New Clues to Mysterious Formation of Hot Jupiter Exoplanets
Astronomers discover a new way of determining the relative age of exoplanets and prove there are multiple ways these planets form. In our solar system,…
Astronomers discover a new way of determining the relative age of exoplanets and prove there are multiple ways these planets form. In our solar system,…
Machine learning algorithm points to problems in mathematical theory for interpreting microlenses. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems trained on real astronomical observations now surpass astronomers in…
Astronomers will train Webb’s high-precision spectrographs on two intriguing rocky exoplanets. Imagine if Earth were much, much closer to the Sun. So close that an…
Nearly half of Sun-like stars are binary. According to new research, planetary systems around binary stars may be very different from those around single stars….
What Is an Exoplanet? An exoplanet is a planet that is located outside our Solar System. While there is currently no formal agreement on what…
A futuristic “gravity telescope” technique conceptualized by Stanford astrophysicists could enable astronomical imaging significantly more advanced than any present today. In the time since the…
What Is a Habitable Zone? The Habitable Zone is the region around a star where the conditions could potentially be suitable to sustain life on…
A worldwide team of astronomers studied archival Hubble Space Telescope observations of 25 hot Jupiters, allowing them to answer five unresolved questions important to our…
The journey of commissioning the Webb telescope continues this week with the successful cooling of the Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), through the critical ‘pinch point,’ down…
A new study by an international team of astrophysicists, led by the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics has presented the amazing new discovery of a…
Sizzling Worlds Vaporize Most of the Dust in Their Atmospheres “When you’re hot, you’re hot!” crooned country singer Jerry Reed in a top 1971 pop…
Hubble Finds a Planet Forming in an Unconventional Way In general, the formation of planets in our universe can be likened to cooking a meal….
There’s a huge amount of variety among exoplanets – planets located outside our solar system. There are water worlds, lava planets, egg-shaped worlds, planets with…
The count of confirmed exoplanets just ticked past the 5,000 mark, representing a 30-year journey of discovery led by NASA space telescopes. Not so long…
How can we detect exoplanets (planets around other stars)? Planets are very faint and small compared to the stars they orbit. To overcome this challenge,…
One of the many goals of the James Webb Space Telescope is to help characterize the atmospheres of exoplanets using a technique called spectroscopy, which…
Among thousands of known exoplanets, MIT astronomers flag three that are actually stars. The first worlds beyond our solar system were discovered three decades ago….
What Is an Atmosphere? An atmosphere is a layer (or several layers) of gas that surrounds a planet, or other celestial body. If a celestial…