Tag Archives: planets

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has already captured some incredible images of our universe, with some game-changing insights to boot. But researchers at New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute believe the observatory would be capable of even more if it had been designed differently. Published Sunday in Frontiers in Astronomy …

Just 5.96 light-years from Earth sits Barnard’s Star, a red dwarf with a fifth of the Sun’s diameter and even less of its mass. Considered a solitary star for its lack of stellar companions, Barnard’s Star is notoriously lonely—signs of any exoplanets in its orbit have come and gone without …

In a study published in the journal Science Advances, a team of European astronomers shows that water can be delivered to a terrestrial planet in the form of ‘pebble snow’ in the early phases of the planet’s growth. An artist’s impression of a water-world exoplanet. Image credit: Sci-News.com. “All our …

  Astronomers are getting very good at hunting for exoplanets with a little help from powerful ground and space-based telescopes. We’re no longer finding one planet here and there — we’re discovering entire solar systems. TRAPPIST-1 has been of particular interest with its system of seven planets, discovered in 2016 …

Water may emerge in connection with the formation of terrestrial planets, according to a new analysis of a Martian meteorite called North West Africa (NWA) 7533. An artist’s impression of the young Mars. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO / N. Risinger, skysurvey.org. “There are two hypotheses about the emergence …

Extrasolar planets hosted by stars with sufficiently high carbon-to-oxygen ratios could be made of diamonds and silica, according to new research by Arizona State University and the University of Chicago. An artist’s impression of a carbide planet with diamond and silica as main minerals. Image ctredit: Shim / ASU / …

  Spotting exoplanets isn’t as simple as pointing a telescope at the sky and picking out the planet-shaped things. The worlds orbiting distant stars are too dim and tiny for that, but we can detect them with the help of planet-hunting satellites like TESS and the dearly departed Kepler. These …

Like every summer there are plenty of blockbuster, popcorn action flicks set to premiere, but one of the most anticipated is director Luc Besson’s latest, Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets. And after yesterday, we finally have a full-length trailer to watch. One of the reason’s Valerian is so …

Astronomers have found a great many exoplanets out there among the stars, but one thing they have not found is exomoons. There’s no evidence of moons orbiting any of the planets we’ve found orbiting other stars, and it’s not clear why. Moons are obviously common in our solar system — …

On the surface of giant gaseous planets, hydrogen is a gas. But between this gaseous layer and the liquid metal hydrogen in the planet’s core lies a layer of dark hydrogen, says a team of physicists led by Dr. Alexander Goncharov from Carnegie Institution of Washington and University of Edinburgh …