The Universe: Planetary Systems
Planetary Systems includes topics such as Extrasolar and Solar planets and Planetology. A planetary system consists of the various non-stellar objects orbiting a star such as planets, moons, asteroids, meteoroids, comets, and cosmic dust. The Sun and its planetary system, which includes Earth, is known as the Solar System. Planetary systems are generally believed to form as part of the same process which results in star formation. Accepted theories today argue that a protoplanetary disk forms by gravitational collapse of a molecular cloud and then evolves into a planetary system by collisions and gravitational capture.
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Featured Article
Exoplanet: Atmosphere
An "exoplanet" is an extra-solar planet, that is, a planet orbiting a star other than our own sun. Of the roughly 307 currently known extrasolar planets, about thirty of them transit their...
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Featured Blog Post
Detecting Extrasolar Planets
The first detection of extrasolar planets was announced in 1995 by two competing groups. One was headed by Geoff Marcy, then at San Francisco State University, the other by Michel Mayor at the Geneva...
Latest News
In All the Universe, Just 10 Percent of Solar Systems Are Like Ours
WASHINGTON, DC (Jan. 5, 2010) – In their quest to find solar systems analogous to ours, astronomers have determined how common our solar system is. They’ve concluded that about 15...
Articles
Importance of Planet Detection The "Kepler Mission: A search for Habitable Planets" is NASA's first mission ca...
SIM (Space Interferometry Mission), scheduled for launch within the next decade, will be the most powerful pla...
News Articles
NASA-JPL (May 13, 2009) NASA's Kepler spacecraft has begun its search for other Earth-like worlds. The mis...
PASADENA, CA (Jan. 4, 2010) NASA's Kepler space telescope, designed to find Earth-size planets in the habitab...
PASADENA, CA (Feb. 9, 2010) NASA astronomers have successfully demonstrated that a David of a telescope can t...
CAMBRIDGE, MA (Dec. 18, 2009) In the new blockbuster Avatar, humans visit the habitable - and inhabited - ali...
PRINCETON, NJ (Dec. 3, 2009) An international team of scientists that includes an astronomer from Princeton U...
ESO (Oct. 21, 2009) Today, at an international ESO/CAUP exoplanet conference in Porto, the team who built ...
NASA-JPL (Oct. 19, 2009) Peering far beyond our solar system, NASA researchers have detected the basic che...
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