Hot Jupiters as a research area focuses on close-in, gas giant exoplanets with orbital periods of a few days and strong stellar irradiation, used as laboratories for testing planet formation, migration, and atmospheric physics. Work in this field addresses mechanisms of inward migration (e.g., disk-driven vs. high-eccentricity pathways), tidal interactions, atmospheric escape, cloud and haze formation, chemical disequilibrium, and energy transport under extreme irradiation. Researchers combine transit, eclipse, and phase-curve observations with high-resolution spectroscopy and sophisticated radiative–convective and global circulation models to constrain compositions, temperature–pressure profiles, wind patterns, and the interaction of these planets with their host stars’ radiation and magnetic environments.
Macquarie University astronomers have tracked an extreme planet's orbital decay, confirming it is spiraling toward its star in a cosmic death dance that could end in three possible ways.
Astronomy
Jul 15, 2025
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Yale astronomers may have discovered the origin story for one of the universe's most dazzling phenomena—the double hot Jupiter—as well as a plan to find more of them.
Astronomy
Jun 19, 2025
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Using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has detected three new hot Jupiter exoplanets orbiting three distant K dwarf stars. The finding was reported in a research paper ...
Observations with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have provided new clues about how the exoplanet WASP-121b has formed and where it might have originated in the disk of gas and dust around its star. These insights stem ...
Planetary Sciences
Jun 3, 2025
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In the hunt for exoplanets, many seek out habitable worlds. There's comfort in discovering planets that remind us of home—ones at a perfect distance from their host star, with oceans of water covering their surfaces and breathable ...
Planetary Sciences
May 29, 2025
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Apples-to-apples comparisons in the distant universe are hard to come by. Whether the subject is dwarf galaxies, supermassive black holes, or "hot Jupiters," astronomers can spend months or years searching for comparable ...
Astronomy
May 14, 2025
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Scientists from UNSW Sydney have located a potential new exoplanet—a planet that orbits a star outside of our solar system—using a technique known as "transit timing variation."
Planetary Sciences
Mar 5, 2025
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The planet WASP-121b is extreme. It's a gas giant almost twice as big as Jupiter orbiting extremely close to its star–50 times closer than the Earth does around the sun. WASP-121b is so close to its star that tidal forces ...
Planetary Sciences
Mar 1, 2025
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Astronomers have peered through the atmosphere of a planet beyond the solar system, mapping its 3D structure for the first time. By combining all four telescope units of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope ...
Planetary Sciences
Feb 18, 2025
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89
Nearly one third of known exoplanets are enormous gas giants, similar to Jupiter or Saturn. But whereas our solar system developed with gas giants far from our sun, some planetary systems consist of so-called 'hot—or even ...
Planetary Sciences
Jan 31, 2025
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