Posted on by Matt Williams

Six Planets Found Orbiting an Extremely Young Star

Artist rendering of the TOI-1136 system and its young star flaring. Credit: Rae Holcomb/Paul Robertson/UCI

The field of exoplanet study continues to grow by leaps and bounds. As of the penning of this article, 5,572 extrasolar planets have been confirmed in 4,150 systems (with another 10,065 candidates awaiting confirmation. Well, buckle up because six more exoplanets have been confirmed around TOI-1136, a Sun-like star located roughly 276 light-years from Earth. This star is less than 700 million years old, making it relatively young compared to our own (4.6 billion years). This system will allow astronomers to observe how systems like our own have evolved with time.

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Posted on by Matt Williams

Astronomers Find Another Solar System with 8 Planets. Uh, Pluto, About that Deplaneting…

In a series of papers, Professor Loeb and Michael Hippke indicate that conventional rockets would have a hard time escaping from certain kinds of extra-solar planets. Credit: NASA/Tim Pyle
In a series of papers, Professor Loeb and Michael Hippke indicate that conventional rockets would have a hard time escaping from certain kinds of extra-solar planets. Credit: NASA/Tim Pyle

With every passing year, more and more extra-solar planets are discovered. To make matters more interesting, improvements in methodology and technology are allowing for the discovery of more planets within individual systems. Consider the recent announcement of a seven-planet system around the red dwarf star known as TRAPPIST-1. At the time, this discovery established the record for most exoplanets orbiting a single star.

Well move over TRAPPIST-1! Thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope and machine learning, a team from Google AI and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics (CfA) recently discovered an eighth planet in the distant star system of Kepler-90. Known as Kepler -90i, the discovery of this planet was made possible thanks to Google algorithms that detected evidence of a weak transit signal in the Kepler mission data.

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