habitable zone tagged posts

This artist’s impression shows an imagined view from the surface one of the three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth.  In this view one of the inner planets is seen in transit across the disc of its tiny and dim parent star. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

These worlds have sizes and temps similar to Venus and Earth and are the best targets found so far for the search for life outside the Solar System. They are the first planets ever discovered around such a tiny and dim star. A team used the Belgian TRAPPIST telescope to observe the star 2MASS J23062928-0502285 aka TRAPPIST-1...

Jupiter and Io. Tidal heating is responsible for driving the most volcanically active body in our solar system, Jupiter’s moon Io. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Goddard Space Flight Center

A planet’s magnetic field emanates from its core and is thought to deflect the charged particles of the stellar wind, protecting the atmosphere from being lost to space. Magnetic fields, born from the cooling of a planet’s interior, could also protect life on the surface from harmful radiation, as Earth’s magnetic field protects us.

Low-mass stars are among the most common in the universe...

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft operating in a new mission profile called K2. Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T Pyle Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-08-astronomers-tenth-transiting-tatooine.html#jCp

Astronomers at the 29th International Astronomical Union General Assembly will announce on Aug 14 the discovery of a new transiting “circumbinary” planet, bringing the number of such known planets into double digits. A circumbinary planet orbits 2 stars, and like the fictional planet “Tatooine” from Star Wars, this planet has two suns in its sky. The discovery marks an important milestone and comes only 4 years after the first Kepler circumbinary planet was detected...