Posts tagged with ‘astronomy’

Three newly discovered exoplanets could be perfect for life

Two of the newly discovered potentially habitable exoplanets orbit the same star, Kepler-62, which is located about 1,200 light-years away. The system resembles our own, with five planets total, though the other three worlds are all too close to the star to contain life as we know it. The two farthest planets, Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f, have 1.6 and 1.4 times the radius of Earth and go around their parent start every 122 and 267 days, respectively.

Because their parent star is only about two-thirds the size of our sun, the estimated surface temperatures of the two worlds is -3 degrees and -65 degrees Celsius. While that sounds very chilly, the calculation doesn’t take into account a potential atmosphere, which would act like a warm blanket, heating the planets up and possibly producing temperatures where liquid water could exist.

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The Hubble telescope captures the true face of evil in the universe

The gravitational field surrounding this massive cluster of galaxies, Abell 68, acts as a natural lens in space to brighten and magnify the light coming from very distant background galaxies. Like a fun house mirror, lensing creates a fantasy landscape of arc-like images and mirror images of background galaxies. The foreground cluster is 2 billion light-years away, and the lensed images come from galaxies far behind it. In this photo, the image of a spiral galaxy at upper left has been stretched and mirrored into a shape similar to that of a simulated alien from the classic 1970s computer game “Space Invaders!” A second, less distorted image of the same galaxy appears to the left of the large, bright elliptical galaxy.

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What would it look like if you flew a Cessna over the surfaces of other planets or moons in the Solar System?

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