exoplanets, hip99770, new discoveries, outer space

Astronomers Have Directly Detected a Massive Exoplanet

Finding life on other planets might well be the holy grail of astronomy, but the hunt for suitable host exoplanets that can sustain life is a resource-intensive task. The search for exoplanets (planets outside our Solar System) involves competing for time on Earth’s biggest telescopes — yet the hit rate of this search can be ...

Troy Oakes

Kepler planets.

Astronomers Find That 2 Exoplanets May Be Mostly Water

A team led by UdeM astronomers has found evidence that two exoplanets orbiting a red dwarf star are “water worlds,” planets where this liquid makes up a significant fraction of the volume. These worlds, located in a planetary system 218 light-years away in the constellation Lyra, are unlike any planets found in our solar system. ...

Troy Oakes

The Kepler planetary system.

James Webb Telescope Reveals an Exoplanet Atmosphere That Has Never Seen Before

NASA’s space telescope has produced a molecular and chemical portrait of the atmospheric constituents of exoplanet WASP-39 b, a Saturn-sized behemoth that orbits a star some 700 light-years away. The observations provide a full menu of atoms and molecules, and even signs of active chemistry and clouds. The suit of discoveries is detailed in a ...

Troy Oakes

Artist's illustration of exoplanet WASP-39b.

Birmingham Telescope Discovers 2 New Temperate Rocky Planets

The team, which includes astronomers at the University of Birmingham, detected the rocky planets orbiting LP 890-9, a small, cool star located about 100 light-years from Earth. The star, also called TOI-4306 or SPECULOOS-2, is the second-coolest star found to host planets, after the famous TRAPPIST-1. This rare discovery is the subject of a forthcoming publication ...

Troy Oakes

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

Astronomers Flag 3 Exoplanets as Being Stars

The first worlds beyond our solar system were discovered three decades ago. Since then, close to 5,000 exoplanets have been confirmed in our galaxy. Astronomers have detected another 5,000 planetary candidates — objects that might be planets but have yet to be confirmed. Now, the list of planets has shrunk by at least three. In ...

Troy Oakes

Night sky filled with stars.

Evidence for Substance at Liquid-Gas Boundary on Exoplanet WASP-31b

One of the properties that makes a planet suitable for life is the presence of a weather system. Exoplanets, such as WASP-31b, are too far away to directly observe this, but astronomers can search for substances in the atmosphere that make a weather system possible. Researchers from the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research and ...

Troy Oakes

Artist impression of an exoplanet.

Hubble Pins Down Weird Exoplanet with Far-Flung Orbit

An exoplanet in an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away may offer a clue to a mystery much closer to home: a hypothesized, distant body in our solar system dubbed “Planet Nine.” This is the first time that astronomers have been able to measure the motion of a massive Jupiter-like planet that ...

Troy Oakes

The 11-Jupiter-mass exoplanet HD 106906 b.

An Earth-Sized Rogue Planet Discovered in the Milky Way

Our Galaxy may be teeming with rogue planets, gravitationally unbound to any star. An international team of scientists, led by Polish astronomers from the University of Warsaw, has announced the discovery of the smallest Earth-sized free-floating planet found to date. Over 4,000 extrasolar planets have been discovered to date. Although many of the known exoplanets ...

Troy Oakes

An artist's impression of a gravitational microlensing event by a free-floating exoplanet.

How Many Habitable Planets Are Out There?

Thanks to new research using data from the Kepler space telescope, it’s estimated that there could be as many as 300 million potentially habitable planets in our galaxy. Some could even be pretty close, with several likely within 30 light-years of our Sun. The findings will be published in The Astronomical Journal, and research was a ...

Troy Oakes

This illustration depicts Kepler-186f.

Carbon-Rich Exoplanets May Be Made of Diamonds

As missions like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, TESS, and Kepler continue to provide insights into the properties of exoplanets (planets around other stars), scientists are increasingly able to piece together what these planets look like, what they are made of, and if they could be habitable or even inhabited. In a new study published recently in The Planetary Science Journal, a ...

Troy Oakes

Diamond anvil cells.