'Hot Jupiters' provoke their own host suns to wobble

Blame the "hot Jupiters." These large, gaseous exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) can make their suns wobble when they wend their way through their own solar systems to snuggle up against their suns, according ...

How mighty Jupiter could have changed Earth's habitability

Is Jupiter a friendly planet, Earth's enemy, or perhaps both? For decades, scientists have talked about how the giant gas planet keeps some asteroids from striking our small world, while others have pointed out that Jupiter's ...

Astronomers see misaligned planets in distant system

Using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, an international team of astronomers has discovered a distant planetary system featuring multiple planets orbiting at a severe tilt to their host star.

Flipping hot Jupiters: Why some planets orbit the wrong way

(PhysOrg.com) -- In the last few years astronomers have observed that in some extrasolar systems the star is spinning one way and the planet, a "hot Jupiter," is orbiting the star in the opposite direction. A Northwestern ...

Spacecrafts reveal mysteries of Jupiter and Saturn rings

(PhysOrg.com) -- In a celestial forensic exercise, scientists analyzing data from NASA's Cassini, Galileo and New Horizons missions have traced telltale ripples in Saturn and Jupiter's rings to specific collisions with cometary ...

Jupiter has lost one of its cloud stripes

(PhysOrg.com) -- New photographs of the gas giant Jupiter, the first taken on May 9, show the massive reddish band of clouds known as the Southern Equatorial Belt in the planet’s southern hemisphere has disappeared from ...

First temperate exoplanet sized up (w/ Video)

(PhysOrg.com) -- Combining observations from the CoRoT satellite and the ESO HARPS instrument, astronomers have discovered the first “normal” exoplanet that can be studied in great detail. Designated Corot-9b, the planet ...

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