Featured series 
Tag: Planetary Science
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Science & Tech
Of orbits and ice ages
In a paper published in the journal Nature, Harvard Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Peter Huybers confirms that changes in the orientation of the Earth’s spin axis have contributed to periods of major deglaciation in the past million years.
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Science & Tech
Scientists find signs of ‘snowball Earth’
Geologists have found evidence that sea ice extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago, bringing new precision to a “snowball Earth” event long suspected of occurring around that time.
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Science & Tech
Kepler starts search for other Earths
As NASA’s Kepler space telescope this week begins scanning the Milky Way for planets that might harbor life, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) are keeping their fingers crossed and waiting for the data to start flowing.
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Science & Tech
Transit search finds super-Neptune
Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics havediscovered a planet somewhat larger and more massive than Neptuneorbiting a star 120 light-years from Earth. While Neptune has a diameter3.8 times that of Earth and a mass 17 times Earth’s, the new world(named HAT-P-11b) is 4.7 times the size of Earth and has 25 Earthmasses. HAT-P-11b was…
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Science & Tech
Humanity may hold key for next Earth evolution
Human degradation of the environment has the potential to stall an ongoing process of planetary evolution, and even rewind the evolutionary clock to leave the planet habitable only by the bacteria that dominated billions of years of Earth’s history, Harvard geochemist Charles Langmuir said Thursday (Nov. 13).
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Science & Tech
Mars’ water appears to have been too salty to support life
A new analysis of the Martian rock that gave hints of water on the Red Planet — and, therefore, optimism about the prospect of life — now suggests the water was more likely a thick brine, far too salty to support life as we know it. The finding, by scientists at Harvard University and Stony…
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Science & Tech
Sulfur dioxide may have helped maintain a warm early Mars
Sulfur dioxide (SO2) may have played a key role in the climate and geochemistry of early Mars, geoscientists at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) suggest in the Dec. 21 issue of the journal Science. Their hypothesis may resolve longstanding questions about evidence that the climate of the Red Planet was once…
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Science & Tech
Strange new planet baffles astronomers
Using a network of small automated telescopes known as HAT, Smithsonian astronomers have discovered a planet unlike any other known world. This new planet, designated HAT-P-1, orbits one member of a pair of distant stars 450 light-years away in the constellation Lacerta. “We could be looking at an entirely new class of planets,” said Gaspar…
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Science & Tech
Tilting at ice ages
Here’s a story to cool you off on a hot summer day. One of the major mysteries of ice ages may have been solved by a Harvard climatologist.
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Science & Tech
Super-Earths may be three times more common than Jupiters
Astronomers have discovered a new “super-Earth” orbiting a red dwarf star located about 9,000 light-years away. This newfound world weighs about 13 times the mass of the Earth and is probably a mixture of rock and ice, with a diameter several times that of Earth. It orbits its star at about the distance of the…
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Science & Tech
Most Milky Way stars are single
Common wisdom among astronomers holds that most star systems in the Milky Way are multiple, consisting of two or more stars in orbit around each other. Common wisdom is wrong.
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Science & Tech
Spitzer puts a new spin on the Helix Nebula
Helix Nebula (NGC 7293) is a challenging stargazing target for amateur astronomers. It is one of the closest planetary nebulas – a type of nebula formed from gas ejected by a dying sunlike star. Yet it is so large and spread out in the sky that it appears very dim in a telescope eyepiece. Long-exposure…
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Science & Tech
Tiny “David” telescope finds “Goliath” planet
A newfound planet detected by a small, 4-inch-diameter telescope demonstrates that we are at the cusp of a new age of planet discovery. Soon, new worlds may be located at an accelerating pace, bringing the detection of the first Earth-sized world one step closer. “This discovery demonstrates that even humble telescopes can make huge contributions…
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Science & Tech
Lifeless suns dominated early universe
The very first generation of stars were not at all like our Sun. They were white-hot, massive stars that were very short-lived. Burning for only a few million years, they collapsed and exploded as brilliant supernovae. Those very first stars began the seeding process in the universe, spreading vital elements like carbon and oxygen, which…
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Science & Tech
Suns of all ages possess comets, maybe planets
Astronomers observed a comet puffing out huge amounts of carbon, one of the key elements for life. The comet also emitted large amounts of water vapor as the Sun’s heat baked its outer surface. When combined with previous observations suggesting the presence of evaporating comets near young stars like Beta Pictoris and old stars like…
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Science & Tech
Planetary survivor strategy: Outeat, outweigh, outlast!
Astronomers Myron Lecar and Dimitar Sasselov have found that planet formation is a contest, where a growing planet must fight for survival lest it be swallowed by the star that initially nurtured it. Of the first 100 stars found to harbor planets, more than 30 stars host a Jupiter-sized world in an orbit smaller than…
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Science & Tech
Earth’s birth date turned back
Radioactive elements in rocks decay in a predictable way, like the ticking of a well-made clock that can run for millions of years. The decay marks a change in character of the elements; one type of uranium, for example, decays into lead. To measure the age of meteorites, and thereby deteremine the age of Earth…
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Science & Tech
Looking for the meaning of life at the bottom of the sea
Charles Langmuir, Harvard professor of geochemistry, loves going to sea. “It’s tremendously stimulating, wonderful, exciting, and eye-opening,” he says enthusiastically. “Every time I’ve gone since 1984, I’ve seen things I’ve never seen before. Sometimes, they’re things nobody has ever seen before. Teams of people keep the work going seven days a week, 24 hours a…
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Science & Tech
New moons found around Neptune
Astronomers have discovered three new moons of Neptune, boosting the number of known satellites of the gas giant to 11. These moons are the first to be discovered orbiting Neptune since the Voyager II flyby in 1989, and the first discovered from a ground-based telescope since 1949. It now appears that each member of the…
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Campus & Community
Earth’s new center
The outer core is liquid, the inner core is solid. That’s the way Earth has been depicted in textbooks for the past 66 years. But the work of Adam Dziewonski, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science, and graduate student Miaki Ishii shows that this picture doesn’t get to the bottom of things. Engulfed in…
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Science & Tech
When worlds collide
Astronomers believe the a mega-merger in the galaxy known as Arp 220 triggered the formation of huge numbers of new stars, sent shock waves rumbling through intergalactic space, and could possibly lead to the formation of a supermassive black hole in the center of the new conglomerate galaxy. Data collected by the Chandra X-ray observatory…
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Science & Tech
New, far-out planet is discovered
A planet discovered in the constellation Sagittarius is so distant that light takes 5,000 years to travel from there to here at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Called OGLE-TR-56b, the planet orbits too close to its sun to be hospitable to living things. The way it was found could lead to the discovery…
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Science & Tech
Stellar apocalypse yields first evidence of water-bearing worlds beyond our solar system
The first evidence that planetary systems beyond our own contain water, a molecule that is an essential ingredient for known forms of life, was discovered recently by using the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS), a small radio observatory that NASA launched into space in December 1998. The discovery was reported in an article published in…