Tag Archives: exoplanet

It wasn’t so long ago that exoplanets were technically only hypothesized and had never been directly observed. Today, it seems like every other week produces an amazing new observation and an exciting new insight.This week’s breakthrough comes from the Very Large Telescope in Chile, used by a team from Ireland’s …

The Earth of today is a lush garden that supports countless living organisms, but give it a few billion years, and Earth will be swallowed up by the Sun. Or maybe not. Astronomers have discovered an Earth-like world 4,000 light-years away that shows another way forward. This world remains intact, …

NASA launched the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in 2018 with a two-year mission to scan the sky for exoplanets. As often happens with NASA spaceflight, the mission has long passed its design timeline. NASA is now celebrating the fifth anniversary of TESS, and it hopes to see the planet …

The James Webb Space Telescope was not designed exclusively to hunt for exoplanets like NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), but it can still make vital contributions to our understanding of these distant worlds. NASA has announced that Webb just confirmed its first exoplanet, a world known as LHS 475 …

A few short decades ago, we could only speculate about the possibility of planets beyond our own solar system, but then we started finding them. Little by little, the universe has become a bustling place with more exoplanets being discovered every year. How many? NASA JPL says as of March …

You might think our local gas giants are extreme — Jupiter with its gaggle of moons, and Saturn with the iconic rings, but they’re nothing compared to WASP-121b. This exoplanet caught the attention of astronomers a few years back when they realized its atmosphere was hot enough to bleed metal. …

Move over, James Webb: humanity is about to get another eye in the sky. There’s just been a new space telescope announced, named TOLIMAN, and it’s already got funding from the Breakthrough project. The telescope is designed around two things: its target, and the exotic optics the telescope will use. …

Thanks to amazing scientific advancements like NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), we have confirmed the existence of thousands of exoplanets. Most of these alien worlds are obscured by the light from their stars, limiting what we can learn about them. For the first time, scientists …

  The Hubble Space Telescope has been spying on a very unusual exoplanet some 336 light years away. The planet, known as HD 106906 b, is 11 times the mass of Jupiter, and it orbits the binary stars at a distance of nearly 68 billion miles — 730 times greater …