NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will search for planets outside our solar system toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy, where most stars are. Studying the properties of exoplanet worlds will help ...
Astronomy
Mar 31, 2020
2
225
The path of a light beam is bent by the presence of mass, as explained by General Relativity. A massive body can therefore act like a lens—a so called "gravitational lens"—to distort the image of an object seen behind ...
Astronomy
Mar 30, 2020
16
493
Astronomers working on 'first light' results from a newly commissioned telescope in Chile made a chance discovery that led to the identification of a rare eclipsing binary brown dwarf system.
Astronomy
Mar 9, 2020
0
259
Citizen scientists have uncovered a bizarre pairing of two brown dwarfs, objects much smaller than the Sun that lack enough mass for nuclear fusion. The discovery, reported in The Astrophysical Journal and confirmed by a ...
Astronomy
Feb 12, 2020
1
193
A team of astronomers led by Brendan Bowler of The University of Texas at Austin has probed the formation process of giant exoplanets and brown dwarfs, a class of objects that are more massive than giant planets, but not ...
Astronomy
Feb 10, 2020
15
264
NASA's Kepler spacecraft was designed to find exoplanets by looking for stars that dim as a planet crosses the star's face. Fortuitously, the same design makes it ideal for spotting other astronomical transients—objects ...
Astronomy
Jan 24, 2020
0
1396
As one window to the universe closes, another will open with an even better view. Some of the same planets, stars and galaxies we first saw through the first window will appear in even sharper detail in the one that will ...
Astronomy
Jan 23, 2020
0
14
Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. In terms of mass, Jupiter dwarfs the other planets. If you were to gather all the other planets together into a single mass, Jupiter would still be 2.5 times more massive. ...
Astronomy
Nov 19, 2019
0
111
The discovery of yet another exoplanet is no longer news. More than 4,000 planets around other stars have now been found since the detection of the first one in 1995. As astronomers long suspected, or at least hoped, it seems ...
Astronomy
Sep 27, 2019
1
73
By combining high-precision astrometry and adaptive optics-resolved imaging, astronomers have found that the binary system WISE J0720−0846, better known as Scholz's star, hosts a T dwarf, confirming previous assumptions. ...
