Exoplanets | SpaceRef

Exoplanets TOP STORY

Nearby Star's Icy Debris Suggests 'Shepherd' Planet

Beta Pictoris

An international team of astronomers exploring the disk of gas and dust around a nearby star have uncovered a compact cloud of poisonous gas formed by ongoing rapid-fire collisions among a swarm of icy, comet-like bodies.

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Exoplanets

Kepler Finds a Very Wobbly Planet

Kepler-413b

Imagine living on a planet with seasons so erratic you would hardly know whether to wear Bermuda shorts or a heavy overcoat.

Exoplanets

Hubble Hangout: Disk Detective - Finding the Birthplace of Planets

Scientists are combing the galaxy looking for stars that could be harboring planet-forming disks. They need your help to explain this puzzling part of stellar evolution.

Exoplanets

Rare Brown Dwarf Discovery Provides Benchmark for Exoplanet Research

A team of researchers has directly imaged a very rare type of brown dwarf that can serve as a benchmark for studying objects with masses that lie between stars and planets.

Exoplanets

New Kind of Planet or a Failed Star?

An object discovered by astrophysicists at the University of Toronto nearly 500 light years away from the Sun may challenge traditional understandings about how planets and stars form.

Exoplanets

Newfound Planet Is Earth-mass But Gassy

An international team of astronomers has discovered the first Earth-mass planet that transits, or crosses in front of, its host star. KOI-314c is the lightest planet to have both its mass and physical size measured.

Exoplanets

Hubble Reveals Cloudy Weather on Extrasolar Planet

Weather forecasters on exoplanet GJ 1214b would have an easy job. Today's forecast: cloudy. Tomorrow: overcast. Extended outlook: more clouds.

Exoplanets

Are Comets the Key to Curious Fomalhaut Exoplanet System?

The nearby star Fomalhaut A hosts the most famous planetary system outside our own solar system, containing both an exoplanet and a spectacular ring of comets.

Exoplanets

Sub-Earth-Mass Moon Orbiting a Gas Giant Primary or a High Velocity Planetary System in the Galactic Bulge

We present the first microlensing candidate for a free-floating exoplanet-exomoon system, MOA-2011-BLG-262, with a primary lens mass of M_host ~ 4 Jupiter masses hosting a sub-Earth mass moon.

Exoplanets

First Earth-sized Rocky Exoplanet Found

A team of astronomers has found the first Earth-sized planet outside the solar system that has a rocky composition like that of Earth. This exoplanet, known as Kepler-78b, orbits its star very closely every 8.5 hours, making it much too hot to support life. The results are being published in the journal Nature.

Exoplanets

Misaligned Planets in a Distant Star System

Using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, an international team of astronomers has discovered a distant planetary system featuring multiple planets orbiting at a severe tilt to their host star.

Exoplanets

A Strange Lonely Planet Found Without a Star

An international team of astronomers has discovered an exotic young planet that is not orbiting a star. This free-floating planet, dubbed PSO J318.5-22, is just 80 light-years away from Earth and has a mass only six times that of Jupiter. The planet formed a mere 12 million years ago -- a newborn in planet lifetimes.

Exoplanets

Telescopes Reveal Patchy Clouds on Exotic World

Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have created the first cloud map of a planet beyond our solar system, a sizzling, Jupiter-like world known as Kepler-7b.

Exoplanets

How Engineers Modified the Spitzer Telescope to Probe Exoplanets

Now approaching its 10th anniversary, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has evolved into a premier observatory for an endeavor not envisioned in its original design: the study of worlds around other stars, called exoplanets.

Exoplanets

New Observations of a Water-Rich Atmosphere Super-Earth

A Japanese research team of astronomers and planetary scientists has used Subaru Telescope's two optical cameras, Suprime-Cam and the Faint Object Camera and Spectrograph (FOCAS), with a blue transmission filter to observe planetary transits of super-Earth GJ 1214 b (Gilese 1214 b) (Figure 1).

Exoplanets