Exoplanets
A Planet has Whipped Up Spiral Arms Around a Young Star
Astronomers have observed dozens of newly forming stars surrounded by protoplanetary disks. Some look like grooved vinyl records, while others…
A Direct Image of a Planet That’s Just Like Jupiter, Only Younger
In a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of astronomers used the W. M. Keck Observatory…
How Close Can a Planet Get to a Star and Still Be Habitable?
In exoplanetology, the ring around the star is often called the "Goldilocks zone," in reference to the 19th-century fairy tale…
That New Car Smell… But for Planets
Remember how a new car smells? It's a chemical signature of all the materials used to make the car's interior.…
Watching the Watchers With Nancy Grace Roman
Astronomers have discovered thousands of planets using the transit technique, watching how distant stars dim as a planet passes in…
A Brown Dwarf is Getting Hit With So Much Radiation it's Hotter Than the Sun
Astronomers have found a brown dwarf companion to a white dwarf star with a day-side temperature of around 8,000 kelvin…
The Suspense is Killing Us. The Next Planet in the TRAPPIST System Gets the JWST Treatment
The TRAPPIST-1 system is easily the most exciting collection of exoplanets ever discovered by astronomers. The system contains seven rocky…
Can We Predict if a System Will Have Giant Planets?
Prediction is one of the hallmarks of scientific endeavors. Scientists pride themselves on being able to predict physical realities based…
JWST is Powerful Enough to See a Variety of Biosignatures in Exoplanets
According to a new study, JWST is powerful enough to detect the chemicals in the atmospheres of various terrestrial planets…
This Hot Jupiter is Leaving a Swirling Tail of Helium in its Wake
In a recent study published in Science Advances, a team of researchers commissioned the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET), which is designed…