Giant celestial disk hard to explain Star's oversized debris ring challenges theories of planet formation Web edition : Friday, June 15th, 2012 ANCHORAGE, Alaska - About 80 light-years away, an enormous, dusty ring swirls around a sunlike star, with a defined inner edge that is probably sculpted by a planet orbiting at 140 times Earth's distance from the sun.
"These results are suggestive for exotic life, but by no means a clincher," says Strobel. "What we want to do next is actually to measure something that may prove or disprove the abiotic and biological hypotheses,” he says – like the existence of such a catalyst.
Opportunity landed on the red planet in January 2004 along
with its sister rover, Spirit. The pair were originally planned to travel the
Martian surface for only 90 days each, but have now set the record for the longest
mission on Mars.
A solar sneeze, a superhot planet, the death of a comet and more in this week's news Web edition : Tuesday, July 26th, 2011 Someone should teach the Sun some manners. When it sneezed on June 7, the sun blew an enormous glob of dark plasma into space - and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught it on tape.