“The new planet is a ‘super-Earth’ orbiting the star HD 26965, which is only 16 light years from Earth, making it the closest super-Earth orbiting another Sun-like star,” says University of Florida (UF) astronomer Jian Ge, leader of the Dharma Planet Survey. “We may have discovered what may be Star Trek’s famed planet Vulcan. The planet is roughly twice the size of Earth and orbits its star with a 42-day period just inside the star’s optimal habitable zone.”
“I think I know how the universe was born,” said Andrei Linde, Russian-American theoretical physicist and the Harald Trap Friis Professor of Physics at Stanford University. Linde is one of the main authors of the inflationary universe theory, as well as the theory of eternal inflation and inflationary multiverse.
Sun-like stars represent just 15 per cent of all stars in the Milky Way. More than half of those, in turn, exist in binary star systems that have also been disregarded as being too different from the conditions present in the solar system. The search for Earth twins therefore covers a nearly insignificant fraction of all the outcomes in nature.
Since 2009 the European Space Agency’s Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) has been mapping the Earth’s gravitational field. More potato-shaped than spherical, the latest images shows just how different gravity can be at different points on our planet.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) captured this strip of stars and galaxies in the southern sky all the way through one 30-minute duration on Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2018. Created through combining the view from all four of its cameras, here is TESS’ “crack of dawn,” from the 1st staring at sector that can be used for making a choice on planets around other stars. Notable features in this swath of the southern sky come with the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds and a globular cluster known as NGC 104, also known as 47 Tucanae. The brightest stars within the image, Beta Gruis and R Doradus, saturated an entire column of camera detector pixels at the satellite’s moment and fourth cameras.
“You say to yourself, ‘Here I am, the only one on the planet who knows this thing. Soon the rest of the world will know, but for the moment I am the only one.” In 1969, Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind imagined the basic building blocks of the universe as invisible vibrating loops of energy. This insight would form the basis of string theory and help lead to a radical re-envisioning of how the universe began.
