One day in the future perhaps not 10 years from now we will be able to look up into the night sky at particular stars and know that they have Earth like planets orbiting them. SETI is going to scan the stars with exoplanets for intelligent life in 2011 and you never know do you? [...]
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Identifying Exoplanets by Their Dust Tails
Are we losing the Sahara to space? No, is the simple answer to that. The Earth has a trail of dust behind it but the dust is interstellar dust which is already present in the solar system. This interplanetary dust comes from the fragments of comets and asteroids that have collided. As the Earth travels [...]
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Actual and Artist Images of Exoplanets
Extrasolar planets or for short exoplanets have been found in orbit around many different star systems other than ours. Exoplanets are being found all the time but take a look at this database of exoplanets for an idea on their characteristics. An actual image has been shot sometime back of an exoplanet but as you [...]
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How to Measure the Atmosphere of Another Planet
So how do scientists find out what is in an atmosphere? Yes, this can be really interesting because when an extrasolar planet that is earth like is found in would be nice to find out if it could support life by looking at its atmosphere and the way it is made up. Obviously a nice [...]
Space
Best of the Week Podcast-Hubble’s First Images of an Extrasolar Planet.
Paul Kalas was the leader of the team who managed the long-sought feat of actually taking a photograph of a planet orbiting another star. Before this, all the planets outside our solar system were found by indirect means. He describes how they achieved the breakthrough, using the Hubble Space Telescope, and discusses the wide range [...]
aliens
Where Are All The Civilisations?
What is going on? Where are they all? Are they here? Too many questions and literally too little time. It just seems so really boring that we can be the only ones in this universe. Time is definitely a massive problem when looking for somebody alien to chat to. Does it matter that there are [...]
