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Mission reveals surprises about the planet Mercury

Last updated Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - 5:42pm

The smallest planet in the solar system keeps serving up big surprises. Scientists working on the Messenger mission to Mercury have found that the planet has unexpected inner layers and craters with tilted bottoms, and it may have been geologically active far later into its life than previously imagined.

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This illustration provided by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows artist's renderings of planets Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f compared with Venus and the Earth. Scientists have found the two Earth-sized planets orbiting a distant star, an encouraging sign for prospects of finding life elsewhere. The discovery shows that such planets exist and that they can be detected by the Kepler spacecraft, said Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. They’re the smallest planets found so far outside the solar system. Scientists are seeking Earth-sized planets as potential homes for extraterrestrial life, said Fressin, who reports the new findings in a paper published online Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2011 by the journal Nature. (AP Photo/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

Two Earth-sized planets discovered

Lisa M Krieger San Jose Mercury News

Last updated Wednesday, December 21, 2011 - 11:04am

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- NASA's Kepler mission has found the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system. But they're too hot to support liquid water -- or life.

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Milky Way full of wandering planets, new research suggests

Los Angeles Times, Thomas H. Maugh II

Last updated Thursday, May 19, 2011 - 2:00pm

The Milky Way galaxy may be filled with millions upon millions of Jupiter-sized planets that have escaped their solar systems and are wandering freely in space, researchers said Wednesday in a finding that seems certain to make astronomers rethink their ideas about planetary formation.

While scientists had previously thought that about 20 percent of stars had massive planets attached to them, the new results reported in the journal Nature suggest that there are at least twice as many planets as stars, and perhaps several times as many.

The finding "is a revelation in the sense that it looks like a quintupling of the number of gas giants in the universe," said astronomer Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who was not involved in the research.

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