Universe Today
Scouring TESS Data With AI Reveals A Hundred New Exoplanets
New AI tool validates over 100 new planets, finds thousands of candidates, and gives our best estimate for how likely it is to find certain planets around Sun-like stars.
Exoplanets
Planets beyond our solar system
Recent Articles
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New Henrietta Spectrograph to Probe Alien Atmospheres
Finding life beyond our solar system goes beyond measuring an exoplanetâs size, as rocky, Earth-sized worlds might not have the conditions for life as we know it. While exoplanets can be directly imaged by blocking their starâs glare, these images are fuzzy and lack resolution to provide enough details about the habitability. Therefore, astronomers are limited to studying an exoplanetâs atmosphere, and this has proven to be quite beneficial in teaching scientists about an exoplanetâs formation and evolution, and whether it contains the necessary ingredients for life as we know it.
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Blocking out the Stellar Lighthouses
Finding another Earth is one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time and the biggest obstacle isn't the distance, it's the glare. An Earth like planet orbiting a Sun like star is ten billion times fainter than its host. A team of NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are developing a remarkable piece of optical wizardry that could solve the problem of seeing planets hidden by the stellar glare and they're already within striking distance of the performance needed to make it work.
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Mars-Like Worlds Near M-Dwarfs May Lose Air in Millions of Years
The criteria for finding an Earth-like planet unofficially comes down to two things: water and the habitable zone. But a phenomenon known as atmospheric escape often âescapesâ the minds of many astronomy fans, and it turns out that atmospheric escape is one of the key characteristics for finding an Earth-like world. Although extensive research has been conducted on how the planet Mars might have lost its atmosphere, and potentially the ability to sustain life, how would the atmosphere enveloping a Mars-like exoplanet respond to stars different from our own?
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Looking For Nearby âProject Hail Maryâ Worlds
Itâs out. The top sci-fi draw of the year Project Hail Mary is now showing in a theater near you. The movie tells the tale of middle school teacher Ryland Grace, who is sent on a one way, last ditch mission to save humanity. The story is a refreshing take on first contact and just how different life out there could be⌠but are there real âAdriansâ or âEridsâ out there? A new paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society identifies 45 rocky worlds with a potential for life, out of the currently 6,281 exoplanets known.
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Direct Confirmation Of Two Baby Planets Forming Around A Young Sun-like Star
Astronomers have observed two planets forming in the disc around a young star named WISPIT 2. Having previously detected one planet, the team have now employed European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes to confirm the presence of another. These observations, and the unique structure of the disc around the star, indicate that the WISPIT 2 system could resemble our young Solar System.
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Saturn-mass world discovered orbiting two low-mass stars
You just established a settlement on an Earth-like planetary body far from our solar system. You did your evening chores after eating dinner, and you want to go out for the evening view, which consists of two setting stars, reminiscent of the infamous scene in Star Wars. However, thereâs one major difference: a large planetary body is in the sky. As you were aware before arriving, youâre on an exomoon orbiting a Saturn-sized exoplanet, both of which orbits two stars.
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This Super-Puff Planet is Hiding its True Nature Behind Thick Haze
Super-puff planets have extremely low densities, and exoplanet scientists aren't sure why. They seem to defy our understanding of how planets form. Researchers used the JWST to observe the atmosphere of Kepler-51d, one of the puffiest of the super-puffs. Unfortunately, even the powerful space telescope found a featureless spectrum. What does it mean?
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A New Type of Exoplanet Has a Magma Ocean That's Lasted 5 Billion Years
A study led by the University of Oxford has identified a new type of planet beyond our Solar System â one that stores large amounts of sulphur deep within a permanent ocean of magma. The magma ocean has lasted 5 billion years so far, while Earth's magma ocean likely lasted only tens of millions of years.
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NASA Exoplanet-Hunting CubeSat Delivers "First Light" Images
With the first images from the spacecraft now in hand, the team behind NASAâs Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat (SPARCS) is ready to begin charting the energetic lives of the galaxyâs most common stars to help answer one of humanityâs most profound questions: Which distant worlds beyond our solar system might be habitable?
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Astronomers Search for "Exotrojans" Hiding in Extreme Pulsar Systems
Greek mythology has given a name to a great many objects in our solar system. But perhaps one of the least well understood are the Trojans, named after the people of Troy featured in The Iliad. When astronomers refer to them, they are normally talking about a group of over 10,000 confirmed asteroids orbiting at the Lagrange points both in front of and behind Jupiter on its orbit around the Sun. But, more generally, astronomers can now use the term to refer to any co-orbital setup - indeed almost every planet in our solar system has Trojans, though not as many as Jupiter. Which also leads to the belief that âexotrojansâ must exist around other stars. Despite our best efforts with initiatives like the TROY project, so far we have yet to find one. But a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal by Jackson Taylor of West Virginia University and an abundance of co-authors took the hunt to one of the most extreme environments in the universe: pulsar binary systems.
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This Isn't Just Another Rocky World Orbiting a Red Dwarf. This One's Special
Rocky planets are found in abundance around M-type stars (red dwarfs), so finding another one doesn't always generate headlines. But an international team of astronomers say that one recent M-dwarf rocky planet found by TESS is especially noteworthy. This one can serve as a benchmark for comparative studies of this type of exoplanet and their at-risk atmospheres.
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Scientists Find Evidence of Worlds Colliding ... 11,000 Light-Years Away
Astronomers say unusual readings from a star system 11,000 light-years away suggest that two of the planets circling the star crashed into each other, creating a huge, light-obscuring cloud of rocks and dust.
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CHEOPS Discovery Defies Planetary Formation Rules
Weâre starting to see just how exceptional our own solar system and its history is, as more exoplanets are discovered. A fourth exoplanet discovery in the LHS 1903 system made by ESAâs CHEOPS mission places a rocky world right where it shouldnât be. This âinside-out systemâ could challenge our current understanding of planetary formation.
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Starshade concept could reveal Earth-like exoplanets
Finding Earth-like exoplanets with the composition and ingredients for life as we know it is the Holy Grail of exoplanet hunting. Since the first exoplanets were identified in the 1990s, scientists have pushed the boundaries of finding exoplanets through new and exciting methods. One of these methods is the direct imaging method, which involves carefully blocking out the host star within the observing telescope, thus revealing the orbiting exoplanets that were initially hiding within the starâs immense glare.
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Adolescence Is Tumultuous, Even For Exoplanets
Planetary systems such as our solar system take hundreds of millions of years to evolve. But we see most exoplanet systems either very early in their development, or long after the systems have settled down. There's an information gap about what happens in the middle, and a rarely observed "adolescent" system is a valuable opportunity to learn more and to test models of planetary evolution.
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Super-Jupiters Challenge Planet Size Limits
Our solar system is home to a wide diversity of planetary bodies, boasting eight planets, five officially recognized dwarf planets, and almost 1,000 confirmed moons. The eight planets consist of the four rocky (terrestrial) planets of the inner solar system and the four gas giant planets of the outer solar system. The largest planet in our solar system is Jupiter, measuring a radius and mass of 11 and 318 times of Earth, respectively. However, the discovery of exoplanets quickly altered our understanding of planetary sizes, as several have been discovered to have masses and radii several times that of Jupiter. So, how big can planet get, and are there limits to their sizes?
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Exploring Alien Atmospheres with New Theory
Searching for life beyond Earth has rapidly advanced in recent years. However, directly imaging an exoplanet and all their incredible features remain elusive given the literal astronomical distances from Earth. Therefore, astronomers have settled by exploring exoplanet atmospheres for signatures of life, also called biosignatures. This is currently conducted by analyzing the starlight that passes through an exoplanetâs atmosphere, known as spectroscopy, as it passes in front of its star, also called a transit. But improvements continue to be made to better explore exoplanet atmospheres, specifically cleaning up messy data.
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Exomoons Could Reveal Themselves Through Lunar Eclipses
Our solar system hosts almost 900 known moons, with more than 400 orbiting the eight planets while the remaining orbit dwarf planets, asteroids, and Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs). Of these, only a handful are targets for astrobiology and could potentially support life as we know it, including Jupiterâs moons Europa and Ganymede, and Saturnâs moon Titan and Enceladus. While these moons orbit two of the largest planets in our solar system, what about moons orbiting giant exoplanets, also called exomoons? But, to find life on exomoons, scientists need to find exomoons to begin with.
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The Optical Engineering Required to Photograph an Earth Twin
More and more papers are coming out about the upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). As the telescope moves from theory to practice (and physical manifestation), various working groups are discovering, defining, and designing their way to the worldâs next major exoplanet observatory. A new paper from researchers at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center adds another layer of analysis - we even just reported on its immediate predecessor two weeks ago. In this one, the researchers compared the ability of the telescope to distinguish between carbon dioxide and methane/water, to come up with a specific wavelength the engineers should design for.