Assessing the habitability of planets around old red dwarfs

A new study using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope gives new insight into an important question: how habitable are planets that orbit the most common type of stars in the Galaxy? The target ...

Do the TRAPPIST-1 planets have atmospheres?

In February of 2017, the scientific community rejoiced as NASA announced that a nearby star (TRAPPIST-1) had a system of no less than seven rocky planets. Since that time, astronomers have conducted all kinds of follow-up ...

Super-Earths discovered orbiting nearby red dwarf

The nearest exoplanets to us provide the best opportunities for detailed study, including searching for evidence of life outside the solar system. In research led by the University of Göttingen, the RedDots team of astronomers ...

A mirror image of Earth and sun

Among the more than 4,000 known exoplanets, KOI-456.04 is something special: less than twice the size of Earth, it orbits a sun-like star. And it does so with a star-planet distance that could permit planetary surface temperatures ...

In the far future, the universe will be mostly invisible

If you look out on the sky on a nice clear dark night, you'll see thousands of intense points of light. Those stars are incredibly far away, but bright enough to be seen with the naked eye from that great distance—a considerable ...

Star survives close call with a black hole

Astronomers may have discovered a new kind of survival story: a star that had a brush with a giant black hole and lived to tell the tale through exclamations of X-rays.

How did the TRAPPIST-1 planets get their water?

In 2017, an international team of astronomers announced a momentous discovery. Based on years of observations, they found that the TRAPPIST-1 system (an M-type red dwarf located 40 light-years from Earth) contained no less ...

How will clouds obscure the view of exoplanet surfaces?

In 2021, NASA's next-generation observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will take to space. Once operational, this flagship mission will pick up where other space telescopes—like Hubble, Kepler and Spitzer—left ...

page 5 from 20