For the first time in more than 10 years, it will be possible to see all five bright planets together in the sky.

Around an hour or so before sunrise, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the five planets that have been observed since ancient times, will appear in a line that stretches from high in the north to low in the east.

The planets are visible from right across Australia in the dawn sky. You can start to look for the lineup from Wednesday, January 20 and it can be seen right through until the end of February.

Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn have been in the morning sky since the beginning of the year. Jupiter is bright in the north, next comes reddish Mars, followed by pale Saturn and lastly brilliant Venus, which shines above the eastern horizon. It is the appearance of Mercury that makes the family complete.

Mercury has just transitioned from an evening object to a morning object. At first it will appear quite low to the eastern horizon and of all the planets it is also the faintest, so it will be hard to see to begin with. However, Mercury will continue to rise higher each morning and by early February it will sit just below bright Venus.

Dates with the moon

If you need something a little more to get you leaping out of bed before sunrise, then here are the dates to mark in your calendar. From the end of January, the moon will travel by each planet and can be used as an easy guide for your planet-spotting.

On January 28, the moon will be right next to Jupiter. Come February 1, the moon (in its Last Quarter phase) will be alongside Mars, then on the following morning it’ll sit just below the red planet. On the morning of February 4, the crescent moon will be near Saturn. Then on February 6, the moon will be alongside Venus and on February 7, a thin sliver of moon will sit below Mercury.

In line with the sun

The line formed by the planets in the sky closely follows the ecliptic, the apparent path of the sun against the background stars. This path marks the plane of our solar system, visual proof that the planets, including Earth, all orbit the sun on roughly the same plane.

The ecliptic is bordered by the constellations of the zodiac and one of the most recognizable zodiac constellations is Scorpius. If you’re awake before the first rays of the sun begin to drown out the stars, then look for the curved outline of the scorpion between Mars and Saturn. In fact, sitting just above Saturn is the red supergiant star Antares, which marks the heart of the scorpion and its reddish color makes it the perfect rival for Mars.

Rare oddity

It’s been a long time since the orbits of all five planets have brought them together to the same patch of sky. To make the best of the viewing opportunity try and get to a clear open space where you can see from the north all the way across to the eastern horizon.

As early February comes around, I also highly recommend checking out the flight path of the International Space Station via websites such as Heavens Above or NASA’s Spot the Station.

The Station will be flying morning passes over Australia during that time and current predictions for each capital city have it traveling right through or near the line of planets, for example: Darwin (February 3), Brisbane (February 5), Perth (February 6), Sydney (February 7), Canberra (February 7), Adelaide (February 8), Melbourne (February 9) and Hobart (February 11). The predictions can change slightly, so best to check the websites closer to the date and be sure to enter your precise location to obtain the most accurate timing for the pass.

Finally, there’s still more to come. This August the five planets will be together again, visible in the evening sky, so stay tuned for more planet watching in 2016.

Tanya Hill, Honorary Fellow of the University of Melbourne and Senior Curator (Astronomy), Museum Victoria

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Saturn’s Rings are amazing to behold. Since they were first observed by Galileo in 1610, they have been the subject of endless scientific interest and popular fascination.

Composed of billions of particles of dust and ice, these rings span a distance of about 282,000 km (175,000 miles) – which is three quarters of the distance between the Earth and its Moon – and hold roughly 30 quintillion kilograms (that’s 3.0. x 10¹⁸ kg) worth of matter.

All of the Solar System’s gas giants, from Jupiter to Neptune, have their own ring system – albeit less visible and picturesque ones. Sadly, none of the terrestrial planets (i.e. Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) have such a system.

But just what would it look like if Earth did? Putting aside the physical requirements that it would take for a ring system to exist, what would it be like to look up from Earth and see beautiful rings reaching overhead?

It is precisely this question that inspired Kevin Gill, a software engineer who performs science data visualizations for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to create “Rings Over Earth”.

Using vacation photos he has taken over the years, and then tweaking them with Photoshop and the 3-D animation/modeling software Maya, Gill was able to superimpose Saturn-like rings onto photographs of Earth’s skies.

In so doing, he was able to give viewers a realistic idea of what it would be like to look up at the skies and see a ring system similar to Saturn’s – specifically from the locations of New Hampshire, the San Bernadino Valley, the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, or Pasadena, California.

And as you can see from the photos, the end result is rather breathtaking and inspiring.

The photos also show how the ring system would appear at different times of day. For instance, the photo of San Bernadino, CA, shows how the rings would appear in the sky at morning, with the Sun cresting the eastern horizon.

The photo of Pasadena shows how the rings would appear at midday, with the Sun directly overhead and illuminating the rings.

And then there are the shots taken from the Griffith Observatory that show how the rings would appear in the night sky over downtown Los Angeles.

In one, we see them descending towards the glowing horizon (top), with a crescent Moon not far away. In the other (above), we see how a section of the rings has been obscured by the Earth’s shadow.

And last, but not least, there is how the rings would appear from orbit, which you can see below. No doubt, such a ring system would play havoc with orbiting satellites and space stations (such as the ISS).

But as Kevin told Universe Today via email, the project was not an exercise in plausibility, but merely for fun.

“I made [the pictures] out of a curiosity of how they would look after having done a few Saturn-related renders,” he said. “I rigged the camera, rings and Earth in Maya, placing the camera more-or-less where I indented the viewer to be (New Hampshire, Los Angeles, etc.)

I used Photoshop to composite the Maya rendered rings over photographs I had taken over the last year. Like the angles, the lighting is more-or-less approximate.”

As a full-time member of the Jet Propulsion Labority who is responsible for producing visualizations, Gill certainly understands the process of bringing data to life.

But as he admits, these pictures may not be an exact rendition of what a ring system would like to an Earth-bound observer. “I didn’t do any math in preparation to get the angles exactly right,” he said. “In fact, in one of the images, I actually moved the Moon out to the right of where it actually was to simulate a more ‘southerly’ view.”

However, there is a fair degree of scientific merit to this kind of artistic speculation. For starters, it is widely believed that at one time, Earth had a ring system of sorts, which was the result of a cataclysmic impact.

This is part of what is known as theImpact Hypothesis of the Moon’s formation, where a newly-formed Earth was struck by a Mars-sized object named Theia roughly 4.5 billion years ago.

This collision ejected material into orbit, which would have formed into a ring around the planet. As this ring fell outside of Earth’s Roche Limit, the force of mutual attraction caused thse particles to accrete to form the Moon, which was then able to hold together.

Had it been outside of Earth’s Roche Limit, this material would have not been able to come together and would therefore have remained as a disc. This is the case for Saturn, which maintains a beautiful ring system within it’s Roche Limit, and several moons beyond it.

So while Earth, in some alternate reality, could have had a ring system, we would have paid for it by never having the Moon.

Hence, there would have never been an Apollo Program, and we would not be currently contemplating building settlements there someday. Doesn’t exactly seem like a fair exchange does it?

But I think we can all agree, the idea of a ring system around Earth (and some artistic renderings of what it would look like) makes from some pretty nice viewing!

And Gill is not the first to create photos that imagine what Earth would look like if it had rings. In 2013, veteran astronomy artist Ron Miller created a series of illustrations of a ringed Earth.

As former art director at the National Air & Space Museum’s Albert Einstein Planetarium, Miller has been responsible for producing countless visualizations of what other planets would look like to the casual observer. You can view his artwork here.

And back in 2009, information provided by NASA”s Cassini space probe led to a number of animators producing videos of what Earth would look like with rings.

One such artist was Roy Prol (aka. T0R0YD), who used 3DS Max to show how the rings would appear in the sky from different latitudes on Earth. Clearly, we all wonder what our planet would look like if it were a little less “Earth-like”!

Be sure to can check out Kevin Gill’s gallery on Flickr, as well as other works of astronomy-related artwork.

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As humans continue exploring further out into space, through both government organizations like NASA and up and coming private space enterprises like SpaceX and Blue Origin, we're going to need a lot more laws to govern space.

The US just made it legal for Americans to mine resources from asteroids, but space, and especially business in space, is largely unregulated right now — which makes it surprisingly easy for someone to become a space pirate.

Space law basics

Could the first person who steps on Mars declare themselves supreme ruler of the planet? Would you have to obey a speed limit in your moon rover? If someone wanted to settle on Mars permanently and build a Martian castle (Elon Musk maybe?), would he be able to buy a plot of land?

Well, according to Article I of the United Nation's Outer Space Treaty, one of the most important parts of the laws that govern space, every celestial body in space, including Mars, falls under international law:

Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.

And so, as of now, no state, person, or company can lay claim to any land that's not on Earth:

Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.

BUT! People, governments, and private corporations still own, say, their living quarters, spaceships and rovers that they send to another planet.

Space piracy

So essentially the universe beyond Earth counts as international waters. But crafts out in space still belong to their owners.

This is exactly what leaves ships in international waters open to piracy: when a crew commandeers a ship and steals its cargo.

Turns out if you tried the same move in space (by raiding a spacecraft instead of a ship) that would technically make you a "space pirate."

Currently, the International Space Station (ISS) belongs to Europe, the United States, Russia, Canada, and Japan, and the Mars rover Curiosity belongs to the US. So, if a crew ever boarded the ISS without permission from the countries that own it, it'd be space piracy.

While this has never happened in real life, there's an amazing list of fictional space pirates on Wikipedia.

And in "The Martian," Mars-stranded NASA astronaut Marc Watney gives a great (and hilarious) example of how international law would manifest on Mars. When he is inside a NASA-owned Mars habitat, US law applies. But as soon as he steps outside onto Martian soil, he's in international waters.

At one point, Watney needs to use a NASA spacecraft called Ares 4. NASA hasn't explicitly given him permission to climb aboard, and according to the UN Outer Space Treaty, you can't lay claim to anything in space — so he must "commandeer" Ares 4, an action that will technically make him a pirate under international law.

"After I board Ares 4, before talking to NASA, I will take control of a craft in international waters without permission," Watney says in the book. "That makes me a pirate! A space pirate!"

It's clear we'll need a real legal system if we set up a colony on Mars or some other distant world — especially if that colony is run by a private corporation. (SpaceX CEO Elon Musk dreams of setting up a whole civilization on Mars.)

Writing new laws is already a complicated process, but writing them for an inhospitable, alien world like Mars may be even harder. How much freedom can someone expect to have on a planet with no breathable air or protection from radiation?

Compliance with certain rules might deprive people of what we on Earth consider basic freedoms (think about having to stay indoors during a dust storm or only having a certain amount of oxygen per day to use to explore the planet), but it could mean the difference between life or death.

Some groups, like those at the annual International Extraterrestrial Liberty Conference, are already trying to figure out how we'll govern space if humans attempt to settle somewhere beyond Earth.

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The most luminous galaxy in the universe is in danger of tearing itself asunder, new research in The Astrophysical Journal Letters shows.

The galaxy, called quite simply W2246-0526, lies 12.4 billion light-years from Earth, and is so consumed by turmoil that it lies in danger of ejecting its entire supply of star-forming gas.

The discovery was made by a team using cutting-edge technology in the Atacama desert of Chile, and the implications of their work are important for what it can teach us about the fate of both W2246-0526 and galaxies in general.

“This discovery provides a new insight into the processes through which galaxies evolve” Roberto Assef, co-author of the study and an astronomer with the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, tells The Christian Science Monitor in an e-mail interview.

The researchers, based at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), were following on from work done by NASA.

The American space agency’s WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) spacecraft had already analyzed W2246-0526, revealing that the infrared light pouring from the galaxy is shining as brightly as more than 300 trillion suns.

What ALMA has enabled for the first time is a study of the actual motion of the galaxy’s interstellar medium, the gas and dust that swirls between the stars.

“It is known that every galaxy is formed having large amounts of interstellar gas from which new stars are constantly born,” says Dr. Assef.

“Such is the case for the Milky Way, for example, where new generations of stars are constantly being formed. Through their life, galaxies will eventually lose their gas and, hence, lose the ability to form new stars.”

What we lack, says Assef, is the understanding of how this happens.

The evidence gathered suggests that W2246-0526 has at its center a “voraciously feeding supermassive black hole”.

The unparalleled brightness of this galaxy is being powered by a tiny, intensely powerful disk of gas spinning round the supermassive black hole. The light exploding from this disk is first absorbed by the surrounding dust and then thrown out into the universe on the infrared wavelength.

“The powerful infrared energy emitted by the dust then has a direct andviolent impact on the entire galaxy, producing extreme turbulence throughout the interstellar medium”, said Assef, according to the press release.

But all of this fresh insight is only available thanks to ALMA, a telescope consisting of 66 antennae that work together to function as one.

“It’s the most powerful telescope of its kind ever constructed,” Charles Blue of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) tells The Christian Science Monitor in a phone interview.

The NRAO is the North American arm of ALMA, though the telescope itself is entirely Chile-based.

“Its function is to look at the cold dark universe that’s not necessarily seen in optical light,” says Mr. Blue. “It can resolve very fine details to a level we just couldn’t see before”.

ALMA is based at 5,000 meters above sea level, in the Atacama desert. It was placed in such inhospitable terrain to provide it with a very high, dry site - critical to the telescope's operation.

It first came online in 2013, but only came into possession of its full capabilities about a year ago.

"Only ALMA, with its unparalleled resolution, can allow us to see this object in high definition and fathom such an important episode in the life of this galaxy,” said Manuel Aravena, also from the Universidad Diego Portales, and co-author of the study. 

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For anyone who’s ever struggled to keep a plant alive on their desk, if you don’t feel incompetent enough already, you should probably know that astronauts have just grown perfect zinnias on the International Space Station (ISS). You know, that place with zero sunlight and microgravity conditions that are known to do weird things to biological processes.

Your own personal failings aside, the fact that astronaut Scott Kelly and his orbiting colleagues managed such a feat is really exciting, because it hints at what might be possible on a lunar, or perhaps even Martian, settlement in the not-so-distant future.

The bright orange zinnias were cultivated in the Vegetable Production System(Veggie), which is a deployable plant growth unit capable of producing a range of crops, including the first ever space lettuce, which the ISS crew taste-tested back in August. 

The plastic-wrapped Veggie system provides LED lighting and nutrients for the plants inside, and relies on the surrounding cabin environment to maintain optimal temperature and carbon dioxide levels. But as sophisticated as the technology is, the months-long journey from seed to flower has been anything but hands-off for the crew.

"There was mould, drought, and flooding in the roots. There were gardening guidelines, urgent, 4am phone calls, and distressed tweets. Some plants didn’t make it and had to be clipped off," Lonnie Shekhtman reports for The Christian Science Monitor.

Fortunately, Kelly is anything but a quitter, and took it upon himself to turn things around after a post-Christmas bout of plant rot.

After weeks of experimentation, the crew figured out that fans could be used to gently dry out the plants after too much humidity fostered mould, but they had to keep adjusting the fan strength after initially drying the plants out because they hadn't upped the water supply. All of that stress ended up killing two of the four zinnias, but two survived to blossom fully over the weekend.

While they're certainly the most beautiful flowers to have ever been grown in space, they're not the only flowers to have a cosmic birth, despite what Kelly's tweet below says:

Back in 1982, the Soviets managed to grow some Arabidopsis plants on board the ISS, and the Guiness Book of Records declared them to be the first plants to flower and produce seeds in space. More recently, US astronaut Don Petittsuccessfully grew a sunflower, but it didn't exactly blow anyone away with its beauty.

Magestic or shrivelled, space flowers and space crops are going to be crucial to our future colonisation plans, and we still have a whole lot to learn. "The unexpected turns experienced during this Veggie run have actually offered bountiful opportunities for new learning and better understanding of one of the critical components to future journeys to Mars,"says NASA.

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For decades, humans have been hunting for extraterrestrial intelligence, but 32 years after the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute was founded, the cosmos remains eerily quiet.

This silence has influenced a new group of experts over recent years which says it's time to stop listening and start talking — by deliberately transmitting messages into space for anyone who might be searching for them. They call the project Active SETI.

Many intellectual leaders of our age, including Stephen Hawking, say that the idea behind Active SETI should be avoided at all cost, but co-founder and former director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, Jill Tarter, pointed out a serious flaw in Hawking's philosophy.

While Hawking fears that giving aliens our cosmic address could potentially bring death and ruin — much like what happened to many groups of Native Americans when Europeans invaded North America — Tarter thinks that aliens advanced enough to skip across star systems and reach Earth will be friendly, not aggressive.

"The idea of a civilization which has managed to survive far longer than we have ... and the fact that that technology remains an aggressive one, to me, doesn't make sense," Tarter told Business Insider. "The pressure of long-term survival — of limiting population ... I think requires that the evolutionary trends that ratcheted up our intelligence ... continues to evolve into something that's cooperative and take on global scale problems."

As humans continue to evolve, our society and the way we handle controversies changes along with us.

"We're kinder and gentler than we've ever been in the past," Tarter said, sighting evidence put forth in Steven Pinker's 2011 book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined," where Pinker investigates the psychological reasoning for violence over the course of human history, discovering six trends of declining violence between the time of first agricultural civilizations to present day.

Another example supporting Tarter's philosophy can be found in one cross-cultural study of 31 hunter-gatherer tribes, researchers discovered evidence that more than half — 64% — engaged in warfare within a two-year period. Yet that taste for warfare has dwindled over the years, says Tarter, with the aid of emerging technologies and innovation.

So, if growing kindness is a direct consequence of humanity's time on Earth, then, according to Tarter's theory, we can expect 10,000 years from now to be less warlike than we are today — and Tarter suspects the same for other intelligent civilizations beyond our solar system.

Having spent most of her career as director of the SETI Institute, Tarter is one of the world's leading experts on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Her work caught the attention of Carl Sagan, who drew strongly from Tarter's life for his sci-fi book "Contact," which was later adapted into the 1997 film of the same title.

Tarter said the idea of transmitting messages into space, as opposed to listening for them, has been on members' minds since the very beginning of SETI. And while she doesn't think a visit from aliens would spell disaster, she agrees with Hawking that humanity should not be sending signals into space — at least, not yet.

"I think that when we grow up and are an advanced technology, and can take on very long-term projects, then we ought to begin transmitting," she said. "But at the moment, in our very youthful state as an emerging technology we should listen, first."

On Wednesday, the people behind WeTransfer — a cloud-based file transfer service — launched its second season of "Creative Class," which honors some of "the most influential people in the creative space." Tarter, along with three others, were recognized for their work. You can learn more about Tarter and her research in this Creative Class feature on Vimeo or below:

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New information has eliminated comets for being the cause of KIC8462852's dimming.

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A company called World View is planning to float passengers to "the edge of space"— about 20 miles into the sky — via balloon by the end of 2016.

And they've just announced that if you want to take a ride, you'll have to get yourself to Tucson.

In a statement, World View announced January 19 that Arizona's Pima County voted to go in on a public-private partnership with the company. Their brand new global headquarters will be based in Tucson, Arizona. All launches will lift off from the Spaceport Tucson launch pad.

While there is no real consensus on where exactly space begins, the International Astronautical Federation thinks it starts at the 100-kilometer mark — about 62 miles up. According to that definition, this 5-hour joy ride get you 1/3 of the way there.

It will also include cocktails, stunning views of the stars, the blackness of space, and the curvature of Earth, all for the hefty sum of $75,000 — about the price of a new entry-level Tesla.

Here's a peek at what it'll be like to float at an altitude of 100,000 feet, above 99% of Earth's atmosphere.

The World View campus will sit next to the Spaceport Tucson launch site, which will be Arizona's first space endeavor-devoted launch pad.

After arriving at the launch site, six passengers and two crew members would climb aboard the fully-pressurized Winnebago-sized capsule, which contains a bathroom and a refreshment bar.

Source: Popular Science. 

The capsule offers 360-degree views and internet access, so you can share photos in real-time.

For almost a century scientists have suspected that an undiscovered planet is lurking on the edge of our solar system, and now there's new evidence that this mysterious "Planet X" really does exist.

You can divvy up the Solar System into four parts: the inner rocky planets, the Asteroid Belt, the gas giants, and a huge cluster of small icy bodies called the Kuiper Belt.

Some of those icy chunks in the Kuiper Belt are big enough to count as dwarf planets (like Pluto and Eris).

But scientists think something bigger — perhaps four times the size of Earth — is lurking out there on the edge of the Kuiper Belt, according to research published today (January 20) in The Astronomical Journal.

"We have found evidence that there’s a giant planet in the outer solar system," astronomer and "Pluto Killer" Mike Brown told Popular Science. "By 'giant' we mean the size of Neptune, and when we say 'outer solar system' we mean 10 to 20 times farther away than Pluto."

Since 2003, Brown and other astronomers have discovered six new dwarf planets orbiting on the fringe of the Kuiper Belt. They all appear to follow a similar orbital pattern, albeit a really strange one. 

Their synchronized wonky orbital path suggests something much larger is out there and tugging on them. Brown and others believe that larger something is a giant "Planet X."

You can see an illustration of what the orbital paths around the sun might look like below. The purple rings represent the six dwarf planets, while the yellow ring is their suggestion of where Planet X – or, Planet 9 — could be:

All of the planets we know of orbit much closer to the sun in the diagram above.

If this giant "Planet X" exists, we probably haven't spotted it because it's so far away that it'd be incredibly faint, according to related research from astronomer Scott Sheppard. It's about 200 times farther from the sun than Earth is, so it would appear extremely faint to us.

While this is pretty compelling evidence that there's a giant planet out there, there very well could be another explanation for why these dwarf planets appear to have the same wonky orbits. The bottom line is that the researchers don't know enough about these far away areas of our solar system yet.

Brown has teamed up with Caltech astrophysicist Konstantin Batygin to try and change that. They've created an open source map, published in The Astronomical Journal, that seeks to pin down where Planet X might be hiding.

They'll be using the Subaru telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii to hunt it down and search for more dwarf planets that it might be influencing to get a better idea of what this mystery planet may be like. Brown and Batygin estimate it could take them five to 15 years to find it, according to Popular Science.

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Astronomers are discovering dozens of new exoplanets each year, but it's been nearly 170 years since we detected a new planet in our own solar system.

Now, a team of astronomers who originally sought to kill the notion that there is a ninth planet orbiting our sun has accomplished just the opposite.

They have what they consider to be the strongest evidence yet for the farthest planet from our sun, informally called Phattie, but commonly known as Planet Nine.

Planet Nine was first proposed in 2014, and it has been the job of Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown — both scientists in the Division of Geological and Planetary Science at the California Institute of Technology — to essentially debunk it.

"Our main goal at that point was to show that this idea is crazy," Brown told Nature News. Now, over a year later, Brown and Batygin are reporting the exact opposite — that a planet much larger than Earth is orbiting our sun 18.6 billion miles away. They reported their findings in a paper, which has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal.

If this ninth planet exists, the team suspects it's 10 times the mass of Earth and 200 times farther from the sun. At that distance, it would take the planet between 10,000 to 20,000 Earth years to complete one trip around the sun. Pluto, for comparison, takes 248 years to complete its orbit.

At that distance, the possibility for life is near to none. Instead of life, you're likely to find a desolate ice ball with a gassy outer layer, like Neptune.

A smoking gun

No one has yet observed Planet Nine, but there are other methods of detecting planets besides sight — namely through their gravitational influence on nearby objects.

In the mid 19th century, astronomers had observed bizarre perturbations in the orbit of Uranus which French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier said could be explained by the gravitational effect of another planet beyond Uranus. Thus, Neptune was discovered before it was ever observed.

As it so happens, a similar case is what gave Planet Nine's existence away, the team reported. But instead of one Uranus, this times it's six different objects.

Traipsing through space at the fringes of our solar system are thousands of small, icy bodies that make up what astronomers call the Kuiper belt. Six Kuiper belt objects in particular are misbehaving in their expected orbits, the team reported.

"You can think of them like different hands on the clock," Brown told Popular Science. "They're all moving at different rates in the same direction, and every once in a while you look up and they are all in the same spot."

This bizarre alignment was the first sign that something was herding these objects. To find out what that something was, the team turned to powerful computer models that could test different potential reasons for what was causing the bodies' unusual orbits.

Two lines of evidence

For a while, the team was stumped, but when they tested the seemingly impossible — a giant planet beyond the Kuiper belt — they discovered their models matched perfectly with the observations. Here's an illustration of the six objects' orbits, as well as Planet Nine's:

But that wasn't enough to convince them. If, in fact, there was a ninth planet, then it would also hold a gravitational influence over some of the many other thousands of objects in the Kuiper belt. After all, gravity is not prejudiced.

One such influence would involve kicking objects into steep orbits. Compared to the eight planets which all orbit mostly in a flat disc around the sun, these objects would orbit nearly perpendicular to that disc.

As it turned out, astronomers in the past had detected half a dozen or so Kuiper belt objects with this exact type of orbit, but no explanation had been convincing enough at the time to understand this odd behavior. A ninth planet could be the solution.

"The fact that they're now marshaling two new, independent lines of evidence for a hypothetical planet makes their case even stronger," Greg Laughlin, who studies planet formation at the University of California, Santa Cruz and was not part of the research team, told Scientific American.

Prove it

Other experts remain unconvinced, however.

"I have seen many, many such claims in my career," Hal Levison, who's a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, told Nature News. "And all of them have been wrong."

One way to prove their theory holds water is to observe Planet Nine through a telescope. That's why the team is currently scanning the skies with one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth, located on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. 

Given its distance, spotting this potential planet will be extremely difficult but necessary, at least if we're ever to know of its existence beyond any doubt.

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Consider applying if:

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Astronomers say they've discovered a ninth planet 200 times farther from the Sun than Earth.

Produced by Emmanuel Ocbazghi. Original Reporting by Jessica Orwig.

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It's easy to forget how small our Earth is within the known universe. These to-scale visuals will help to keep that in perspective.

Produced by Jacqui Frank

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There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there, but one of the oldest and most prominent is that the United States faked the moon landing. Neil deGrasse Tyson has another way to look at how to deal with the conspiracy theories.

Produced by Darren Weaver and Kamelia Angelova. Additional production by Kevin Reilly.

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StarTalk Radio is a podcast and radio program hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, where comic co-hosts, guest celebrities, and scientists discuss astronomy, physics, and everything else about life in the universe. Follow StarTalk Radio on Twitter, and watch StarTalk Radio "Behind the Scenes" on YouTube.

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The Hubble Space Telescope returned this incredible image of a cluster of some of the brightest stars in our galaxy.

The blue-white stars are so bright they look like a field of cosmic diamonds. That little smudge near the center is silhouette of a clump of gas and dust:

This cluster of stars is called Trumpler 14 and it's about 8,000 light-years away from us in the Carina Nebula.

The stars in Trumpler 14 are only a few hundred thousand years old (our own sun is billions of years old), but the young stars are burning through their cores of hydrogen fuel so quickly that most will explode as supernovas in the next few million years.

They're also releasing bursts of high-speed particles from their surface which get swept up into stellar winds. These winds collide with other cosmic material and created super-hot shock waves that heat surrounding gas clouds to millions of degrees.

The blasts from the exploding stars and stellar winds will carve out pockets inside clouds of gas and dust that will give birth to a new cluster of stars — part of a continuous cycle of star birth and death.

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NOW WATCH: Neil deGrasse Tyson explains what the world will be like in 500 years

NASA is tracking the massive winter storm, named Jonas, projected to take over the East Coast this weekend.

And the satellite imagery shows why media reports have been going bonkers about this potential blizzard — it looks huge.

Jonas is in the middle of the country right now making its way east. It should hit the eastern seaboard this Friday and Saturday, though it's still unclear how much snow this winter storm will actually bring.

The Weather Channel is predicting about 1 foot of snow in DC and the surrounding areas, while places farther north near New York should get closer to 6 inches. At least 15 states should see some kind of heavy snow.

You can see just how big the storm is now as it moves across the Midwest in this GIF from NASA satellite imagery:

Several states have already declared blizzard watches, warnings, and emergencies.

READ NEXT: New York City's mayor just issued a dire-sounding travel warning for the coming blizzard

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NOW WATCH: Neil deGrasse Tyson has a message for moon landing conspiracy theorists

Here on Earth, we tend to take time for granted, never suspected that the increments with which we measure it are actually quite relative.

The ways in which we measure our days and years, for example, are actually the result of our planet’s distance from the Sun, the time it takes to orbit, and the time it takes to rotate on its axis.

The same is true for the other planets in our Solar System.

While we Earthlings count on a day being about 24 hours from sunup to sundown, the length of a single day on another planet is quite different.

In some cases, they are very short, while in others, they can last longer than years – sometimes considerably! Let’s go over how time works on other planets and see just how long their days can be, shall we?

SEE ALSO: Here's how amazingly fast we could visit everything in the solar system if we traveled at the speed of light

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A day on Mercury:

Mercury is the closest planet to our Sun, ranging from 46,001,200 km at perihelion (closest to the Sun) to 69,816,900 km at aphelion (farthest). Since it takes 58.646 Earth days for Mercury to rotate once on its axis – aka. its sidereal rotation period – this means that it takes just over 58 Earth days for Mercury to experience a single sunrise and sunset.

However,  it only takes Mercury 87.969 Earth days to complete a single orbit of the Sun (aka. its orbital period). This means a year on Mercury is the equivalent of about 88 Earth days, which in turn means that a single Mercurian (or Hermian) year last exactly one and half Mercurian days. What’s more, Mercury’s northern polar regions are constantly in the shade.

This is due to it’s axis being tilted at a mere 0.034° (compared to Earth’s 23.4°), which means that it does not experience extreme seasonal variations where days and nights can last for months depending on the season. On the poles of Mercury, it is always dark and shady. So you could say the poles are in a constant state of twilight.

A day on Venus:

Also known as “Earth’s Twin”, Venus is the second closest planet to our Sun – ranging from  107,477,000 km at perihelion to 108,939,000 km at aphelion. Unfortunately, Venus is also the slowest moving planet, a fact which is made evident by looking at its poles. Whereas every other planet in the Solar System has experienced flattening at their poles due to the speed of their spin, Venus has experienced no such flattening.

Venus has a rotational velocity of just 6.5 km/h (4.0 mph) – compared to Earth’s rational velocity of 1,670 km/h (1,040 mph) – which leads to a sidereal rotation period of 243.025 days. Technically, it is -243.025 days, since Venus’ rotation is retrograde (i.e. rotating opposite of its orbital path around the Sun). So if you were above Venus’ north pole and watched it circle the Sun, you would see it is moving clockwise, whereas its rotation is counter-clockwise.

Nevertheless, this still means that Venus takes over 243 Earth days to rotate once on its axis, which means that many days pass between a single sunrise and sunset. This may seem odd, until you consider that a single Venusian (or Cytherean) year works out to 224.701 Earth days. Yes, Venus takes a little more than 224 days to complete a single orbital period, but over 243 days to experience a single sunrise and sunset.

So basically, a single Venusian day is longer than a Venusian year! Good thing Venus has other things in common With Earth, because it is sure isn’t its diurnal cycle!

A day on Earth:

When we think of a day on Earth, we tend to think of it as a simple 24 hour interval. In truth, the Earth’s sidereal rotation period is exactly 23 hours 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds long. So really, a single day on Earth is actually the equivalent about of 0.997 Earth days.

Odd, but then again, people prefer simplicity when it comes to time management, so we round up. At the same time, there are variations in the length of a single day on the planet based on seasonal cycles. Due to Earth’s axial tilt, the amount of sunlight experienced in certain hemispheres will vary. The most extreme case of this occurs at the poles, where day and night can last for days or months depending on the season.

At the North and South Poles during the winter, a single night can last up to six months, which is known as a “polar night”. During the summer, the poles will experience what is called a “midnight sun”, where a day lasts a full 24 hours. So really, days are not as simple as we like to imagine. But compared to the other planets in the Solar System, time management is still easier here on Earth.

It's hard to keep rocket launches under wraps. SpaceNews is reporting that someone has filed a temporary flight restriction with the Federal Aviation Administration.

This flight restriction has something to do with “space flight operations,” and it will divert air traffic away from an area of Texas that just so happens to coincide with Blue Origin's test area. The restriction is to take place between 8 am and 4 pm Eastern on Friday and Saturday this week.

Unlike NASA and SpaceX, who livestream all their major events, Blue Origin prefers to keep things private. In December, the company (created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos) launched and landed a rocket, making history without so much as a heads-up to the general public, let alone a livestream. They did come out with a handy PR video after the fact, though:

And although the company hopes to avoid making a spectacle, they can't keep all of their activities quiet--especially when something goes wrong, like in the September 2011 explosion of an unmanned Blue Origin spaceship.

Blue Origin hopes to one day carry human tourists into orbit. The company previously announced its intentions to re-fly the booster, but said that test flight was several weeks away. Could this be the test they were hinting at? Wouldn't we like to know.

[Via SpaceNews]

This article originally appeared on Popular Science

This article was written by Sarah Fecht from Popular Science and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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SpaceX may not have stuck its recent ambitious water landing, but Elon Musk's private rocket company isn't letting that slow it down.

Just a few minutes ago on the official SpaceX Facebook page and YouTube, the company posted the following video and photos of its capsule designed to carry astronauts, the Dragon 2 or "Crew Dragon," performing a "hover test."

While SpaceX has been using the original Dragon to carry cargo into space, the Dragon 2 is meant to carry a crew of up to seven astronauts into orbit and eventually all the way to the International Space Station, as well as to land them safely back on Earth using onboard propulsive thrusters. Those thrusters are precisely what SpaceX is testing, to make sure that they can be switched on-and-off in a reliable and controlled fashion.

In the YouTube version of the video, SpaceX explains that the test was performed on November 24 last year, the second part of two tests conducted at SpaceX's facility in McGregor, Texas, arranged to satisfy NASA's Commercial Crew Program requirements:

Eight SuperDraco thrusters, positioned around the perimeter of the vehicle in pairs called “jet packs”, fired up simultaneously to raise the Crew Dragon spacecraft for a five-second hover, generating approximately 33,000 lbs of thrust before returning the vehicle to its resting position. This test was the second of a two-part milestone under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The first test—a short firing of the engines intended to verify a healthy propulsion system—was completed November 22, and the longer burn two-days later demonstrated vehicle control while hovering.

As for when people will get a chance to ride this thing, that could come as early as next year.

NASA recently revealed a crew of four astronauts that will be the first to ride in a private craft, and placed an order for a human-crewed flight to the International Space Station for 2017, but the agency still hasn't said which private company will begin flights.

SpaceX and Boeing are the two leading contenders, Boeing with its lesser-known CST-100 Starliner capsule. Earlier this week, NASA published a great overview of what both companies hope to accomplish in space travel throughout 2016 and 2017, and it says very clearly that there are three Dragon 2 flights planned, though when precisely these will take place is not specified. As NASA puts it:

Three Crew Dragon spacecraft are in different stages of production at SpaceX's headquarters and factory in Hawthorne, California. Two will perform upcoming flight tests to the International Space Station, one without a crew and one with astronauts aboard. The first of these spacecraft will be refurbished after flight for an in-flight abort test that will be conducted from Florida’s Space Coast, while the third will fly the operational crew mission to the station by SpaceX.

But there are also indications that the ambitious timeline for such a test flight could get delayed until 2018 or later.

Additionally, the initial human-crewed tests of the Dragon 2 won't rely on the SuperDraco thrusters, but rather more traditional parachute-guided descents into the ocean, according to NASA.

Still, SpaceX is clearly getting things ready for its first unmanned tests of the Dragon 2, as well as the eventual human-crewed missions. That's exciting in-and-of itself, no matter how far-off the end goal might be. Even creating a craft capable of performing a controlled hover test like this is no easy feat — it is, after all, rocket science.

Updated after publication to include information from SpaceX's YouTube video and NASA's Commercial Crew Program website.

This article originally appeared on Popular Science

This article was written by Carl Franzen from Popular Science and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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Astronomers think they may have found giant “invisible” structures lurking in the Milky Way.

These things seem to be pretty big – roughly the size of Earth’s orbit around the Sun – and they could help to explain where a bunch of missing matter in the universe is, known as the missing baryon problem.

The detection of these structures was made by astronomers working at the CSIRO’s Compact Array telescope in eastern Australia.

Although previous research had hinted at their presence before, this new paper – published in the journal Science– helps to constrain their size and shape a bit better.

Don’t think these are big, solid objects though. Essentially, the structures appear to be large clumps of some sort of material, possibly clouds of cool gas, in the existing thin gas that lies between stars. And they appear to be in odd shapes.

The astronomers described them as looking like hollow “noodles” or hazelnuts – with material on the outside and a hollow center. Some may even be sheet-like, and we could be looking at them edge-on.

Where they came from, how old they are, or how many there could be in our galaxy remains a mystery, though. “It’s all guesswork at this stage,” lead author Keith Bannister of CSIRO told IFLScience. “There could be many thousands of these in the galaxy.”

Astronomers think they may have found giant “invisible” structures lurking in the Milky Way. These things seem to be pretty big – roughly the size of Earth’s orbit around the Sun – and they could help to explain where a bunch of missing matter in the universe is, known as the missing baryon problem.

The detection of these structures was made by astronomers working at the CSIRO’s Compact Array telescope in eastern Australia. Although previous research had hinted at their presence before, this new paper – published in the journal Science– helps to constrain their size and shape a bit better.

Don’t think these are big, solid objects though. Essentially, the structures appear to be large clumps of some sort of material, possibly clouds of cool gas, in the existing thin gas that lies between stars. And they appear to be in odd shapes. The astronomers described them as looking like hollow “noodles” or hazelnuts – with material on the outside and a hollow center. Some may even be sheet-like, and we could be looking at them edge-on.

Where they came from, how old they are, or how many there could be in our galaxy remains a mystery, though. “It’s all guesswork at this stage,” lead author Keith Bannister of CSIRO told IFLScience. “There could be many thousands of these in the galaxy.”

SEE ALSO: This is what the entire universe looks like in one image

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