Related topics: stars · planets · solar system · jupiter

Big weather on hot Jupiters

Among the hundreds of new planets discovered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft are a class of exotic worlds known as "hot Jupiters." Unlike the giant planets of our own solar system, which remain at a safe distance from the sun, ...

Sifting through the atmospheres of far-off worlds

(Phys.org) —Gone are the days of being able to count the number of known planets on your fingers. Today, there are more than 800 confirmed exoplanets—planets that orbit stars beyond our sun—and more than 2,700 other ...

Spitzer telescope puts planets in a petri dish

(Phys.org) —Our galaxy is teeming with a wild variety of planets. In addition to our solar system's eight near-and-dear planets, there are more than 800 so-called exoplanets known to circle stars beyond our sun. One of ...

Detection of two new exoplanets with Kepler, SOPHIE and HARPS-N

An international team of astronomers, including Alexandre Santerne of the EXOEarths team at CAUP, identified and characterized two new exoplanets, thanks to combined observations from the Kepler space telescope, plus SOPHIE ...

A harvest of exoplanets for the TRAPPIST robotic telescope

Among the many planets detected orbiting other stars (exoplanets) over the last twenty years, a little less than three hundred periodically pass in front of their star. This is what astronomers call a planetary transit. Exoplanets ...

Explosive crater twins on Mars

(Phys.org) —Dramatic underground explosions, perhaps involving ice, are responsible for the pits inside these two large martian impact craters, imaged by ESA's Mars Express on 4 January.

Retired star found with planets and debris disc

(Phys.org) —ESA's Herschel space observatory has provided the first images of a dust belt – produced by colliding comets or asteroids – orbiting a subgiant star known to host a planetary system. The team of scientists ...

NASA selects Explorer investigations for formulation

NASA's Astrophysics Explorer Program has selected two missions for launch in 2017: a planet-hunting satellite and an International Space Station instrument to observe X-rays from stars.

Gravity-bending find leads to Kepler meeting Einstein

(Phys.org) —NASA's Kepler space telescope has witnessed the effects of a dead star bending the light of its companion star. The findings are among the first detections of this phenomenon—a result of Einstein's theory ...

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