The Kepler observatory has discovered two new planets like Saturn orbiting a star and a third possible candidate with an approximate size to Earth, NASA announced.

This is the first time that the probe, with its complex systems, captures more of a transiting planet around a star. According to scientists, this finding will better understand the origin and evolution of planets from the calculations of density, mass and temperature, and analysis of the interaction of two bodies between them and their star.

The two planets have been named as Kepler 9b and Kepler 9c, and orbit at a distance of 2,000 light years from Earth. Its composition is similar to that of Saturn because they are composed of gas, possibly hydrogen and helium, as explained in a conference call the director of the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University, Matthew Holman. The expert and his team analyzed seven months of data of 156,000 stars sent by the powerful telescope, which in its first year of life discovered five planetary bodies beyond the solar system, called exoplanets. (more…)

Astronomers have discovered in the Milky Way a lot of hitherto unknown regions where massive stars are forming. This discovery provides important new information on the structure of our galaxy and promises to provide new clues about its chemical composition. (more…)

On Thursday, Air Force of the United States launched the first satellite dedicated entirely to monitor the thousands of pieces of space junk that man has been spreading around the Earth. The mill will have the sole mission of real-time monitoring of the positions of other satellites and the thousands of fragments of all sizes that float freely in the orbit of our planet. (more…)

“The telescope Planck was designed for a time like this,” says David Southwood, director of Science and Robotic Exploration of the European Space Agency (ESA) can not avoid expressing his great satisfaction at the achievement of the spacecraft. The probe has captured its first image of the entire universe, which not only provides a new vision of how they formed the stars and galaxies, but shows us how the Cosmos itself developed after the Big Bang. (more…)

In March 2008, scientists from University College London announced the existence around Rhea, the second largest satellite of Saturn, what appeared to be three rings formed by narrow strips of ice remains. The news had its importance since it would have been the first time rings around a moon rather than a planet. However, further study has confirmed that these rings simply were not there. So what the researchers saw the first time? (more…)

Almost 7,000 asteroids, most of which are around one hundred meters in diameter, now moving toward Earth, according to a report less than 24 hours by the researcher Boris Shustov, director of the Institute of Astronomy of the Academy of Sciences Russia. (more…)

The radiation map of the cosmic microwave background, the remains of the Big Bang.

You’ve probably read many times that the universe is composed in a measly 4% of normal matter, the one of which is done all you can see, from ourselves to the planets, stars and galaxies. You may also know that the other 23% is composed of what scientists called dark matter, a mystery for physics, undetectable in both the visible light range and the rest of the wavelengths of our telescopes. Even rarer is the remaining 74% of the Cosmos, made by a mysterious force, dark energy. (more…)

Since last May 13, the world is a place a little safer. That day, indeed, opened in Hawaii a small but extremely powerful telescope, with a single mission: to monitor the sky and find Earth-threatening asteroids. To achieve this, has the largest digital camera that exists on our planet, one of 1,400 mega-pixels. (more…)

An international team of astronomers from Japan, Britain and Taiwan just got, for first time, images that reflect the distribution of dark matter around 20 large clusters of galaxies. The finding confirms the theoretical predictions had been made so far. Dark matter is distributed around galaxies as halos of irregular shapes and often elongated. The research opens new avenues toward understanding the true nature of this enigmatic class of matter not composed of atoms. The results will be published in the monthly magazine of the Royal Astronomical Society.

What is dark matter? The answer to this question is still unknown and is one of the central problems of physics and modern astronomy. And it is that dark matter really does honor to its name in a number of different ways. It is undetectable in both the visible light range and the rest of the wavelengths that are able to solve the best telescopes. Neither in the infrared, or X-rays or ultraviolet dark matter has yet revealed his true nature. (more…)

A group of physicists and astronomers, led by John J. Matese of the University of Louisiana, has just published a study which points to the disturbing possibility that at the borders of our solar system there is an unknown giant planet with a mass between one and four times that of Jupiter.

The massive companion of the Sun would be in the outer parts of the Oort cloud, about a light year away from us, the vast spherical region of debris surrounding the solar system and from which they come most of the comets known. (more…)