Astrophysicists studying a popular exoplanet in its star's habitable zone have found that electric currents in the planet's upper atmosphere could create sufficient heating to expand the atmosphere enough that it leaves the ...
In the fall of 1989, the Galileo spacecraft was launched into space, bound for Jupiter and its family of moons. Given the great distance to the king of planets, Galileo had to take a roundabout tour through the inner solar ...
Astrobiology
Feb 9, 2024
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54
A multi-institutional team of astronomers, Earth scientists and planetary physicists has found evidence, via data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), that some hycean exoplanets may have molten surfaces rather than ...
A recently discovered solar system with six confirmed exoplanets and a possible seventh is boosting astronomers' knowledge of planet formation and evolution. Relying on a globe-spanning arsenal of observatories and instruments, ...
Astronomy
Jan 26, 2024
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Proxima Centauri b is the closest exoplanet to Earth. It is an Earth-mass world right in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star just 4 light-years from Earth. It receives about 65% of the energy Earth gets from the sun, and ...
Astronomy
Jan 24, 2024
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The Large Interferometer for Exoplanets (LIFE) project is an ambitious plan to build a space telescope with four independent mirrors. The array would allow the individual mirrors to move closer or farther apart, similar to ...
Astrobiology
Jan 23, 2024
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9
For many years, most astrophysical models assumed that planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, are heated at similar depths by their host stars (i.e., stars like the sun around which planetary systems are formed). ...
Using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered nine new "hot Jupiter" exoplanets. One of the newly detected alien worlds is almost four times more massive than ...
Astronomers have discovered a pair of exoplanets orbiting an M dwarf star, one of which is the coldest M dwarf planet found by the TESS satellite observatory, making it accessible for follow-up studies of its atmosphere. ...
Does the size of an exomoon help determine if life could form on an exoplanet it's orbiting? This is something a February 2022 study published in Nature Communications hoped to address as a team of researchers investigated ...
Planetary Sciences
Jan 15, 2024
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