An exoplanet 320 light-years from Earth has been found in a trinary star system, photographed by the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile. Aside from having the distinction of being one of mere handful of exoplanets that have been directly imaged, the planet, labeled as HD 131399Ab, has a year that lasts 550 Earth years, as it orbits the large central star.
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An Asian studies expert and amateur satellite tracker have voiced their concerns over the possibility that China’s Tiangong-1 space station may be de-orbiting without control from the ground. The station, launched in 2011, was a temporary testbed for the technologies for Tiangong-2, a permanent station scheduled to be launched in September of this year. Beijing’s original plan was to de-orbit the spacecraft in 2013, but Tiangong-1, Chinese for "Heavenly Palace 1", remained in orbit after that date, conducting long-term endurance tests of the now unmanned station’s components.
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Whitley’s book 2012: The War For Souls involved the inter-dimensional invasion of a parallel Earth that had a number of marked differences from our own, including one departure where that Earth had two moons. However, as life sometimes imitates art, our own reality has taken an odd step toward being a bit more like Two-Moon Earth, in that it has been found that we have a second natural "quasi-satellite" accompanying our previously solitary Moon.
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In another first for modern astronomy, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile have produced what may the first direct photograph of an exoplanet that is orbiting a star that has another previously-known planet that was found using the proven "transit method". The transit method is where the planet’s presence is detected by the dimming of the parent star as the planet transits between the star and Earth.
"If it is confirmed that CVSO 30c orbits CVSO 30, this would be the first star system to host both a close-in exoplanet detected by the transit method and a far-out exoplanet detected by direct imaging," according to the ESO release article.
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