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An artist’s impression of the innumerable Earth-like planets that have yet to be born over the next trillion years in the evolving universe. Credit: NASA / ESA / G. Bacon (STScI)

Earth came early to the party in the evolving universe. According to a new theoretical study, when our solar system was born 4.6 B years ago only 8% of the potentially habitable planets that will ever form in the universe existed. And, the party won’t be over when the sun burns out in another 6B years. The bulk of those planets – 92% – have yet to be born.

This conclusion is based on an assessment of data collected by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the prolific planet-hunting Kepler space observatory...

Artist’s concept of NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft in orbit above the moon. Credit: NASA Ames / Dana Berry

The presence of neon in the exosphere of the moon has been a subject of speculation since the Apollo missions, but no credible detections were made till now. There’s not enough neon to make the moon visibly glow because the moon’s atmosphere is extremely tenuous, about 100 trillion times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere at sea level. A dense atmosphere like Earth’s is relatively rare in our solar system because an object has to be sufficiently massive to have enough gravity to hold onto it.

The behavior of a dense atmosphere is driven by collisions between its atoms and molecules...

IMAGE: Artist’s impression of Gaia14aae.
Credit: Marisa Grove/Institute of Astronomy

It is a type of 2-star system known as a Cataclysmic Variable, where one super dense white dwarf star is stealing gas from its companion star, effectively ‘cannibalising’ it.The system could also be an important laboratory for studying ultra-bright supernova explosions, which are a vital tool for measuring the expansion of the Universe. The system, named Gaia14aae, is 730 light years away in Draco constellation. It was discovered by the ESA’s Gaia satellite in August 2014 when it suddenly became 5 times brighter over the course of a single day.

>>Additional observations made by the Center for Backyard Astrophysics (CBA), a collaboration of amateur and professional astronomers, found the system is a rare e...