The search for Earth 2.0 has begun in earnest. But there's a huge variety of exoplanets out there, so narrowing down the search to focus valuable telescope time on only the best candidates is critical. One variable of a planet ...
Even as temperatures rise on Earth's surface and in the lower atmosphere, the planet's upper atmosphere has cooled dramatically. This paradoxical pattern is a well-known sign of humanity's climate impacts—but until now, the ...
The Milky Way's galactic bulge, the bulbous region that surrounds the galactic center, contains a dense collection of stars, planets, and other free-floating objects. This region has been studied for decades with numerous ...
You're a long-necked Titanosaur grazing the plains and chomping away on tree leaves about 100 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous in what would eventually become a future Starbucks location. You look up at the night ...
There's so little we know about circumbinary planets—planets that orbit two stars instead of one—that they can feel like the stuff of fantasy. And for good reason: to date, we've only confirmed the existence of 18 circumbinary ...
One night last fall, University of Cincinnati astrophysics graduate Paul Smith waited anxiously for data to start rolling across his computer screen from the James Webb Space Telescope a million miles from Earth.
Astronomers have long known that neutron stars, the crushed cores left behind after massive stars explode, should be scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy. However, most of them are effectively invisible. A new study ...
Astronomers from the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) and elsewhere have conducted photometric and spectroscopic observations of a cataclysmic variable system designated SRGA J115215.0−510656. Results of the ...
Across the Milky Way galaxy, a planetary odd couple is circling a star some 190 light years from Earth. A normally "lonely" hot Jupiter is sharing space with a mini-Neptune, in a rare and unlikely pairing that's had astronomers ...
Rogue planets sound like rare travelers among the stars, freed from the gravitational constraints of a host system, left to forever wander the interstellar void. But modern models suggest these free floating planets (FFPs) ...
