A new study provides the most accurate estimate of the frequency that planets that are similar to Earth in size and in distance from their host star occur around stars similar to our Sun. Knowing the rate that these potentially ...
Astronomy
Aug 14, 2019
8
1570
New research from astronomers at the University of Washington uses the intriguing TRAPPIST-1 planetary system as a kind of laboratory to model not the planets themselves, but how the coming James Webb Space Telescope might ...
Astronomy
Aug 14, 2019
4
963
The scorching hot exoplanet WASP-121b may not be shredding any heavy metal guitar riffs, but it is sending heavy metals such as iron and magnesium into space. The distant planet's atmosphere is so hot that metal is vaporizing ...
Astronomy
Aug 1, 2019
5
687
The rings of Uranus are invisible to all but the largest telescopes—they weren't even discovered until 1977—but they're surprisingly bright in new heat images of the planet taken by two large telescopes in the high deserts ...
Astronomy
Jun 20, 2019
1
5
Astronomers believe planets like Jupiter shield us from space objects that would otherwise slam into Earth. Now they're closer to learning whether giant planets act as guardians of solar systems elsewhere in the galaxy.
Astronomy
May 24, 2019
31
944
Astronomers have discovered a third planet in the Kepler-47 system, securing the system's title as the most interesting of the binary-star worlds. Using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, a team of researchers, led ...
Astronomy
Apr 16, 2019
0
1874
Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope document the formation of a Great Dark Spot on Neptune for the first time, report researchers in a new study.
Astronomy
Mar 25, 2019
2
1615
Some of the peculiar aspects of our solar system—an enveloping cloud of comets, dwarf planets in weird orbits and, if it truly exists, a possible Planet Nine far from the sun—have been linked to the close approach of ...
Astronomy
Feb 28, 2019
5
464
Corresponding with the three-year anniversary of their announcement hypothesizing the existence of a ninth planet in the solar system, Caltech's Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin are publishing a pair of papers analyzing ...
Astronomy
Feb 27, 2019
39
1286
The strange orbits of some objects in the farthest reaches of our solar system, hypothesised by some astronomers to be shaped by an unknown ninth planet, can instead be explained by the combined gravitational force of small ...
Astronomy
Jan 21, 2019
58
883
