Among the more than 4,000 known exoplanets, KOI-456.04 is something special: less than twice the size of Earth, it orbits a sun-like star. And it does so with a star-planet distance that could permit planetary surface temperatures ...
Astronomy
Jun 4, 2020
0
426
Brown dwarfs are the middle child of astronomy, too big to be a planet yet not big enough to be a star. Like their stellar siblings, these objects form from the gravitational collapse of gas and dust. But rather than condensing ...
Astronomy
Jun 2, 2020
4
728
There are eight classical planets in our solar system, from speedy Mercury to distant Neptune. There are also numerous dwarf planets, such as Pluto and Ceres. While we continue to find more dwarf planets, there are some hints ...
Astronomy
May 25, 2020
14
303
When the New Horizons spacecraft passed by Pluto in 2015, one of the many fascinating features its images revealed was that this small, frigid world in the distant solar system has a hazy atmosphere. Now, new data helps explain ...
Space Exploration
May 14, 2020
19
26
The next generation of powerful Earth- and space-based telescopes will be able to hunt distant solar systems for evidence of life on Earth-like exoplanets—particularly those that chaperone burned-out stars known as white ...
Astronomy
Apr 30, 2020
4
2925
A team of transatlantic scientists, using reanalyzed data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, has discovered an Earth-size exoplanet orbiting in its star's habitable zone, the area around a star where a rocky planet could ...
Astronomy
Apr 15, 2020
9
4749
In 2017, an international team of astronomers announced a momentous discovery. Based on years of observations, they found that the TRAPPIST-1 system (an M-type red dwarf located 40 light-years from Earth) contained no less ...
Astronomy
Apr 10, 2020
9
78
Astronomers have used the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to make the first measurement of wind speed on a brown dwarf—an object intermediate in mass ...
Astronomy
Apr 9, 2020
3
1177
NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will search for planets outside our solar system toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy, where most stars are. Studying the properties of exoplanet worlds will help ...
Astronomy
Mar 31, 2020
2
225
In 2021, NASA's next-generation observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will take to space. Once operational, this flagship mission will pick up where other space telescopes—like Hubble, Kepler and Spitzer—left ...
Astronomy
Mar 30, 2020
0
36
