Earth’s closest twins have been found. The two most Earth-like planets – Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b have been found orbiting red dwarf stars that are smaller and cooler than our Sun. Kepler-438b circles its star every 35 days, while Kepler-442b completes one orbit every 112 days. With a diameter just 12% bigger than Earth, Kepler-438b has a 70% chance of being ... Read More »
Always wondered about alien lives and their origins… well here is an interesting hypothesis! Could extraterrestrial life be made of corkscrew-shaped particles of interstellar dust? Intriguing new evidence of life-like structures that form from inorganic substances in space are revealed today in the New Journal of Physics. The findings hint at the possibility that life beyond earth may not necessarily ... Read More »
In a bid to monitor Earth better, Nasa has successfully installed and activated its first Earth-observing instrument — the ISS-RapidScat — on the International Space Station (ISS). The ISS-RapidScat will monitor ocean winds for climate research as well as weather predictions and hurricane monitoring. The instrument has already begun collecting data. “Its antenna began spinning and it started transmitting and ... Read More »
So what are Exoplanets? Well, Exoplanets are planets outside of the solar system. They are also referred to as extrasolar planets. Starting in 1992 with the first discovery, astronomers have located about 837 such planets in 660 planetary systems around the Milky Way galaxy. Researchers believe they will find many more planets — a 2012 study estimated that each star of ... Read More »
Panspermia Perhaps life did not begin on Earth at all, but was brought here from elsewhere in space, a notion known as panspermia. For instance, rocks regularly get blasted off Mars by cosmic impacts, and a number of Martian meteorites have been found on Earth that some researchers have controversially suggested brought microbes over here, potentially making us all Martians ... Read More »
Much of the water on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system likely predates the birth of the sun, a new study reports. The finding suggests that water is commonly incorporated into newly forming planets throughout the Milky Way galaxy and beyond, researchers said — good news for anyone hoping that Earth isn’t the only world to host life. “The implications of ... Read More »
A star-explosion mystery that puzzled astronomers for more than two decades has finally been solved. Researchers using data gathered by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have determined that the supernova SN 1993J — which was first observed in 1993, as its name suggests — occurred because one star nabbed hydrogen from another. “This is like a crime scene, and we finally identified the robber,” ... Read More »
Yes, soon you may travel to space in specially prepared space balloon! A Chinese entrepreneur plans to set up a commercial space project to fly travellers in a manned capsule above the earth surface where they can see the curve of the planet and experience weightlessness. Jiang Fang, president of a Beijing-based company “Space Vision,” plans to build a manned ... Read More »
Black holes – the most dense objects in the universe that do not even let light escape- do not exist, a physics professor in the US has claimed. Laura Mersini-Houghton at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the College of Arts and Sciences, has proven, mathematically, that black holes can never come into being in the first place. ... Read More »
The Launch Vehicle – PSLV-C25 will inject the Spacecraft into an Elliptical Parking Orbit with a perigee of 250 km and an apogee of 23,500 km. With six Liquid Engine firing, the spacecraft is gradually maneuvered into a hyperbolic trajectory with which it escapes from the Earth’s Sphere of Influence (SOI) and arrives at the Mars Sphere of Influence. When ... Read More »
