Tag: WISE

Water Ice Clouds Detected on Brown Dwarf 7.3 Light Years Away

Water Ice Clouds Detected on Brown Dwarf 7.3 Light Years Away

Artists Conception : Credit Rob Gizis, CUNY BMCC An astronomer at Penn State University appears to discovered the first ever direct evidence of water ice clouds on another world.  That world is WISE J0855-0714, an enigmatic brown dwarf of “failed star” located only 7.3 light years from Earth. The discovery was made using images from […]

New Discovery at the Edge of Solar System Suggests Planet X May Still Be Out There

New Discovery at the Edge of Solar System Suggests Planet X May Still Be Out There

Time lapse photo showing movement On the third episode of the re-tooled COSMOS, Neil deGrasse Tyson took his ship of the imagination to the Oort cloud to discover the origin of comets. He may have to go back. Astronomers have discovered a second dwarf planet orbiting in the far reaches of the solar system, well […]

Posted in: Outer Planets
CrowdSourcing Space Science: NASA Launches DiskDetective

CrowdSourcing Space Science: NASA Launches DiskDetective

NASA has launched  DiskDetective.org,  a crowdsourced science project aimed at engaging the general public in identifying planetary nurseries in the debris fields surrounding stars. RELEASE 14-038 NASA-Sponsored ‘Disk Detective’ Lets Public Search for New Planetary Nurseries NASA is inviting the public to help astronomers discover embryonic planetary systems hidden among data from the agency’s Wide-field […]

Meet the New Neighbors : A Binary System 6.5 Light Years Away

Meet the New Neighbors : A Binary System 6.5 Light Years Away

We are currently living in what many consider a golden age of astronomical discovery in which ongoing analysis of  data produced by various space telescopes such as Kepler and Wise is constantly rewriting our understanding of the cosmos both distant and close. In the latter category comes yesterday’s  announcement from JPL that astronomers have discovered Earth’s third nearest star […]

Searching for Trojan Asteroids

Searching for Trojan Asteroids

Even as NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope continues to chart new planets around distant stars at an impressive rate, data gathered from another NASA spacecraft, the Wide-field Infrared Observatory (WISE), is shedding light on a particular class of asteroids shadowing planetary orbits in our home system.  Labelled as Trojan asteroids following the initial discovery of  the asteroid “Achilles” in a position ahead of Jupiter in 1906, they can precede or […]

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