... 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 . ...

... 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 . ...

... Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2000 February 13 . Southwest Mercury . Credit: Mariner 10 , NASA . Explanation: The planet Mercury resembles a moon. ... In fact, the Earth is the only planet more dense. ... From Earth , Mercury's proximity to the Sun cause it to be visible only for a short time just after sunset or just before sunrise. ... About APOD | ...

... Bad Astronomy . ... Bitesize Astronomy . ... Have you ever looked at pictures of Saturn's rings and noticed what look like gaps in the rings? ... Gian Domenico Cassini discovered a large gap in Saturn's rings in 1675. Later, an astronomer named Encke discovered a smaller gap near the edge of the rings. ... It was found long ago that an orbit in the Cassini Division, as the large gap is named, has a period almost exactly one-half that of one of Saturn's moons named Mimas. ... 2008 Phil Plait. ...

Class 1 Introduction, Background History of Modern Astronomy The Night Sky, Eclipses and the Seasons Kepler's Laws Newtonian Gravity General Relativity Matter and Light Telescopes Class 2 Solar System Characteristics Formation Exosolar Planets Class 3 Stars The Sun Stellar Evolution of Low and High Mass Stars Deaths of Stars Exotic Stars Class 4 Galaxies Galaxy Classification Formation of Galaxies Galactic Evolution ... So far, one planet has been studied by this method. ...

... As we have seen, evolutionary considerations based on our current understanding of massive binary systems lead to the conclusion that BH+PSR binaries must constitute a rather numerous subclass of all binary PSR ( 1 per 1000 isolated pulsars; Lipunov et al. , 1994b[ 124 ]). It seemed a priori that the binary radio pulsar PSR B0042-73   in the SMC (Kaspi et al., 1994[ 81 ]) could belong to one of these two classes. ... This means that such binary pulsars should be discovered in the near future. ...

... Survey Telescopes . ... Astronomers using ESOтАЩs world-leading HARPS instrument have discovered a planetary system containing at least five planets, orbiting the Sun-like star HD 10180. ... The newly discovered system of planets around HD 10180 is unique in several respects. ... All very massive planetary systems are found around massive and metal-rich stars, while the four lowest-mass systems are found around lower-mass and metal-poor stars [5] . ... ESOcast 20: Richest planetary system discovered...

Ultracompact dwarf galaxies (UCDs) are among the densest stellar systems in the Universe. With typical masses of 10^7 to 10^8 solar masses and half-mass radii between 10 to 100 pc they are more than a factor 1000 denser than dwarf galaxies of the same mass. They also show evidence for elevated mass-to-light ratios, which could be due to the presence of massive black holes or unusual stellar IMFs as a result of their extreme densities. ...

... The relationship of the mass and the observed galactocentric distance R -- (a), and that of the mass and the total dissipation velocity n taken from Gnedin, Ostriker (1997) -- (b). The dotted line in diagram (a) shows the "cone of survival" according to the paper by Surdin and Arkhipova (1998) . ... The solid line is a regression stright line for the main sequence of clusters, and the dotted line parallel to it separates the sequence of clusters of anomalously small mass shown by open triangles. ...

... GALAXY: A galaxy is made up of billions or trillions of stars bound together by their own gravity. ... HELIUM (He): The second element in the periodic table, has 2 protons, 2 neutrons, and is a noble gas. ... Helium melts at -272.2 degrees Celsius, and boils at -268.934 degrees Celsius. ... HYDROGEN (H): The first element on the periodic table, is a gas, and has an atomic mass of 1.00794 amu. ... Hydrogen melts at -259.34 degrees Celsius, and freezes at -252.87 degrees Celsius. ...

... 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 . ...