Deep beneath the surface of distant exoplanets known as super-Earths, oceans of molten rock may be doing something extraordinary: powering magnetic fields strong enough to shield entire planets from dangerous cosmic radiation ...
At the beginning of the exoplanet age, the goals were fairly simple. The first was to find as many of them as possible to flesh out our understanding of the exoplanet population. The second was to determine if any were in ...
On Jan. 11, 2026, I watched anxiously at the tightly controlled Vandenberg Space Force Base in California as an awe-inspiring SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried NASA's new exoplanet telescope, Pandora, into orbit.
Pandora, the latest in a long portfolio of University of Arizona's space science missions, has cleared its last major milestone on its journey into space. This week, Pandora—a satellite about the size of fridge—was mounted ...
One of the main questions in exoplanet science concerns M dwarfs (red dwarfs) and the habitability of exoplanets that orbit them. These stars are known for their prolific and energetic flaring, and that's a problem. M dwarfs ...
The sun is not only our closest stellar neighbor, it's also the star we understand the most. As we've observed it over the centuries, we've learned that the sun is not an immortal constant. It goes through active and quiet ...
One of the primary goals of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is to detect atmospheres around exoplanets, to try to suss out whether or not they could potentially support life. But, in order to do that, scientists have ...
With new technologies comes new discoveries. Or so Spider Man's Uncle Ben might have said if he was an astronomer. Or a scientist more generally—but in astronomy that saying is more true than many other disciplines, as many ...
In astronomy, there is a concept called "degeneracy." It has nothing to do with delinquent people, but instead is used to describe data that could be interpreted multiple ways. In some cases, that interpretation is translated ...
The hunt is on for terrestrial exoplanets in habitable zones, and some of the most promising candidates were discovered almost a decade ago about 40 light-years from Earth. The TRAPPIST-1 system contains seven terrestrial ...
