Summaries | Headlines

First Directly Imaged Brown Dwarf Companion To An Exoplanet Host Star (October 21, 2006) -- Astronomers have detected a new faint companion to the star HD 3651, already known to host a planet. This companion, a brown dwarf, is the faintest known companion of an exoplanet host star imaged ... > full story

Hubble Zeroes In On Nearest Known Exoplanet, Confirms That Planets Form From Disks Around Stars (October 9, 2006) -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, in collaboration with ground-based observatories, has provided definitive evidence for the existence of the nearest extrasolar planet to our solar system. The ... > full story

Hubble Finds Extrasolar Planets Far Across Galaxy (October 4, 2006) -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered 16 extrasolar planet candidates orbiting a variety of distant stars in the central region of our Milky Way galaxy. The planet bonanza was uncovered during ... > full story

Astronomers Discover Two New Planets, Both Among The Hottest Ever (September 26, 2006) -- A team of UK, French and Swiss astronomers has discovered two new Jupiter-sized planets around stars in the constellations of Andromeda and Delphinus. They are among the hottest planets yet ... > full story

Scientists Snap First Images Of Brown Dwarf In Planetary System (September 19, 2006) -- Scientists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered and directly imaged a small brown dwarf star, 50 times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting with a planet around a sun-like star. Such an ... > full story

Strange New Planet Baffles Astronomers (September 14, 2006) -- Using a network of small automated telescopes known as HAT, Smithsonian astronomers have discovered a planet unlike any other known world. This new planet, designated HAT-P-1, orbits one member of a ... > full story

Earth-like Planets May Be More Common Than Once Thought (September 10, 2006) -- More than one-third of the giant planet systems recently detected outside Earth's solar system may harbor Earth-like planets, many covered in deep oceans with potential for life, according to a new ... > full story

Planet Or Failed Star? One Of Smallest Stellar Companions Seen By Hubble (September 8, 2006) -- Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have photographed one of the smallest objects ever seen around a normal star beyond our Sun. Weighing in at 12 times the mass of Jupiter, the ... > full story

Bigger Solar System? Astronomers Debate Definition Of 'Planet' And 'Plutons' (August 16, 2006) -- The world's astronomers, under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), have concluded two years of work defining the difference between "planets" and the smaller "solar system ... > full story

Models Show One Nearby Star System Could Host Earth-like Planet (July 24, 2006) -- Researchers running computer simulations for four nearby systems that contain giant planets about the size of Jupiter have found one that could have formed an Earth-like planet with the right ... > full story

Mysterious Carbon Excess Found In Infant Solar System (June 8, 2006) -- Astronomers at the Carnegie Institution detected unusually high quantities of carbon, the basis of all terrestrial life, in an infant solar system around nearby star Beta Pictoris. The surprise ... > full story

Forming Super-Earths By Ultraviolet Stripping (June 7, 2006) -- A new explanation for forming "super-Earths" suggests that they are more likely to be found orbiting red dwarf stars -- the most abundant type of star -- than gas giant planets like Jupiter and ... > full story

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The 12th Planet (The Earth Chronicles, Book 1)
Zecharia Sitchen's The 12th Planet is the starting point on a quest that spans six books and 20 years worth of ancient aliens, genetic manipulation, and scrutiny of linguistic minutiae. If we trust ... > read more

Roving Mars : Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet
teve Squyres is the face and voice of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission. Squyres dreamed up the mission in 1987, saw it through from conception in 1995 to a successful landing in 2004, and serves ... > read more

Physics for Scientists and Engineers (3rd Edition)
Physics for Scientists and Engineers combines outstanding pedagogy with a clear and direct narrative and applications that draw the reader into the physics. The new edition features an unrivaled ... > read more

Lonely Planet Healthy Travel Africa (Lonely Planet Healthy Travel Guides Africa)
Getting the most out of your travels means staying healthy. Healthy Travel Africa is a user-friendly guide to minimising health risks for travellers to all parts of Africa, including Egypt. Written ... > read more

Field Notes from a Catastrophe
An argument for the urgent danger of global warming in a book that is sure to be as influential as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.Known for her insightful and thought-provoking journalism, New ... > read more

Essential Cosmic Perspective, The (3rd Edition)
The Essential Cosmic Perspective, Third Edition, built from the ground up on our new understanding of the universe, has been revised and streamlined to make it easier for readers to navigate and ... > read more

Elemental Geosystems, Fourth Edition
This book gives readers an accessible, systematic, non-mathematical, and visually appealing start in physical geography. It features a distinctive, holistic integration of human-Earth relationships, ... > read more

Gen-e-sis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins
Life on Earth arose nearly 4 billion years ago, bursting forth from air, water, and rock. Though the process obeyed all the rules of chemistry and physics, the details of that original event pose as ... > read more

The Privileged Planet : How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery
A convincing case that the rare, finely tuned conditions that allow for intelligent life on Earth are no coincidence, and that Earth was practically designed for ... > read more

Earth: Portrait of a Planet
This survey is the first to weave together the three major intellectual revolutions in the Earth Sciences that have occurred in the last forty years--the theory of plate tectonics, the ... > read more