20 June 2016
Trio of hot Jupiters give clue to their formation
... is a well studied star cluster and recent estimates of the age range of its inhabitants imply that the stars are younger than the Sun (at around 4 billion years). The team state that the high rate – three hot Jupiters around a sample...
27 October 2017
Astronomers find system with six planets
.... HD 3445 is a G0V type star. Our Sun for example is a G2V type star (the 0 represents the hottest stars of a given class, so the Sun is cooler than HD 34445). HD 34445 is also slightly more massive than the Sun and around 2 to 4 billion years older...
23 May 2018
First permanent extrasolar asteroid found near Jupiter
... it was found that 2015 BZ509 shares an orbit with Jupiter and travels around the Sun at the same speed as the giant gas planet, but it does so in the opposite direction. This is called a retrograde orbit and although asteroids with retrograde...
19 October 2018
Countdown begins for the launch of BepiColombo
... two regions that are 180 degrees apart, which always have the Sun directly overhead when the planet is closest to the Sun. If you could stand at these points, then the Sun would appear to be almost stationary overhead for two to three weeks...
17 October 2019
Hubble gets a good look at interstellar visitor Comet 2I/Borisov
... of our Solar System, with its innermost edge at about 2000 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. 2I/Borisov and ‘Oumuamua are only the beginning of the discoveries of interstellar objects paying a brief visit to our Solar System. There...
June 2015
Ultimate sunbather: NASA and ESA collaborate on Solar Orbiter
... orbit will take 6 months. Solar Orbiter has to travel close to the Sun, out of the ecliptic plane (where the planets all reside), so it can observe the poles of the Sun as well as the equator. This unique orbit will make it possible to conduct long...
