European astronomers have discovered a new transiting brown dwarf in a dynamical-tide regime as part of the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) survey. The newly found object, designated WASP-128b, orbits its host on a close ...
When it comes to extrasolar planets, appearances can be deceiving. Astronomers have imaged a new planet, and it appears nearly identical to one of the best studied gas-giant planets. But this doppelgänger differs in one ...
Astronomy
Jul 17, 2018
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102
A team of astronomers has performed one of the highest resolution observations in astronomical history by observing two intense regions of radiation, 20 kilometres apart, around a star 6500 light-years away.
Astronomy
May 23, 2018
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375
Pluto hogs the spotlight in the continuing scientific debate over what is and what is not a planet, but a less conspicuous argument rages on about the planetary status of massive objects outside our solar system. The dispute ...
Astronomy
Jan 23, 2018
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133
Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to peer deep into the vast stellar nursery called the Orion Nebula, astronomers searched for small, faint bodies. What they found was the largest population yet of brown dwarfs—objects ...
Astronomy
Jan 11, 2018
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47
Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. Astronomers are hopeful that the powerful infrared capability of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will resolve a puzzle as fundamental as stargazing itself—what ...
Astronomy
Jan 4, 2018
5
373
Taking a picture of an exoplanet—a planet in a solar system beyond our sun—is no easy task. The light of a planet's parent star far outshines the light from the planet itself, making the planet difficult to see. While ...
Astronomy
Dec 4, 2017
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142
Brown dwarf stars are failed stars. Their masses are so small, less than about eighty Jupiter-masses, that they lack the ability to heat up their interiors to the roughly ten million kelvin temperatures required for normal ...
Astronomy
Jul 11, 2017
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54
Our galaxy could have 100 billion brown dwarfs or more, according to work by an international team of astronomers, led by Koraljka Muzic from the University of Lisbon and Aleks Scholz from the University of St Andrews. On ...
Astronomy
Jul 5, 2017
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579
Scientists recently discovered the hottest planet ever found – with a surface temperature greater than some stars. As the hunt for planets outside our own solar system continues, we have discovered many other worlds with ...
Astronomy
Jun 12, 2017
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