Earthlike Planet Found Orbiting at Right Distance for Life. A possible Earth twin has been confirmed orbiting a sunlike star 600 light-years away—and the new planet may be in just the right spot for supporting life, NASA announced Monday. Discovered by the Kepler space mission, the new planet—dubbed Kepler-22b—is the first world smaller than Neptune to be found in middle of its star's habitable zone. Also called the Goldilocks zone, the habitable zone is the region around a star where a planet's surface is not too hot and not too cold for liquid water—and thus life as we know it—to exist. (Also see "New Planet May Be Among Most Earthlike—Weather Permitting. ") Other planets have been spotted in the habitable zones of their stars, but most of those worlds are Jupiter- or Neptune-size bodies that are unlikely to harbor life. (Related: "Six New Planets—Mini-Neptunes Found Around Sunlike Star.
") "What makes this particular discovery so exciting is that this planet is right smack in the middle of the habitable zone," Batalha said. WIKISKY.ORG. Photopic Sky Survey. Wallpaper. Videos See the universe come to life via animations, scientific visualizations, expert commentary, and more. How Far Away is the Sun? Another Visualization. - Brad BlogSpeed.
Alright, this one’s a doozy. After the reasonable popularity of last week’s scale picture that illustrated the distance between the Earth and the Moon, I just had to take things to the next logical level. Today I’ve reduced the scale, and increased the image size dramatically, to represent one astronomical unit (AU), or the distance between the earth and the Sun.* So allow me to just say ahead of time that I apologize if this post breaks anyone’s computer. I’m not a web-savvy dude (note the use of Posterous instead of WordPress) so I’m not sure what nightmares could potentially be created by posting a 500 x 284,049 pixel image on the web.
I tried to split the image into parts, compress it to crap, and repeat the areas of blank space where I could to mitigate any potential problems. I also realize that this down scrolling visual device, one that worked so well on the moon example, strains its usefulness here. But try not to, at least for a while. If you enjoyed this post, please consider: