Clear skies, in the UK, for an astronomical event - it can happen!

( large photo )

io9 has an intriguing story about a planet larger than Earth and as dense as lead. (Not to mention being white hot).

A bit of digging turns up the paper that this story is based on, made available last week. However, in the course of searching for it I found this paper by another team, which whilst referencing the first paper (I assume they saw a ( Read more... )

The Kepler planet-hunting probe has demonstrated the clarity of its detection system by seeing not only the dip in light as a planet passes in front of its star, and indeed not only the dip again caused by the planet's own light as it passes behind, but the smooth increase in light from the planet as it's orbit takes it through the full range of ( Read more... )

... evidence that this may actually have happened. Observations indicate that what was assumed to be a protoplanetary disc around BD+20 307 could be no such thing, as the star turned out to be both a binary and far too old to be in the early stages of forming a solar system. Rather, the interpretation now is that we're looking at the debris cloud ( Read more... )

Info on Comet Holmes, which brightened a million-fold last week and is now apparently an easily-visible naked-eye object in Perseus.

More info from Heavens-Above


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