On July 14th, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will flyby Pluto, offering the first close-up look at that small, distant world. You can help decide what names will be used on subsequent maps of the dwarf planet and its largest moon, Charon, as the SETI Institute announces the launch of its “Our Pluto” campaign.
An international scientific team using NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has discovered a cloud produced by a supernova explosion 10,000 years ago that contains enough dust to make 7,000 Earths, showing that supernovae are capable of producing a substantial amount of the material from which planets can form.
Researchers at the Australian National University and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen have calculated that billions of stars in the Milky Way will have between one and three planets in the habitable zone conducive to liquid water, by using a law proposed in 1766 that helped to discover Uranus.
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