Tag: solar system
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Nation & World
Pluto in detail
Scott Kenyon offers an astrophysicist’s view of the New Horizons mission to Pluto.
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Nation & World
Delving into dark matter
Harvard physicists have suggested that a disk of dark matter may lie along the center line of the galaxy.
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Nation & World
Water worlds surface
Astronomers have found a planetary system orbiting the star Kepler-62. This five-planet system has two worlds in the habitable zone — the distance from their star at which they receive enough light and warmth for liquid water to theoretically exist on their surfaces.
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Nation & World
Alien world is blacker than coal
Imagine a giant world like Jupiter, but more alien than any planet in our solar system. Instead of displaying gleaming clouds colored white and salmon, this world is darker than the blackest lump of coal. It glows only with a feeble red light like a stove’s electric burner — the result of scorching heat from…
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Nation & World
Light fantastic
New research shows that aurorae on distant “hot Jupiters” could be 100 to 1,000 times brighter than Earth’s aurorae. “I’d love to get a reservation on a tour to see these aurorae,” said lead author Ofer Cohen, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
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Nation & World
Looking for life beyond Earth
Scientist Carolyn Porco explored the deeper regions of the solar system and her work with the Cassini mission to Saturn during a talk at Radcliffe.
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Nation & World
Solar eruption seen in detail
On April 9, the sun erupted and blasted a bubble of hot, ionized gas into the solar system. The eruption was observed in unprecedented detail by a fleet of spacecraft, revealing new features that are predicted by computer models but difficult to see in practice.