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Planetary Habitability Depends on its Star’s Magnetic Field

The extrasolar planet census recently passed a major milestone, with 5500 confirmed candidates in 4,243 solar systems. With so many exoplanets available for study, astronomers have learned a great deal about the types of planets that exist in our galaxy and have been rethinking several preconceived notions. These include the notion of “habitability” and whether …

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The Ultraviolet Habitable Zone Sets a Time Limit on the Formation of Life

The field of extrasolar planet studies has grown exponentially in the past twenty years. Thanks to missions like Kepler, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and other dedicated observatories, astronomers have confirmed 5,690 exoplanets in 4,243 star systems. With so many planets and systems available for study, scientists have been forced to reconsider many previously-held …

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Officially, Only the Sun Can Have Planets. Is it Time to Fix the Definition of “Planet”?

What is the true definition of a planet, and could there be a more refined definition in the future? This is what a recent study published in The Planetary Science Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers from the United States and Canada investigated the potential for a new definition of a “planet”. …

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Webb Measures the Weather on a Tidally Locked Exoplanet

Exploring exoplanet atmospheres in more detail was one task that planetary scientists anticipated during the long wait while the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was in development. Now, their patience is finally paying off. News about discoveries of exoplanet atmosphere using data from JWST seems to be coming from one research group or another almost …

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Webb Detects the Smell of Rotten Eggs in an Exoplanet’s Atmosphere

Studying the atmospheres of exoplanets is helpful for several reasons. Sometimes, it helps in understanding their formation. Sometimes, it helps define whether the planet might be habitable. And sometimes, you allow a press officer to write the headline “Stench of a gas giant? Nearby exoplanet reeks of rotten eggs.” That headline was released by John …

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Do Planets Have the Raw Ingredients for Life? The Answer is in their Stars

Finding planets that already have, or have the ingredients for intelligent life is a real challenge. It is exciting that new telescopes and spacecraft are in development that will start to identify candidate planets. Undertaking these observations will take significant amounts of telescope time so we need to find some way to prioritise which ones …

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Plate Tectonics Might Only Occur on 0.003% of Planets. That Makes Earth Very Special Indeed.

Plate tectonics, oceans, and continents might just be the secret ingredients for complex life on Earth. And if these geological features are rare elsewhere in the universe, then perhaps that explains why we haven’t yet discovered intelligent alien life. New research from American and Swiss Earth scientists suggests that these ingredients represent missing variables in …

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Alpha Centauri Could Have a Super Jupiter in Orbit

The three-body problem is one of Nature’s thorniest problems. The gravitational interactions and resulting movements of three bodies are notoriously difficult to predict because of instability. A planet orbiting two stars is an example of the three-body problem, but it’s sometimes called a “restricted three-body problem.” In that case, there are some potential stable orbits …

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