It’s uncommon that we get to see exoplanets themselves. Most frequently, planets in different star methods are too small and too dim to be immediately detected, so astronomers infer their presence primarily based on their results on their host stars. However often, it’s doable to picture a star immediately — and not too long ago,…
Of the many strange exoplanets discovered to date, one of the most extreme has to be a world called AU Mic b. This Neptune-sized planet orbits close enough to its star that a year there lasts just over a week, and it is bombarded by dramatic flares from its host star which cook the planet…
One of the big open questions about Earth and how life formed here is where the planet’s water came from. Water is essential to life as we know it, but many scientists think that water did not originally form on Earth — rather, it may have been carried here by asteroids. Recently, though, astronomers have…
When you look up at the night sky you see mostly stars, not planets — and that’s simply because planets are so much smaller and dimmer than stars. But you can see planets in our solar system, like Venus, which is one of the brightest objects in the night sky. Due to its thick, dense…
Anyone who has watched Star Wars has likely found themselves enchanted by the views from Luke’s home planet of Tatooine, with its pair of suns visible in the sky over the desert. As visually striking as this concept it, it isn’t purely fantasy: there do exist planets that orbit two stars, called circumbinary systems, and…
Astronomers have discovered an Earth-sized planet that is highly volcanically active — an unusual finding that means it could possibly support life. The newly discovered planet, LP 791-18d, is thought to be covered in volcanoes and could be as active as Jupiter’s moon Io, which is the most volcanically active body in our solar system….
Studying other planets is difficult not only because they are so far away, but also because they can have properties that make taking readings much harder. Here in our solar system, we only have scant information about the surface of Venus because its thick atmosphere makes it hard to view. Being 50 light-years away, the…
Planets form from large disks of dust and gas that collect around their host stars. Billions of years ago, our solar system would have looked like a single point of bright light coming from the sun, with a disk of matter swirling around it that eventually clumped into planets. To learn about how our solar…
Astronomers recently caught the grisly sight of an exoplanet being devoured by its star, in a preview of what will eventually happen to the Earth. The sun-like star is located within our galaxy, around 12,000 light-years away, and has puffed up into an end-of-life state called a red giant. As it grows, it expands outward,…
The hunt for habitable exoplanets is on, and with the James Webb Space Telescope, we finally have a tool that can not only detect the presence of a planet in another star system, but can also look at the composition of its atmosphere. That ability will eventually allow us to find Earth-like planets wthat are…