Exoplanets | SpaceRef

Exoplanets TOP STORY

First Exposed Planetary Core Discovered

Mars Imaged by Hubble

A year that is a mere 18 hours TOI 849 b is an extremely unusual planet in the so-called "Neptune Desert" - a term used by astronomers for a region close to stars where we rarely see planets of Neptune's mass or larger.

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Exoplanets

Super Earths Discovered Orbiting Nearby Red Dwarf Gliese 887

Copernicus Detail

The nearest exoplanets to us provide the best opportunities for detailed study, including searching for evidence of life outside the Solar System.

Exoplanets

Rogue's Gallery Of Dusty Star Systems Reveals Exoplanet Nurseries

Astronomers this month released the largest collection of sharp, detailed images of debris disks around young stars, showcasing the great variety of shapes and sizes of stellar systems during their prime planet-forming years. Surprisingly, nearly all showed evidence of planets.

Exoplanets

Young Giant Planet Offers Clues to Formation of Exotic Worlds

Jupiter-size planets orbiting close to their stars have upended ideas about how giant planets form. Finding young members of this planet class could help answer key questions.

Exoplanets

WASP-79b Has Yellow Skies And Iron Rain

The weather forecast for the giant, super-hot Jupiter-size planet WASP-79b is steamy humidity, scattered clouds, iron rain, and yellow skies.

Exoplanets

Researchers Use 'Hot Jupiter' Data to Mine Exoplanet Chemistry

After spotting a curious pattern in scientific papers -- they described exoplanets as being cooler than expected -- Cornell astronomers have improved a mathematical model to accurately gauge the temperatures of planets from solar systems hundreds of light-years away.

Exoplanets

Cheops Observes Its First Exoplanets And Is Ready For Science

Cheops, ESA's new exoplanet mission, has successfully completed its almost three months of in-orbit commissioning, exceeding expectations for its performance.

Exoplanets

Safety Zone Saves Giant Moons From Fatal Plunge

Numerical simulations showed that the temperature gradient in the disk of gas around a young gas giant planet could play a critical role in the development of a satellite system dominated by a single large moon, similar to Titan around Saturn.

Exoplanets

What If Mysterious 'Cotton Candy' Planets Actually Sport Rings?

Some of the extremely low-density, "cotton candy like" exoplanets called super-puffs may actually have rings, according to new research from Carnegie's Anthony Piro and Caltech's Shreyas Vissapragada.

Exoplanets

An 18-hour Year Planet Is On The Edge Of Destruction

Astronomers from the University of Warwick have observed an exoplanet orbiting a star in just over 18 hours, the shortest orbital period ever observed for a planet of its type.

Exoplanets

TESS Mission Uncovers Its First World with Two Stars

In 2019, when Wolf Cukier finished his junior year at Scarsdale High School in New York, he joined NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, as a summer intern. His job was to examine variations in star brightness captured by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and uploaded to the Planet Hunters TESS citizen science project.

Exoplanets

Massive Gas Disk Raises Questions About Planet Formation Theory

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) found a young star surrounded by an astonishing mass of gas.

Exoplanets

'Cotton Candy' Planet Mysteries Unravel in New Hubble Observations

New data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have provided the first clues to the chemistry of two of these super-puffy planets, which are located in the Kepler 51 system.

Exoplanets

CHEOPS Space Telescope to Investigate Extrasolar Planets

On 17 December 2019 at 05:54 local time (09:54 CET [08:45 UTC/GMT]), the European Space Agency (ESA) CHaracterising ExOPlanets Satellite (CHEOPS) space telescope is scheduled to lift off from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on board a Soyuz launcher.

Exoplanets

Gas Giant Exoplanet Composition Not Determined By Its Host Star

A surprising analysis of the composition of gas giant exoplanets and their host stars shows that there isn't a strong correlation between their compositions when it comes to elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, according to new work led by Carnegie's Johanna Teske and published in the Astronomical Journal.

Exoplanets