19 May 2021
Scientists unexpectedly find heavy metal vapour in comets throughout our Solar System, and beyond
... than 480 million kilometres from the Sun. That is more than three times the Earth-Sun distance. “It was a big surprise to detect iron and nickel atoms in the atmosphere of all the comets we have observed in the last two decades, about 20 of them...
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...
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...
14 December 2017
AI detects eighth planet orbiting distant sun
..., and it whizzes round its host star once every 14.4 days. All of the planets in the Kepler-90 system are closer to their central star than the Earth is to the Sun. Because Kepler-90i orbits so close to its host star, its average...
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...
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...
