Exoplanets
If a Star Has Less Metals, it Might Have a Better Chance to Spark Life
In the hunt for habitable worlds around other stars, planetary atmospheres provide fertile places to look. But, as a group…
Astronomers Find a Planet Using Gaia Data
The ESA's Gaia mission is our most accurate star-measuring spacecraft. It's busy mapping the positions and radial velocities of one…
Astronomers Find Out What Happens to Rocky Planets That Wander too Close to Their Stars
The massive Kepler survey found a treasure trove of exoplanets. But in all that wealth they found three anomalies: what…
Do Repeating Radio Signals Indicate an Exoplanet with a Magnetosphere?
There's an interesting problem in exoplanet studies: how to tell if a planet has a magnetosphere. It's not like we…
Finally, JWST's Data on the First TRAPPIST-1 Planet. Survey Says? It Sucks
With the James Webb Space Telescope’s ability to detect and study the atmospheres of distant planets orbiting other stars, exoplanet…
The Discovery of a Hot Neptune that Shouldn’t Exist
1800 light-years away, an unlikely survivor orbits an aged star. This rare planet is called a hot Neptune, and it's…
TESS Shows That Even Small Stars Can Host Giant Planets
Can low-mass stars play host to giant, Jupiter-sized planets? Theories of planet formation suggest that it's highly unlikely. But a…
Stars Can Eat Their Planets…and Spit Them Back Out Again
As tragic as it is, engulfment of a planetary object by its stellar parent is a common scenario throughout the…
Venus is Like an Exoplanet that’s Right Next Door
We're lucky to have a neighbour like Venus, even though it's totally inhospitable, wildly different from the other rocky planets,…
The Planet That Shouldn’t Exist
As of this writing, almost 5300 exoplanets spanning approximately 4000 planetary systems have been confirmed to exist in our universe.…