Pulsar planets research investigates planetary-mass companions orbiting pulsars, focusing on their formation, dynamical evolution, and detectability in extreme post-supernova environments. This area integrates precision pulsar timing to identify periodic variations in pulse arrival times, constraining companion masses and orbital parameters with high accuracy. The field explores formation channels such as fallback disks, supernova-induced capture, or survival of pre-existing planets through stellar collapse, and studies irradiation, ablation, and tidal interactions under intense relativistic winds and high-energy radiation. Pulsar planets provide unique laboratories for testing planetary composition, disk evolution, and orbital dynamics under conditions inaccessible in normal main-sequence planetary systems.
When astronomers discovered the first planet outside our solar system, it was orbiting a pulsar, one of the most extreme, radiation-blasted environments imaginable. Not exactly the kind of place you'd expect to find a planet, ...
Astrobiology
2 hours ago
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Greek mythology has given a name to a great many objects in our solar system. But perhaps one of the least well understood are the Trojans, named after the people of Troy featured in "The Iliad." When astronomers refer to ...
Astronomy
Mar 18, 2026
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An international collaboration using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) has published an exceptionally detailed radio sky map, revealing 13.7 million cosmic sources and delivering the most complete census yet of actively growing ...
Astronomy
Feb 19, 2026
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Almost as tall as a football field, NASA's Space Launch System rocket and capsule stack traveled slowly—just under one mile per hour—out to the Artemis II launchpad, its temporary home at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, ...
Space Exploration
Feb 3, 2026
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In 2026, astronauts will travel around the moon for the first time since the Apollo era, powerful new space telescopes will prepare to survey billions of galaxies, and multiple nations will launch missions aimed at finding ...
Space Exploration
Jan 14, 2026
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Scientists using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have observed a rare type of exoplanet, or planet outside our solar system, whose atmospheric composition challenges our understanding of how it formed.
Astronomy
Dec 16, 2025
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Researchers from HSE University and the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences analyzed seven years of data from the ERG (Arase) satellite and, for the first time, provided a detailed description of a ...
Planetary Sciences
Nov 19, 2025
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Science advances through data that don't fit our current understanding. At least that was Thomas Kuhn's theory in his famous On the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So scientists should welcome new data that challenges ...
Planetary Sciences
Sep 11, 2025
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176
One of the most difficult parts of astronomy is understanding how time affects it. The farther away you look in the universe, the farther back you look in time. One way this complicates things is how objects might change ...
Astronomy
Sep 4, 2025
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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will have 13 months to develop a low-orbit telescope that will be part of a space mission expected to launch in 2027 to help select future moon landing sites, map mineral deposits, and ...
Space Exploration
Aug 11, 2025
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