Nocera is an engaging, persuasive and occasionally profane speaker who mercilessly dismisses every form of energy on the planet besides solar.
The extra-solar planet is one of a mere handful detected using a novel technique called microlensing.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Planet hunters find 'super-Earth'
They proclaimed the observation as the first visual - albeit indirect - proof of a planet outside our Solar System.
On Monday, January 21st, the Moon will appear amazingly close in the sky to the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter.
ENGADGET: PSA: Slooh's Space Camera broadcasting Moon / Jupiter conjunction right now
Located 168 light years from Earth orbiting the star Kappa Andromedae, this planet is about 12.8 times more massive than Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system.
FORBES: Astronomers Locate Massive 'Super-Jupiter' Around Giant Star
Prof Solomon said that what Messenger finds not only unlocks secrets about the innermost planet in our Solar System, but could also shed light on those of other planets.
The largest planet in the solar system, Jupiter, has these cloud of Trojan asteroids that straddle its orbit, so that would seem to violate a plain reading of the definition.
Kepler-22b is quite a bit larger than the biggest rocky planet in this Solar System (which happens to be Earth), but much smaller than the smallest of our local gaseous worlds (Neptune).
If the new object were a captured alien, it could give astronomers their first good look at an extra-solar planet, or a brown dwarf if that is what it turns out to be.
Plate tectonics, the formation of faults and the moving of the continental crust over a molten interior, is a characteristic unique to Earth and it meant that minerals evolved far beyond those on any other planet in the Solar System.
Carbon dioxide and other gases warm the surface of the planet naturally by trapping solar heat in the atmosphere.
By unleashing a massive pulse of electromagnetic radiation sweeping over the planet, a severe solar storm could potentially knock out the electric power grid, silence radio and satellite communications and disrupt GPS navigation systems.
But the new find is a planet just a third the size of that recent record-holder, smaller even than our Solar System's smallest planet, Mercury.
BBC: Exoplanet Kepler 37b is tiniest yet - smaller than Mercury
Australia is countenancing the same sorts of issues, as it will soon have the highest rate of rooftop solar penetration on the planet.
FORBES: The Economist: Innovation Almost Dead. Perhaps Not So In Electricity
Lying only 10 light years away in the equatorial constellation of Eridanus, it was already known to harbor at least one extra-solar Jupiter-like planet, which orbits the star roughly every 7 years.
Now, researchers speculate that it is the first known meteorite from our Solar System's innermost planet, Mercury.
Huge sheets of ice reflect solar radiation, keeping our planet cool.
CNN: Polar bears resort to cannibalism as Arctic ice shrinks
In its solar system there is another planet, Gliese-581d, that is also of interest in the search for life, according to the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo.
The stakes have just been raised a notch: Not only is there another planet right next door in our own solar system that had habitable environments on its surface long ago, but there appear to have been common and recognizable -- perhaps even Earthlike -- environments on Mars.
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.
The planet and its neighbours are bathed in the solar wind, a stream of charged particles ejected from the upper atmosphere of the sun.
But part of the problem with the definition - I mean, as an example - is that if you look at Mars - if Mars - if we discovered a Mars-sized object out beyond the orbit of Pluto, it couldn't be a planet, because over the age of the solar system it wouldn't have time to clear its orbit.
China is the manufacturing juggernaut that supplies the majority of low-cost solar cells to the rest of the planet.
FORBES: Low Carbon Economies And Smart Grids: Watch Out For China
Subsequent missions will analyse the solar wind, three comets and the planet Mercury.
The newfound world, dubbed Kepler-22b, is much bigger than our planet - but, even so, it's also the smallest world yet discovered outside our Solar System, and finding it does bode well for the eventual detection of a true twin, a planet that really is a second Earth.
But the second planet may yield more valuable clues about the formation of solar systems and the universe.
Planet hunters are finding more and more worlds beyond our solar system.
The kilometre-wide separation of the component satellites of Terrestrial Planet Finder should allow it to see planets in distant solar systems a problem akin to looking for moths flying around a football-stadium arc light that is several hundred kilometres away.
Regardless of which theory is correct (and both might be wrong), the effect of fewer cosmic rays would be fewer clouds and since clouds tend to cool the earth by reflecting incoming solar radiation away from it a warmer planet.
应用推荐