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Our home solar system may be down by a planet with the recent demotion of Pluto, but the number of giant planets discovered in orbit around other stars continues to grow steadily. Now, an international team of astronomers has detected a planet slightly larger than Jupiter that orbits a star 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco.

Much of the heat within our planet is caused by the radioactive decay of the elements uranium and thorium. Now, an international team of particle physicists using a special detector in Japan has demonstrated a novel method of measuring that radioactive heat.

In the subatomic particle family, the neutrino is a bit like a wayward red-haired stepson. Neutrinos were long ago detected-and even longer ago predicted to exist-but everything physicists know about nuclear processes says there should be a certain number of neutrinos streaming from the sun, yet there are nowhere near enough.

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