The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has found signs of Earth-like planets in an unlikely place: the atmospheres of a pair of burnt-out stars in a nearby star cluster. The white dwarf stars are being polluted by debris from asteroid-like objects falling onto them. This discovery suggests that rocky planet formation is common in clusters, [continue reading]
TAU finds white dwarf stars may hold the key to detecting life on other planets Because it has no source of energy, a dead star — known as a white dwarf — will eventually cool down and fade away. But circumstantial evidence suggests that white dwarfs can still support habitable planets, says [continue reading]
Researchers at The University of Auckland have proposed a new method for finding Earth-like planets and they anticipate that the number will be in the order of 100 billion. Most of the discovered extrasolar planets lie within 300 light-years of the Solar System. Image Credit: NASA/JPL The strategy uses a technique called gravitational microlensing, currently [continue reading]
Glimpses of a giant alien planet may help to answer questions about its origins and those of our own Solar System. A team of astronomers, including Quinn Konopacky of the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, have made the most detailed examination yet of the atmosphere of a Jupiter-like planet [continue reading]
Even dying stars could host planets with life – and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white [continue reading]
Astronomers from Leiden University and the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) think it may be possible to detect signs of extraterrestrial life within the next 25 years… without the need for a space mission. Their article about this will be published in The Astrophysical Journal. Artist’s impression of the European Extremely Large Telescope [continue reading]