born in protoplanetary disks, which are the rings of gas and dust that encircle newly formed, young stars. Even though the universe has hundreds of these disks, it has been challenging to observe genuine planetary birth and development in these settings. A new method for finding these elusive young planets has now been devised by astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and with it, "smoking gun" proof of a small Neptune- or Saturn-like planet lurking in a disk. The Astrophysical Journal Letters today published a description of the findings. According to Feng Long, a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Astrophysics and project leader, "directly finding young planets is highly tough and has thus far only been effective in one or two situations." Because they are encased in substantial amounts of gas and dust, planets are always too dim for us to see them. Instead, they must look for signs that a ...