Dirty stars make good solar system hosts

September 21st, 2009 SYDNEY - Researchers have discovered an unusual kind of meteorite in the Western Australian desert and have uncovered where in the solar system it came from, a new finding suggests. Meteorites are the only surviving physical record of the formation of our solar system and by analysing them researchers can glean valuable information about the conditions that existed when the early solar system was being formed.

August 26th, 2009 LONDON - In a new study, a team of scientists has described how aluminium radioisotopes can now offer precise timing of events 4.5 billion years ago, and thus have been dubbed as the 'stopwatch for the solar system'. According to a report by BBC News, the study shows that the rate of decay of isotopes can now be relied upon to give accurate measures of time for that period.

July 22nd, 2009 NEW DELHI - The excitement of the century's longest total solar eclipse was quite evident from the sales of Gnomon Astrotech, a Delhi based firm that sold a record 50,000 solar goggles across India in just two days. The company imported a large number of solar goggles, solar filter films and telescopes from a US-based firm to meet the huge demand during the celestial spectacle.

July 21st, 2009 WASHINGTON - In a new research, an international team of astrophysicists has found evidence that suggests life in our solar system may have been fuelled by a nearby dying giant star of six times the mass of the sun. The evidence that the team has found is in the form of radioactive nuclei found in the earliest meteorites, dating back billions of years, which could have been delivered by a nearby dying giant star.

July 21st, 2009 SYDNEY - A team of international astrophysicists has found a new explanation for the early composition of our solar system. The team has found that radioactive nuclei found in the earliest meteorites, dating back billions of years, could have been delivered by a nearby dying giant star, six times the mass of the sun.

July 4th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of scientists has for the first time observed energetic neutral atoms scattered off the Moon from the incoming solar wind ion beam. When the solar wind, made up mostly of ionized hydrogen, hits the Moon, most of it is absorbed, but some is reemitted as energetic neutral atoms.

July 2nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Two University of Hawaii astronomers have found a binary star-disk system in which each star is surrounded by the kind of dust disk that is frequently the precursor of a planetary system, which makes them solar systems in the making. The astronomers in question are doctoral student Rita Mann and Dr.

June 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of scientists has analyzed 22 interstellar meteorite grains to suggest the stuff that became incorporated into the planets and life on Earth has younger cosmic roots than theories predict. The analysis was done by University of Chicago postdoctoral scholar Philipp Heck and his international team of colleagues.

June 11th, 2009 London, June 11 (ANI: A new analysis of craters of the Moon has suggested that the shattered remnants of a dwarf planet may have bombarded the inner planets in the early solar system. According to a report in New Scientist, several large impact scars on the moon appear to be around 3.9 billion years old, suggesting that the Earth and other objects of the inner solar system were heavily pounded at that time.

June 11th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers have found a planet forming disk orbiting twin suns in images captured from radio telescopes. The sequence of images, collected with the Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA), provide an unusually vivid snapshot of the process of formation of giant planets, comets, and Pluto-like bodies.

May 29th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A long-proposed tool for hunting planets has finally discovered a Jupiter-like planet orbiting one of the smallest stars known. The technique, called astrometry, was first attempted 50 years ago to search for planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets.

April 28th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Billions of planets are orbiting stars outside our solar system, but many have disappeared after being plucked by the gravitational pull of their stars, according to a study. Computer models over the last year or so have only predicted that gravitational forces might pull a planet into its parent star and this is such planet destruction has already occurred, said Washington University (WU) astronomer Rory Barnes.

April 28th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers have come across first time evidence of the destructive power of stars' tides, in the form of missing planets outside our solar system. According to University of Washington astronomer Rory Barnes, the idea that gravitational forces might pull a planet into its parent star has been predicted by computer models only in the last year or so, and this is the first evidence that such planet destruction has already occurred.

April 21st, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team, led by astronomers at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, has discovered one of the coolest sub-stellar bodies ever found outside our own solar system. The stellar companion orbits the red dwarf star Wolf 940, some 40 light years from Earth.

March 12th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Indian scientists have developed a solar water heating system that will effectively pay for itself five times over, with an estimated working life of about twenty years. The solar hot water system used in the study is installed at the Jijau hostel, part of the Dr Panjabrao Deshmukh Agricultural University campus, in Akola, Maharashtra state, India.