Gemini Planet Imager analyzes 300 stars

Over the past four years, an instrument attached to a telescope in the Chilean Andes—known as the Gemini Planet Imager—has set its gaze on 531 stars in search of new planets. The team, led by Stanford University, is now ...

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 ...

Video: Jupiter odyssey

ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, is set to embark on a seven-year cruise to Jupiter starting May 2022. The mission will investigate the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants and the Jupiter system as an ...

Planets around other stars are like peas in a pod

An international research team led by Université de Montréal astrophysicist Lauren Weiss has discovered that exoplanets orbiting the same star tend to have similar sizes and a regular orbital spacing. This pattern, revealed ...

The proliferation of Jupiter-like worlds

Our galaxy is home to a bewildering variety of Jupiter-like worlds: hot ones, cold ones, giant versions of our own giant, pint-sized pretenders only half as big around.

Jupiter's great red spot heats planet's upper atmosphere

Researchers from Boston University's (BU) Center for Space Physics report today in Nature that Jupiter's Great Red Spot may provide the mysterious source of energy required to heat the planet's upper atmosphere to the unusually ...

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