Astronomy TheFoxPosts.com

With a greater focus on asteroids and objects from deep space, as well as the possibility of a collision with Earth, astronomers have arrived for the first time at a planet that may have lost its atmosphere as a result of a collision with a massive object. A team of astronomers has discovered an Earth-like planet that may have lost some of its atmosphere owing to a collision 200,000 years ago. Astronomers from MIT, the National University of Ireland Galway, and Cambridge University uncovered evidence of the massive collision in a neighboring star system, only 95 light-years away from Earth. The star, known as HD 172555, is roughly 23 million years old, and astronomers believe its dust shows indications of a recent collision. According to the study published in the journal Nature, massive impacts are what cause planets like the early Earth to reach their ultimate mass and attain long-term stable orbital arrangements. One significant prediction is that these impacts will generat...

A pair of rocky planets orbiting the star LP 890-9, also known as SPECULOOS 2, seem likely to be in the habitable zone and one of them could be the second most habitable exoplanet discovered so far The telescopes of the SPECULOOS Southern Observatory in the Atacama desert in Chile were used to discover SPECULOOS-2c ESO/P. Horálek A pair of rocky planets slightly larger than Earth are orbiting in the habitable zone around a dim red dwarf star and one may be the second most Earth-like exoplanet discovered so far. The planet s are called LP 890-9b – which had been spotted before but we knew little about it – and LP 890-9c, also called SPECULOOS-2c. Only a few details are known about SPECULOOS-2c beyond its size and the eight days it takes to orbit its star, LP 890-9, also known as SPECULOOS 2. Amaury Triaud at the University of Birmingham, UK, and his colleagues, who spotted it, hope the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might tell us more about whether it has an atmosphere and...