... Planets . ... Earth Satellites . ... Looking in the direction of the constellation Cygnus the Swan and launched by NASA in 2009 is the Kepler Space Observatory.Many previous missions searching for exoplanets mainly detected large giant planets, like large hot Jupiters (it is easier to detect larger planets).However KeplerтАЩs main objective is to search for much smaller planets located in a habitable zone which is not too close nor too far from their star; planets which may be just like our Earth. ...

... One of the brightest galaxies in planet Earth's sky and similar in size to the Milky Way, big, beautiful spiral M81 lies 11.8 million light-years away in the northern constellation Ursa Major. ... Intrepid Crater on Mars . ... The robotic rover Opportunity has chanced across another small crater on Mars. ... Too Close to a Black Hole . ... Sunset at the Spiral Jetty . ... The small, northern constellation Triangulum harbors this magnificent face-on spiral galaxy, M33. ... Hartley 2 Star Cluster Tour...

... There has been a heated public discussion in the past few years about whether our ninth planet is really deserving of the name. Since Pluto orbits a star, and is much less luminous, it certainly satisfies the definition we have above. The problem is actually not with Pluto, but with a very large number of other bodies in our Solar System which also satisfy this definition, but which are not called planets. Perhaps the most notable of these is Ceres, the largest asteroid. ... Planet . ...

... Tonight's Sky . ... The Magazine . ... Star Atlas . ... An artificial comet holds secrets to Earths life . ... Astronomy for Kids . ... Observing springtime deep-sky objects with a large telescope . ... The planet has extreme temperature swings and perhaps active lava flows. ... A digital supplement to Astronomy magazine. ... Join TravelQuest International with Astronomy and Discover magazines on one of three great tour options surrounding this celestial spectacle . ... Astronomy Magazine . ...

... 2009 June 3 . VB 10: A Large Planet Orbiting a Small Star . Illustration Credit: JPL-Caltech , NASA . Explanation: Can a planet be as large as the star that it orbits? Recent observations have discovered that nearby Van Biesbroeck's star might have just such a large planet. ... Since faint M-type stars like VB 10 are so common, planetary system s surrounding them, including planets larger than their parent star, might be more common than planetary systems like our own Solar System . ...

. Previous slide . Next slide . Back to first slide . View graphic version .

Just beyond the main asteroid belt there exists a population of small objects orbiting the Sun at the same heliocentric distance of Jupiter. The combined action of Jovian and Solar gravity creates a stable dynamical haven for these objects near the so-called Lagrangian equilibrium points, in honour to the French mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange who first demonstrated their existence and stability. ... Soon after its discovery it was realized that this asteroid is, in fact, a Mars Trojan. ...

... Neptune is smaller in diameter but larger in mass than Uranus . ... N eptune has been visited by only one spacecraft, Voyager 2 on Aug 25 1989. ... A t the time of the Voyager encounter, Neptune's most prominent feature was the Great Dark Spot (left) in the southern hemisphere. ... Neptune's winds blew the Great Dark Spot westward at 300 meters/second (700 mph). ... L ike Uranus and Jupiter, Neptune's rings are very dark but their composition is unknown. ... Neptune's Ring System . ... Uranus .. ...

... Kepler is a mission designed to detect and characterize Earth-sized planets around solar-like stars. The sizes of the planets are determined from the decrease in light from a star that occurs during planetary transits, and the orbital period is determined from the repeatability of the transits. ... These goals are accomplished by continuously and simultaneously monitoring a single field of 140,000 stars for evidence of brightness changes caused by transits of Earth-sized or larger planets. ...

... More on 51 Peg: . The discovery of a Jupiter--mass planet in orbit around the solar--type star 51Peg has been reported by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz (Geneva Observatory) on October 6th at the 9th Cambridge workshop on "cool stars, stellar systems, and the sun" held at Florence (Italy). ... Recall that the measurements of radial velocity only yield v sin i which in turn gives us M sin i. For most values of i, sin i will be greater than 0.5 and this gives a mass estimate of 0.5 Jupiter masses. ...

... Visibility of Small Solar-System Bodies . Asteroids) in 2009 : . ... Distance (AU) . ... Jan. 12, 2009 . ... 8.8 m . ... is at opposition on July 4, 2009 . ... Apparent . ... from Sun (AU) . ... is at opposition on September 21, 2009 . ... middle distance between Earth and Sun, equal 149.6 millions km. ... Mean Distance: . ... a configuration of the Sun, Earth and a planet in which the apparent geocentric longitude of the planet differs by 180 from the apparent geocentric longitude of the Sun. ...

... Bad Astronomy . ... Bitesize Astronomy . ... Keep Bad Astronomy close to your heart, and help make me filthy rich. ... It's semi-common knowledge that stars twinkle and planets don't. By semi-common, I mean that a lot of folks know that, but I also mean it isn't strictly true. Stars twinkle because we see them from the bottom of a sea of air. ... These small bundles of air act like little lenses, bending light as it passes through them. ... What we see is the light from the star flickering. ...

The AstroGuide . ... AstroGuide | ... AstroGuide Listing . ... See many more Astronomy Listings by: Category or Alphabet . The purpose of ISTeC (formally NASTeC) is to bring to the attention of the general astronomical community the distribution and availability of small-to-intermediate size research telescopes and associated equipment through a voluntary information listing. ... Web Site . ... Unless otherwise specified, web site content Copyright 1994-2016 John Huggins All Rights Reserved . ...

... Many massive planets contrary to Jupiter have large eccentricities of orbits. ... Another problem is to study the conditions and boundaries of stable, regular motions of small mass planet in systems having `Jupiter' with large orbital eccentricity as well as properties of regular, stable, and irregular, chaotic motions. ... The regular eccentricity evolution described above demonstrates that stable quasi--circular orbits of small planet are unusual. ...

... Called Gliese 623b or Gl623b, the diminutive star (right of center) is ten times less massive than the Sun and 60,000 times fainter. ... The image file is on oposite.stsci.edu in the directory /pubinfo/gif: PR# GIF File Caption text Object STScI-PRC94-54 Gl623b.gif G1623b.txt Dwarf Star Gliese 623b The photo release text is in the directory /pubinfo/press-releases: PR# PR text STScI-PRC94-54 PR-54.txt Another directory, /pubinfo/latest, contains all of the files relevant to the latest releases. ...

... Science User Portal . ... For the first time, astronomers have been able to directly follow the motion of an exoplanet as it moves from one side of its host star to the other. ... Only 12 million years old, or less than three-thousandths of the age of the Sun, Beta Pictoris is 75% more massive than our parent star. ... This research was presented in a paper to appear this week in Science Express (тАЬA Giant Planet Imaged in the disk of the Young Star Beta Pictoris,тАЭ by A.-M. Lagrange et al.) ...

The small solids. Asteroids or the small planetes . ... The comets. ... Ceneca the Young.Procuring about the nature.63 y. The comet is a celestial body of a great size, but a rare one... transparent. Sometimes there seen a core and the medium forms a kind of a tail, beard or dishevelled looks. ... The core is an ice body - conglomeration of frosted gas and dust. ... The comet state is variable: ones have the con tails, others the dust tails, and the third have both. ... Meteors and meteorites. ...

... 13, Moscow 119992, Russian Federation, e-mail: busarev@sai.msu.ru; 2 Research Institute Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, p/o Nauchnyi, Crimea 334413, Ukraine, e-mail: prok@crao.crimea.ua Summary: We propose a combined method of astronomical investigations of small or distant planets incorporating registration of a set of integral spectra of an object and their frequency analysis. ... An application of the method is shown on example of asteroid 21 Lutetia. ... 6] Busarev V. V. (2002), Solar Sys. ...

... This glossary is not meant to be an exhaustive list of techno-definitions. ... Is there a term you don't see here? ... Do you know how to pronounce the CONSTELLATIONS , STARS , or the PLANETS and their MOONS ? ... First Law - the orbit of each planet is an ellipse with the sun at a focus . ... LIGHT BUCKET: A common slang term for a large apertures . ... LIGHT POLLUTION: The illumination of the night sky caused by artificial light sources on the ground (streetlights, billboards, etc.) ...

... Given the observing time and frequency, task plplt plots the expected visibility function for a planet. You will most likely want to check this visibility function before observing and discovering that the planet is resolved out! NOTE that mfboot and plplt do not include the effect of the ATCA's primary beam - the planet is implicitly (and silently) assumed to be small compared with the primary beam. ... Information on using the ATCA to observe a planet is available on-line . ...