Space and astronomy news
We can’t understand nature without understanding its range. That’s apparent in exoplanet science and in our theories of planetary formation. Nature’s outliers and oddballs put pressure on our models and motivate scientists to dig deeper.
Continue reading “This Exoplanet is Probably a Solid Ball of Metal”
The race is on to discover truly habitable Earth-like worlds. While we are starting to observe the atmospheres of large potentially habitable planets such as Hycean worlds with the telescopes we currently have, the most significant breakthroughs will likely come with the development of advanced specialized telescopes. These new designs will likely use a starshade to hide the glare of a star and allow us to directly observe its exoplanets. But will that be enough to study distant terrestrial planets?
Continue reading “An Ambitious New Technology Might be Needed to See Other Earths”
In an age of ever-growing numbers of exoplanets circling other stars, it’s natural that astronomers search for signatures of advanced civilizations. Such signatures may have biological or technological origins.
Continue reading “If Astronomers See These Chemicals in a Planet’s Atmosphere, There’s Likely an Advanced Civilization There”
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has only been operational for just over a year, but this isn’t stopping the world’s biggest space agency from discussing the next big space telescope that could serve as JWST’s successor sometime in the future. Enter the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), which was first proposed as NASA’s next flagship Astrophysics mission during the National Academy of Sciences’ Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020 (Astro2020). While its potential technological capabilities include studying exoplanets, stars, galaxies, and a myriad of other celestial objects for life beyond Earth, there’s a long way to go before HWO will be wowing both scientists and the public with breathtaking images and new datasets.
Continue reading “Planning is Underway for NASA’s Next Big Flagship Space Telescope”
Roughly 5 billion years ago Earth was in the process of forming. Gas and dust gathered with the young Sun’s protoplanetary disk, likely nudged a bit by the resonant gravitational pull of Jupiter and other large worlds. One can imagine that as Earth formed it swept its orbit clear of debris, leaving a gap in the disk visible from light years away. While we know this tale is reasonably accurate, the idea that planets such as Earth always clear gaps in a protoplanetary disk likely isn’t.
Continue reading “Do The Gaps in Protoplanetary Disks Really Indicate Newly Forming Planets?”
Despite its great oceans, Earth is not really an ocean world. It has less water than icy moons such as Europa and Enceladus, a relatively thin nitrogen-rich atmosphere, and vast continents that rise above sea level. A true ocean world would have no continents, a warm sea hundreds of kilometers deep, and a thick hydrogen and water-rich atmosphere. They are known as hydrogen-ocean planets or hycean worlds. While we’ve long thought they exist, the James Webb Space Telescope may now have found one.
Continue reading “JWST Might Have Imaged a Hycean World for the First Time, With a Hydrogen-Rich Atmosphere and a Deep Planet-Wide Water Ocean”
We’re rapidly learning that our Solar System, so familiar to us all, does not represent normal.
A couple of decades ago, we knew very little about other solar systems. Astronomers had discovered only a handful of exoplanets, especially around pulsars. But that all changed in the last few years.
Continue reading “TESS Finds a Planet That Takes 482 Days to Orbit, the Widest it’s Seen so Far”
A recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters examines a rare alloy molecule known as chromium hydride (CrH) and its first-time confirmation on an exoplanet, in this case, WASP-31 b. Traditionally, CrH is only found in large quantities between 1,200 to 2,000 degrees Kelvin (926.85 to 1,726.85 degrees Celsius/1700 to 3,140 degrees Fahrenheit) and used to ascertain the temperature of cool stars and brown dwarfs. Therefore, astronomers like Dr. Laura Flagg in the Department of Astronomy and Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University refer to CrH as a “thermometer for stars”.
Continue reading “Astronomers Confirm First Exoplanet “Thermometer Molecule” that is Typically Used to Study Brown Dwarfs”
There’s an odd exoplanet out there posing a challenge to planetary scientists. It’s a hot Neptune denser than steel. The big question is: how did it form?
Continue reading “A Neptune-sized Exoplanet is Denser Than Steel. The Result of a Catastrophic Collision?”
Searching for exoplanets is incredibly difficult given their literal astronomical distances from Earth, which is why a myriad of methods have been created to find them. These include transit, redial velocity, astrometry, gravitational microlensing, and direct imaging. It is this last method that was used to recently create a time-lapse video that compresses a mind-blowing 17 years of the partial orbit of exoplanet, Beta Pictoris b, into 10 seconds. The data to create the video was collected between 2003 and 2020, it encompasses approximately 75 percent of the total orbit, and marks the longest time-lapse video of an exoplanet ever produced.
Continue reading “Watch an Actual Exoplanet Orbit its Star for 17 Years”