Tag: Exoplanets

A small NASA exoplanet probe now has a ride to Earth orbit. The agency announced on Monday afternoon (Feb. 10) that it has picked SpaceX to launch Pandora, a 716-pound (325-kilogram) satellite designed to help scientists better understand how our understanding of exoplanets‘ atmospheres are affected by changes in their host stars. Pandora will lift off atop a Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than this fall, according to NASA officials. Pandora will head to low Earth orbit. Once there, the satellite will observe at least 20 known transiting exoplanets —…

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One of the largest exoplanets to be found orbiting a relatively low-mass star has been discovered, thanks to the way the planet’s gravity drags its star around on its journey through space. The planet is the fourth world to be spotted in data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which was designed to map a billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, cataloguing their masses, luminosities, temperatures and motions through space. It’s this latter property that led to the discovery of the giant exoplanet Gaia-4b. It orbits a star…

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Astronomers may have inadvertently complicated the mystery of how strange “roasting marshmallow” planets form. Using the Gemini South telescope, researchers found that the “hot and puffy” ultra-hot Jupiter planet WASP-121b may have formed closer to its star than previously believed, challenging what we know about how planets form. Since the discovery of the first planet outside the solar system in the mid-1990s, the catalog of extrasolar planets, or “exoplanets,” has grown to over 5,000 entries. Many of these exoplanets are like nothing found in our solar system. The hot and…

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Astronomers have found winds on a distant world that blow at a phenomenal 5.6 miles per second (9 kilometers per second), or 20,500 miles per hour (33,000 kilometers per hour) — the fastest winds ever measured on a planet. The faraway world, a gas giant called WASP-127b that was discovered in 2016, orbits a star 520 light-years from Earth. It zips around its host star in just four days, following a slightly skewed orbit. The exoplanet is also likely tidally locked to its star the same way the moon is…

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The innermost Earth-like planet in the famous TRAPPIST-1 system might be capable of supporting a thick atmosphere after all, according to new research. Since the system of seven tightly-packed, Earth-sized worlds was discovered in 2017, huddled in remarkable harmony just 40 light-years from Earth, astronomers have tried to determine whether any support atmosphere, which is critical to harbor life as we know it. Previous observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have suggested all planets in the system would be barren, airless rocks thanks to violent, atmosphere-stripping radiation unleashed…

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A planetary system anchored by a dead white dwarf star, located around 4,000 light-years away, has offered astronomers a possible glimpse into what our sun and Earth could look like in around 8 billion years.  However, this would only be Earth’s future if our planet manages to survive the sun’s eventual transformation into a swollen red giant. This transformation is expected to happen around 5 billion to 6 billion years from now, when the sun finally exhausts its fuel supply needed for nuclear fusion. That red giant phase will see…

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As much as 95% of an exoplanet’s water could be trapped forever deep inside its iron core, transforming what we thought we knew about water worlds and potentially rendering them even more habitable than we realized. “Planets are much more water-abundant than previously assumed,” said Caroline Dorn, who is professor of exoplanets at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, in a statement. When planets are born by accreting rubble and enduring collisions with other protoplanets, they become so hot that their entire surface is covered in an ocean of molten rock. This…

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