A very small rocky planet—close to the size of Mercury—is evaporating as it orbits the host star. The putative planet orbits the star in less than 16 hours, so the planet’s surface is highly irradiated. The planet would actually be hot enough to vaporize rocky material at the surface, which could escape the gravitational pull of the planet and form a comet-like tail trailing the orbit.
Venus transits the Sun, from the frame of the Earth, about twice every century, separated by eight years. The last one happened in 2004, and another is happening in June 2012. Observing the transmission spectrum during the 2012 transit—and comparing it to measured transmission spectra of the Earth, taken during lunar eclipses—will tell us how hard it will be to distinguish two planets that look identical in mass and radius, but have extremely different atmospheric properties.
In an effort to quantify the common misconceptions about the relationship between astronomy and astrology, the authors of this study surveyed nearly 10,000 undergraduates at the University of Arizona over a 20-year period. Here’s what they found.
One of the many cool observations that have come from the WISE telescope survey this year has been the discovery of the first Trojan asteroid orbiting at the same semi-major axis as the Earth. The authors of this paper outline a way to optimize future surveys to find more of these Earth Trojans.
The authors present results that show a feature in the final reconstructed image of this transition disk in both K band and L band (2 bands in the near-infrared). The L band source is somewhat elongated and appears to include two separate regions. The K band image falls between these two L band regions and is more like a point source. The authors interpret this as a protoplanet in the process of forming with an extended heated region around it.