If it holds up, the latest finding would be one of the first direct observations of the very early stages of a planet's birth.
It has long been thought that the lunar body resulted from an impact between the early Earth and another planet-sized object 4.5 billion years ago.
Scientists made the discovery first by pinpointing their target through infrared images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, and later using the Very Large Telescope to deduce that the object was both too small to be a star as well as hot and young enough (752F and under 120 million years old) to fit the behavior of a planet orphaned early into its existence.
The headline fish species of the evening, along with the multitudes of extremely tanned men, served as a reminder that somewhere on the planet in this early spring, it is indeed seasonably warm.
Kepler needs to witness three of these "transits" to detect a planet, so its early discoveries were tilted toward close-orbiting worlds (which transit more frequently).
Asteroids and meteorites, along with comets, are regarded as left-overs from the raw ingredients of the early solar system, uncooked by any planet-forming processes.
But here it was, the early creep of 2013, and the planet now discussing an old tattoo of a football coach whose team wasn't in the playoffs.
This is the kind of subtle detail the scientists are looking for as they build a picture of what conditions were like on early Mars and the possibility that the planet could once have harboured simple lifeforms.
BBC: Nasa's Curiosity Mars rover to ingest drill sample soon
Since the Arctic as a whole is responding to climate change earlier and more acutely than the rest of the planet, we should think of it as an early warning system -- a proverbial canary in a coalmine.
Mars Express continues to listen out for Beagle's call but if no contact is made by early February, the lander segment of this first solo European mission to another planet will be declared lost.
The "Blueprint for Mobility" details the company's early thinking on how to tackle the issues of mobility in an increasingly crowded and urbanized planet between now and 2025.
ENGADGET: Road safety project simTD connects cars, infrastructure. Hopes to save lives, time
Since the very first planets outside our solar system were discovered in the early 1990s, the hope has been to find an "Earth twin" - a planet like ours, orbiting a star like ours, at a distance like ours.
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