Space and astronomy news
A hospitable star that doesn’t kill you with deadly flares. A rocky planet with liquid water and an agreeable climate. Absence of apocalyptic asteroid storms. No pantheon of angry, vengeful, and capricious gods. These are the things that define a habitable planet. Now some scientists are adding one more criterion to the list: gin and …
A study by Cornell’s Carl Sagan Institute provides models of how Earth looked like over time, which could help us find habitable exoplanets
There’s a type of exoplanet that astronomers sometimes refer to as cotton candy planets, or super-puffs. They’re mysterious, because their masses don’t match up with their extremely large radii. The two characteristics imply a planet with an extremely low density. In our Solar System, there’s nothing like them, and finding them in distant solar systems …
A team of scientists from the Netherlands have proposed an exciting new approach for finding exoplanets: look for signs of auroras!
A new study has shown how gas giants (like Proxima c) can exist around Red Dwarf suns, the most common type of star in the Universe
We tend to think of our Earthly circumstances as normal. A watery, temperate world orbiting a stable yellow star. A place where life has persisted for nearly 4 billion years. It’s almost inevitable that when we think of other places where life could thrive, we use our own experience as a benchmark. But should we?
A new study by a team led from the University of Colorado, Boulder, has discovered a rare and unique class of exoplanet that has the density of cotton candy.
The CHEOPS mission is underway. On December 18th, the exoplanet-studying spacecraft launched from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana aboard a Soyuz-Fregat rocket. Initial signals from CHEOPS show that the launch was a success.
The history of our Solar System is punctuated with collisions. Collisions helped create the terrestrial planets and end the reign of the dinosaurs. And a massive collision between Earth and an ancient body named Theia likely created the Moon. Now astronomers have found of evidence of a collision between two exoplanets in a distant solar …
Continue reading “Astronomers See the Wreckage from a Collision Between Exoplanets”
The coronagraph instrument, which will help NASA’s WFIRST mission to search for exoplanets, just passed a major milestone!