GRAVITY instrument breaks new ground in exoplanet imaging

The GRAVITY instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) has made the first direct observation of an exoplanet using optical interferometry. This method revealed a complex exoplanetary atmosphere with clouds ...

Cooking up alien atmospheres on Earth

Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are cooking up an alien atmosphere right here on Earth. In a new study, JPL scientists used a high-temperature "oven" to heat a mixture of hydrogen ...

An exoplanet with an 11-hour orbit

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was launched on April 18 of last year with the primary objective of discovering transiting planets smaller than Neptune around stars bright enough for spectroscopic investigations ...

Aluminium oxide found in an ultra-hot Jupiter

An international team led by the astrophysicist Carolina von Essen, has used the OSIRIS spectrograph on the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) to study the chemical composition of a planet whose equilibrium temperature is around ...

Habitable water world exoplanets

There are currently about fifty known exoplanets whose diameters range from Mars-sized to several times the Earth's and which also reside within their stars' habitable zone – the orbital distance within which their surface ...

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