Top 10 Space Moments.docVIP

Top 10 Space Moments 10. The Galaxy’s Most Adorable Planet The cosmos don’t often get cute, but when it comes to a little world that goes by the prosaic name Kepler-37b, that rule got bent just a little. Discovered by the Kepler space telescope, the planet, which orbits a star 200 million light years from Earth, is only 2,400 mi. (3,860 km) across; and while that sounds big, it’s two-thirds the size of our own tiny Mercury and just 10% larger than the moon. Finding such a pipsqueak world was not easy. Kepler detects exoplanets by looking for the slight dimming of light as they pass in front of their parent stars in the course of their orbits. But 37b is small enough that it dims that starlight by just 0.2%. The star itself, however, happens to be an unusually steady one, with little flickering in its light output—and that made the detection possible. As for life on Kepler 37b? Forget it. It’s so close to its parent star that it completes an orbit every 11 days. It is surely completely airless and blazingly hot—no place even to think of looking for biology. 9. The Coldest Place in the Universe Think you’re having a chilly winter? Be happy you don’t live in the vicinity of the Boomerang nebula, a cloud of gas left over from an ancient star, about 5,000 light years from Earth. Scientists have always wondered about the nebula’s unusual shape—which actually looks more like a bowtie than a boomerang—and this year got their answer, using the ALMA telescope (short for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) in the Chilean desert. They found that the nebula is in fact spherical, but an especially thick band of dust absorbs some of the starlight reflecting off the grains. The rest glows in a bow-tie shape. The important detail for people who like their numbers big and record-setting, however, is the temperature. Parts of the Boomerang nebula clock in at -457.7°F (-272°C). That’s about 2°F (1.1°C) above absolute zero, the coldest temperature possible according to t