Planets too have “fat days”

October 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Using new computer simulations, scientists have suggested that dirty stars that are full of dust and gas make good solar system hosts. When a star forms, collapsing from a dense cloud into a luminous ball, it and the disk of dust and gas orbiting it reflect the composition of that original cloud and the elements within it.

September 24th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has witnessed a clump of planet-forming material around a young star. Planets form out of swirling disks of gas and dust.

September 13th, 2009 LONDON - There are thousands of habitable moons orbiting planets in other solar systems trillions of miles from our own, British scientists say. On the basis of mathematical calculations, scientists at the University College London have said that it should be possible to spot these moons using a space telescope launched by NASA.

August 7th, 2009 LONDON - The planet-hunting Kepler space telescope has found its first extrasolar planets, in the form of three alien worlds that had been previously discovered with ground-based telescopes. According to a report in New Scientist, the finds confirm that Kepler's instruments are sensitive enough to detect Earth-like planets around sun-like stars.

July 10th, 2009 SYDNEY - A German study has suggested that astronomers observing exoplanets around other stars may be underestimating their size because of active stars that add 'noise' to the observation of exoplanets using the transit method. The transit method detects exoplanets as they pass in front of their parent star, reducing the amount of light reaching telescopes on, and orbiting, Earth.

June 26th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, US, is partnering on a historic search for Earth-sized planets around other stars. STScI is the data archive center for NASA's Kepler mission, a spacecraft that is undertaking a survey for Earth-size planets in our region of the galaxy.

June 12th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In a new study, a group of international scientists took the help of a lunar eclipse to take a snapshot of earth's chemical fingerprint, which could help to identify planets most similar to earth where life may be thriving. The team used some of the world's largest optical and infrared telescopes located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain) to observe light reflected from the moon toward the earth during a lunar eclipse on August 16, 2008.

June 11th, 2009 Sydney, June 11 (ANI: In a grim scenario put forward by scientists, the gravity of Jupiter could one day pull Mercury off course, triggering a chain reaction of collisions in the Solar System. But despite the threat, there's only a 1 percent chance of this happening in the next 5 billion years, said French researchers.

June 11th, 2009 Washington, June 11 (ANI: Astronomers, using the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) on La Palma have confirmed an effective way to search the atmospheres of planets for signs of life, vastly improving our chances of finding alien life outside our solar system. The team from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) used the WHT and the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) to gather information about the chemical composition of the Earth's atmosphere from sunlight that has passed through it.

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.

June 11th, 2009 London, June 11 (ANI: A team of scientists has used gravitational microlensing to come up with a tentative detection of the first extragalactic exoplanet in Andromeda, our nearest large galactic neighbour. In gravitational microlensing, a distant source star is briefly magnified by the gravity of an object passing in front of it.

May 11th, 2009 LONDON - Google is preparing to launch a mobile phone application called Star Droid that can help amateur astronomers identify stars and planets. According to a report in the Telegraph, the search engine software will use GPS technology to compare the position of the phone user with existing maps of space, attaching name tags to the stars and planets that can be seen through the phone's viewfinder.

May 7th, 2009 LONDON - A new analysis has suggested that the best bet that scientists have in finding life in the Universe may be around stars a little less massive than the sun, called 'orange dwarfs'. According to a report in New Scientist, these stars live much longer than sun-like stars, and have safer habitable zones - where liquid water can exist - than those of lighter red dwarf stars.

April 29th, 2009 LONDON - Two new studies have suggested that exoplanets which venture near their host stars are doomed to premature deaths - even before they get close enough to be ripped apart by the stars' gravity. According to a report in New Scientist, the studies say that a star's gravity can put a nearby planet on a 'fast track' to spiralling into the star and may also cause the planet to lose much of its atmosphere.

April 5th, 2009 LONDON - Scientists are planning to build a giant telescope that will be powerful enough to identify habitable planets like Earth in distant solar systems. Astronomers claim the European Extremely Large Telescope, which will house a mirror the width of five double decker buses placed end to end, will be the first optical telescope capable of picking out the weak pinpricks of light that are reflected from planets as they orbit stars.