exoplanets
Astronomers are now Finding Planetary Disks Around the Smallest, Least Massive Stars
Astronomers have been watching planetary systems form around sun-like stars for decades. And now, new observations with the ALMA telescope…
A new Class of Exoplanets can Shrink, From Subneptunes Into Superearths
Mighty planets can be whittled down, leaving behind only their rocky cores, becoming nothing bigger than superearths. While astronomers had…
A Sunlike Star Found With Four (No, Five!) Exoplanets Orbiting It
Thanks to an international team astronomers led from MIT, a nearby Sun-like star has been spotted with a system of…
White Dwarf Atmospheres Might Contain the Pulverized Crusts of Their Dead Planets
Astronomers have developed a new technique to search for exoplanets - by looking for their crushed up bones in the…
Exoplanetary System Found With 6 Worlds in Orbital Resonance
200 light-years away from Earth, there's a K-type main-sequence star named TOI (TESS Object of Interest) 178. When Adrian Leleu,…
One of the Oldest Stars in the Galaxy has a Planet. Rocky Planets Were Forming at Nearly the Beginning of the Universe
Would it be surprising to find a rocky planet that dates back to the very early Universe? It should be.…
Astronomers Capture a Direct Image of a Brown Dwarf
The field of exoplanet photography is just getting underway, with astronomers around the world striving to capture clear images of…
If We Used the Sun as a Gravitational Lens Telescope, This is What a Planet at Proxima Centauri Would Look Like
A recent study shows how the Sun could be used as a gravitational lens to take direct images of nearby…
Heard of Mini-Neptunes and gas-Dwarfs? Here's a new one: sub-Earths
A new study suggests that planets smaller than Earth form much later than large planets, which could point to a…
Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XII: What is the Waterworlds Hypothesis?
Is it possible that the reason we haven't heard from any aliens is because there's too much water out there?