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Revived Kepler mission adds 104 planets to list

Image: Kepler discovery
An artist’s conception shows NASA’s Kepler telescope observing four planets as they pass across the disk of their parent star. The comparative sizes of the spacecraft and the star are not to scale. (Credit: NASA / JPL)

Astronomers say they’ve confirmed the existence of 104 worlds to add to the list of extrasolar planets detected by NASA’s Kepler K2 mission, and at least two of them appear to be potentially habitable super-Earths.

The two prospects are among four planets orbiting K2-72, a red dwarf (or M dwarf) star that’s 181 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius.

All four of the planets are between 20 and 50 percent wider than Earth. They all come closer to K2-72 than Mercury comes to our own sun. But because the red dwarf is so much cooler than our sun, the worlds known as K2-72c and K2-72e lie in the star system’s habitable zone. That means it’s conceivable that liquid water could exist on those planets.

K2-72c makes a complete orbit of its sun every 15 Earth days and is thought to be about 10 percent warmer than Earth. K2-72e is farther out: It has a 24-day orbit and should be about 6 percent cooler than Earth.

Study leader Ian Crossfield, who works at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, said he couldn’t rule out the possibility of life arising in such red dwarf environments.

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Astronomers spot an icy world beyond Pluto

The golden ellipse indicates the orbit of the newly confirmed object 2015 RR245. Click on the image for a larger version. (Credit: Alex Parker / OSSOS Team)
The golden ellipse indicates the orbit of the newly confirmed object 2015 RR245. Click on the image for a larger version. (Credit: Alex Parker / OSSOS Team)

Astronomers have found an icy world that ranges far beyond the orbit of Neptune and may well rank as a dwarf planet alongside Pluto.

The newly detected object, designated 2015 RR245, is thought to be less than a third the width of Pluto (435 miles vs. 1,474 miles), but its orbit is more eccentric. Its distance from the sun ranges from about 34 to more than 120 astronomical units, where each AU equals the distance between Earth and the sun. In comparison, Pluto’s orbit has a range of 30 to 50 AU.

Right now, 2015 RR245 is 80 AU from the sun and closing in, based on observations from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii’s big island. It should reach the nearest point in its 733-year orbit in the year 2096.

“The icy worlds beyond Neptune trace how the giant planets formed and then moved out from the sun. They let us piece together the history of our solar system. But almost all of these icy worlds are painfully small and faint: It’s really exciting to find one that’s large and bright enough that we can study it in detail,” Michele Bannister, an astronomer at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, said in a statement.

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Youngest planet spotted around alien star

Image: K2-33b
An artist’s conception shows K2-33b crossing the disk of its parent star. (Credi: NASA / JPL-Caltech)

Scientists say they’ve detected a giant planet circling a star that’s only 5 million to 10 million years old, which would make it the youngest exoplanet ever identified.

The super-Neptune-sized planet traces a super-close-in orbit, making a complete swing around its parent star every 5.4 Earth days, according a team of astronomers associated with NASA’s repurposed Kepler space telescope. The star, known as K2-33, is in the Upper Scorpius stellar association, about 500 light-years from Earth.

Infrared observations of K2-33 indicate that the star is still surrounded by the remnants of gas and dust from a protoplanetary disk. Such disks form around stars as they’re born and give rise to planets, but the disks are thought to dissipate after a few million years. That’s how astronomers figured out that the planet was so young.

“At 4.5 billion years old, the Earth is a middle-aged planet — about 45 in human-years,” Caltech astronomer Trevor David said in a news release. “By comparison, the planet K2-33b would be an infant of only a few weeks old.”

David is the first author of a paper on the discovery published online today by the journal Nature.

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This may be the best view of Pluto we ever see

Image: Pluto surface
Craters and linear features are scattered across Pluto’s terrain in this high-resolution view from NASA’s New Horizons probe. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

Almost a year after NASA’s New Horizons probe flew past Pluto, the team behind the mission has put together a long mosaic strip that includes all of the highest-resolution images.

“This new image product is just magnetic,” Alan Stern, a planetary scientist from Southwest Research Institute who serves as New Horizons’ principal investigator, said today in a NASA news release. “It makes me want to go back on another mission to Pluto and get high-resolution images like these across the entire surface.”

The view starts up at the edge of Pluto’s disk and runs hundreds of miles, down to nearly the terminator line between Plutonian day and night. The width of the strip ranges from 45 to 55 miles, depending on the perspective. Peak resolution is about 260 feet per pixel.

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2007 OR10 deserves a better name

Image: Dwarf planets compared
An illustration lines up the solar system’s four largest dwarf planets, with 2007 OR10 in the middle of the pack. (Credit: Andras Pal / Konkoly Observatory, Ivan Eder / Hungarian Astronomical Association, NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

Observations made by NASA’s Kepler space telescope suggest that the icy world known as 2007 OR10 is bigger than astronomers thought –and that’s adding to the pressure to give the probable dwarf planet an official name, nine years after its discovery.

Some of the suggestions pick up on the recent controversy over a British ship-naming contest in which Boaty McBoatface emerged as the overwhelming favorite. So how about Dwarfplanety McDwarfplanetface, or Plutoid McPlutoface?

The cause of all this mirth is a research paper in the Astronomical Journal that provides a new size estimate for 2007 OR10, which lies far out in the Kuiper Belt, the broad ring of icy material just beyond Neptune. The object traces an eccentric orbit that takes 547.51 Earth years to complete, and ranges as far out as 66.9 times Earth’s distance from the sun (6.2 billion miles).

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Software helps scientists double planet count

Image: Planet diversity
A graphic shows the diversity of planets. (Credit: NASA)

The scientists behind NASA’s Kepler mission are using statistics to put their campaign to identify new planets into overdrive: New software that automates the process has verified 1,284 candidates as genuine planets rather than celestial “impostors,” more than doubling its database of confirmed worlds.

“This is the most exoplanets that have ever been announced at one time,” Princeton University researcher Timothy Morton said today during a teleconference revealing the latest counts.

Kepler’s official tally of potentially habitable planets close to Earth’s size took a jump as well, from 12 to 21.

NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan hailed the rapid progress. “This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth,” she said in a statement.

The dramatic acceleration in the planet hunt is due to a statistical method pioneered by Morton and his colleagues, and described in a paper published in theAstrophysical Journal.

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Hubble spots dwarf planet Makemake’s moon

Image: Makemake and MK 2
An artist’s conception shows the distant dwarf planet Makemake with its dark moon, MK 2, lurking to the right. (Credit: NASA / ESA / A. Parker / SwRI)

Chalk up another moon for the dwarf planets: Astronomers have sifted through imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope to find a tiny satellite circling Makemake.

Makemake (pronounced Mah-kay-mah-kay, like the Rapa Nui deity after which it’s named) is one of the five dwarf planets recognized by the International Astronomical Union, along with Pluto, Eris, Haumea and Ceres. It’s more than 50 times farther away from the sun than Earth is, which translates to a distance of 4.8 billion miles.

With a diameter of 870 miles, Makemake is the third-largest known solar system object beyond the orbit of Neptune, in a wide ring of icy material called the Kuiper Belt. (Planet Nine, a.k.a. Planet X, would change the order if it exists, but it hasn’t yet been found.)

Like Eris, the dwarf planet that stirred up all the fuss over Pluto’s planetary status, Makemake was discovered in 2005 by a team led by Caltech astronomer Mike Brown. Like Pluto, Makemake is thought to be covered in frozen methane.

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The case for Planet Nine (a.k.a. Planet X)

Image: Planet Nine
An artist’s conception shows a “super-Earth” far from the sun. (Credit: R. Hurt / IPAC / Caltech)

For decades, astronomers have gone back and forth over whether a “Planet X” exists on the edge of our solar system – and now two researchers have laid out new evidence supporting the claim, including a rough idea of where it could be found.

One of the most notable things about the claim has to do with one of the people who’s making it: Mike Brown, the Caltech astronomer who says he “killed” Pluto when it was the ninth planet.

“This would be a real ninth planet,” Brown said in a news release. “There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be the third.”

Brown’s “two true planets” refer to Uranus and Neptune, not Pluto. To emphasize the point, Brown and his collaborator at Caltech, Konstantin Batygin, have nicknamed the object “Planet Nine.” (Other nicknames are said to include George, Planet of the Apes, Jehoshaphat and Phattie.)

There’s one big gap in the argument: No such object has yet been detected.

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Stamps celebrate Pluto, planets and ‘Star Trek’

Image: Pluto stamps
The U.S. Postal Service’s souvenir sheet of four stamps contains two new stamps appearing twice. The first stamp shows an artist’s rendering of the New Horizons spacecraft and the second shows the spacecraft’s enhanced color image of Pluto taken near closest approach. (Credit: Antonio Alcala / USPS)

For the first time since 1991, Pluto and the solar system’s eight bigger planets are getting their own postage stamps – thanks to a U.S. Postal Service cosmopalooza that also spotlights Earth’s moon and “Star Trek.”

The Pluto stamp pays tribute to NASA’s New Horizons mission, and updates 1991’s speculative view of the dwarf planet. Back then, the legend on the 29-cent stamp read “Pluto – Not Yet Explored.” This time, the four-stamp sheet carries the label “Pluto – Explored!”

The stamps follow through on a petition that was filed by New Horizons’ fans more than three years ago – long before the piano-sized probe flew past Pluto on July 14.

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How the ‘Star Wars’ saga scores on science

Image: Lightsaber
Kylo Ren (played by Adam Driver) wields a lightsaber with three blazing blades in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Just be careful where you point that thing, Kylo! (Credit: Lucasfilm / Disney)

The “Star Wars” saga isn’t exactly a science textbook, but there’s one fact about the universe that the movies got dazzlingly right: There are more planets out there than you can shake a lightsaber at.

Back in 1977, the movie now known as “Star Wars: A New Hope” put an assortment of alien worlds on display. There was Tatooine, a desert planet with two suns. Alderaan was Princess Leia’s home planet and the epicenter for a “disturbance in the Force.” Rebels took refuge on a moon in orbit around the gas giant Yavin.

In those days, the idea that there could be so many livable worlds seemed like pure science fiction. “For the most part, scientists thought planets were very rare in the universe,” said Jeanne Cavelos, an astrophysicist-turned-author who literally wrote the book on “The Science of Star Wars.”

Now we know better.

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