A team of planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology have published a paper documenting strong circumstantial evidence for a large planet with an orbit outside of Pluto’s. This yet-undiscovered planet is hypothesized to be smaller than Neptune, but would be 10-times more massive than Earth, and comes no closer than 30.5 billion km (19 billion miles) to the Sun.
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In a first for astronomy, a distant supernova has been observed that was previously predicted to appear, has been imaged by a team of astronomers from the University of South Carolina, using the Hubble Space Telescope. The prediction utilized the effect of gravitational lensing, where the gravity of a massive object will bend light from a source behind it around itself, as if it were an optical lens.
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With recent advances in imaging technology pushing the boundaries of astronomy and space exploration more rapidly than ever before, new discoveries within the solar system and beyond are now being made at a breakneck pace. Part of that exploration has been for the elusive Planet X, a theorized large trans-Neptunian world that has otherwise eluded attempts at detection. Until now, only smaller planetoids have been discovered in the deep dark of space, but two new findings hold promise as new candidates for the title of Planet X.
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A team of researchers have announced they have completed a map of a previously unknown weather system. Unlike other known weather systems however, this map has recorded wind speeds of 5,400 mph, on a planet 63 light-years away.
This new weather map, generated by astrophysicists at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, England, is of exoplanet HD 189733 b. This is a gas giant that is 14% larger than Jupiter, orbiting the star HD 189733 A, found in the constellation of Vulpecula. It is very close to it’s parent star — nearly 13 times closer than Mercury is to the Sun — and orbits it’s star every 2.2 days.
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