Your Home Planet, as Seen From Mars

From the most powerful telescope orbiting Mars comes a new view of Earth and its moon, showing continent-size detail on the planet and the relative size of the moon.



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https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/earth-and-its-moon-as-seen-from-mars

5 Potentially Earth-Like Planets Nearby

A possibly Earth-like planet has been found within the habitable zone of humanity's closest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, and astronomers think the world could potentially support life.

While there is still a lot to learn about this newfound world, called Proxima Centauri b or just Proxima b, astronomers are sure of a few things: The Earth-like rocky exoplanet is 4.2 light-years away; its minimum mass is 1.3 times that of the Earth, and it orbits Proxima Centauri every 11.2 days.

Astronomers also said that Proxima b lies within the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, which means the planet orbits a safe distance from the star, making it neither too hot or too cold. Because of this, astronomers said that Proxima b may have suitable surface temperature that would allow for the presence of liquid water, meaning the exoplanet could support some sort of life.

"We know very little about these [types of] planets," Thomas Barclay, senior research scientist and director of the Kepler and K2 missions, told Space.com. NASA's orbiting Kepler Space Telescope has identified more than 2,000 confirmed planets around other stars based on changes in the stars' brightness. "For some of them, we know an approximate mass or an approximate radius, and we know roughly how far they are from their star — but that's really all we know."

With the discovery of Proxima b, here are five other potentially Earth-like planets that astronomers have previously found in Earth's interstellar neighborhood...

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http://www.space.com/33952-five-nearest-earth-like-alien-planets.html

Innovative 'Starshade' Tech Could Illuminate Rocky Alien Planets

"Starshade" technology that could help astronomers find and characterize rocky, Earthlike alien worlds was put to the test earlier this year in the Nevada desert.

A starshade, also dubbed an external occulter, is a precisely shaped screen that flies in far-away formation with a space telescope. The device blocks a star's light to create a high-contrast shadow, so that only light from an orbiting exoplanet enters the telescope for detailed study.

While a starshade to hunt alien planets has not been flown before, researchers studying the technique are drawing upon a track record of success in fielding large, deployable antennas in space. Some designs foresee a fully deployed starshade measuring some 110 feet (34 meters) in diameter, with a 65-foot (20 m) inner disk and 28 outstretched flowerlike petals, each over 22 feet (7 m) in length.

Read the entire article:
http://www.space.com/27765-starshade-tech-alien-planet-search.html

Two giant planets may cruise unseen beyond Pluto

The monsters are multiplying. Just months after astronomers announced hints of a giant "Planet X" lurking beyond Pluto, a team in Spain says there may actually be two supersized planets hiding in the outer reaches of our solar system.

When potential dwarf planet 2012 VP113 was discovered in March, it joined a handful of unusual rocky objects known to reside beyond the orbit of Pluto. These small objects have curiously aligned orbits, which hints that an unseen planet even further out is influencing their behaviour. Scientists calculated that this world would be about 10 times the mass of Earth and would orbit at roughly 250 times Earth's distance from the sun.

Now Carlos and Raul de la Fuente Marcos at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain have taken another look at these distant bodies. As well as confirming their bizarre orbital alignment, the pair found additional puzzling patterns. Small groups of the objects have very similar orbital paths. Because they are not massive enough to be tugging on each other, the researchers think the objects are being "shepherded" by a larger object in a pattern known as orbital resonance.

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http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25711-two-giant-planets-may-cruise-unseen-beyond-pluto.html

New Dwarf Planet Found at Solar System's Edge, Hints at Possible Faraway 'Planet X'

Astronomers have found a new dwarf planet far beyond Pluto's orbit, suggesting that this distant realm contains millions of undiscovered objects — including, perhaps, a world larger than Earth.

The newfound celestial body, called 2012 VP113, joins the dwarf planet Sedna as a confirmed resident of a far-flung and largely unexplored region scientists call the "inner Oort Cloud." Further, 2012 VP113 and Sedna may have been pulled into their long, looping orbits by a big planet lurking unseen in these frigid depths.

"These two objects are just the tip of the iceberg," study co-author Chadwick Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, told Space.com. "They exist in a part of the solar system that we used to think was pretty devoid of matter. It just goes to show how little we actually know about the solar system."

Read the entire article below:
http://www.space.com/25218-dwarf-planet-discovery-solar-system-edge.html

Alien Planet Around Solar Twin Found in Distant Star Cluster, a First (Video)

Scientists using a powerful telescope in Chile have found an alien planet circling a star that is nearly identical to the sun and located in a star cluster 2,500 light-years from Earth



Read the entire article at:
http://www.space.com/24287-alien-planet-solar-twin-discovery-video.html

Super-sensitive Camera Captures a Direct Image of an Exoplanet

The world’s newest and most powerful exoplanet imaging instrument, the recently-installed Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) on the 8-meter Gemini South telescope, has captured its first-light infrared image of an exoplanet: Beta Pictoris b, which orbits the star Beta Pictoris, the second-brightest star in the southern constellation Pictor. The planet is pretty obvious in the image above as a bright clump of pixels just to the lower right of the star in the middle (which is physically covered by a small opaque disk to block glare.) But that cluster of pixels is really a distant planet 63 light-years away and several times more massive — as well as 60% larger — than Jupiter!

And this is only the beginning.

Astronomers discover planet that shouldn't be there

An international team of astronomers, led by a University of Arizona graduate student, has discovered the most distantly orbiting planet found to date around a single, sun-like star. It is the first exoplanet – a planet outside of our solar system – discovered at the UA.

Weighing in at 11 times Jupiter's mass and orbiting its star at 650 times the average Earth-Sun distance, planet HD 106906 b is unlike anything in our own Solar System and throws a wrench in planet formation theories.

"This system is especially fascinating because no model of either planet or star formation fully explains what we see," said Vanessa Bailey, who led the research. Bailey is a fifth-year graduate student in the UA's Department of Astronomy.

It is thought that planets close to their stars, like Earth, coalesce from small asteroid-like bodies born in the primordial disk of dust and gas that surrounds a forming star. However, this process acts too slowly to grow giant planets far from their star. Another proposed mechanism is that giant planets can form from a fast, direct collapse of disk material. However, primordial disks rarely contain enough mass in their outer reaches to allow a planet like HD 106906 b to form. Several alternative hypotheses have been put forward, including formation like a mini binary star system.

"A binary star system can be formed when two adjacent clumps of gas collapse more or less independently to form stars, and these stars are close enough to each other to exert a mutual gravitation attraction and bind them together in an orbit," Bailey explained. "It is possible that in the case of the HD 106906 system the star and planet collapsed independently from clumps of gas, but for some reason the planet's progenitor clump was starved for material and never grew large enough to ignite and become a star."

According to Bailey, one problem with this scenario is that the mass ratio of the two stars in a binary system is typically no more than 10-to-1.

Read the entire article:
http://phys.org/news/2013-12-astronomers-planet-shouldnt.html#jCp

Read more related material:
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/5201/20131205/massive-newfound-planet-defies-traditional-planetary-formation-theories.htm

Earth-size planet found with rocky core like ours

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- Scientists have found a planet way out in the cosmos that's close in size and content to Earth - an astronomical first.

But hold off on the travel plans. This rocky world is so close to its sun that it's at least 2,000 degrees hotter than here, almost certainly too hot for life.

Astrophysicists reported Wednesday in the journal Nature that the exoplanet Kepler-78b appears to be made of rock and iron just like Earth. They measured the planet's mass to determine its density and content. It's actually a little bigger than Earth and nearly double its mass, or weight.

Kepler-78b is located in the Cygnus constellation hundreds of light-years away. Incredibly, it orbits its sun every 8 1/2 hours, a mystery to astronomers who doubt it could have formed or moved that close to a star. They agree the planet will be sucked up by the sun in a few billion years, so its time remaining, astronomically speaking, is short.

Read the entire article:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SCI_ROCKY_PLANET