... Credit: Greg Bacon ( STScI ), NASA Explanation: The last decade saw the profound discovery of many worlds beyond our solar system, but none analogs of our home planet Earth . Exploiting precise observational techniques, astronomers inferred the presence of well over two dozen extrasolar planets , most nearly as massive as gas giant Jupiter or more, in close orbits around sun-like stars. ... Publications with keywords: extrasolar planet - planet - Saturn - planetary system . ... Crescent Saturn . ...

... 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 . ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Planets . ... Earth Satellites . ... A Scorched World: too distant to image, Kepler-10b is depicted here by a NASA artist (Image credit: NASA/Kepler Mission/Dana Berry) . The Kepler satellite looks for planets passing between their parent star and Earth. ... Placed beside our homeworld, Kepler-10b would be about 40% wider than Earth. ... Possibly only occasional jagged islands of metal and rock break the monotony of its glowing lava oceans. ...

My research efforts have focused on three areas which are: . More than 200 extrasolar planets have been discovered around relatively nearby stars, primarily through the Doppler line shifts owing to the reflex motions of their host stars, and more recently through transits of some planets across the face of the host stars. ... Gravitational microlensing provides a novel technique to look for planets around lens stars, and this is the only technique currently capable of detecting Earth-mass planets. ...

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. ...

... Indeed, one alteration of orbits can be the outright ejection of a planet. When several big planets are orbiting a star under each other's influence, the system is inherently unstable. ... We know of no good reason why the smallest objects with fusion should have the same mass as the smallest objects that can form by themselves. ... 6) Mission Definition . ... I don't think this mission is impossible, and will suggest a definition in a future article in Mercury. ... Good luck! . ...

... Image courtesy of Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute . ... There are already 29 multi-planet extrasolar planetary systems discovered (including this last one), so what makes this particular system unique? ... International Year of Astronomy, Ireland National Node . ...

... 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. ...

... 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. ...

The Magician U ranus is the seventh planet from the Sun and the third largest (by diameter). ... Uranus was the son and mate of Gaia the father of Cronus (Saturn) and of the Cyclopes and Titans (predecessors of the Olympian gods). U ranus, the first planet discovered in modern times, was discovered by William Herschel while systematicly searching the sky with his telescope on March 13, 1781. ... U ranus has been visited by only one spacecraft, Voyager 2 on Jan 24 1986. ... more Uranus images . ...