Our galaxy may be teeming with rogue planets, gravitationally unbound to any star. An international team of scientists, led by Polish astronomers, has announced the discovery of the smallest Earth-sized free-floating planet ...
Astronomy
Oct 29, 2020
7
24599
Using the microlensing technique, an international team of astronomers has detected a new distant alien world. The newly found exoplanet, designated OGLE-2018-BLG-0799Lb, is about five times less massive than Jupiter and ...
An upcoming NASA mission could find that there are more rogue planets—planets that float in space without orbiting a sun—than there are stars in the Milky Way, a new study theorizes.
Astronomy
Aug 21, 2020
28
3653
Astronomers at the University of Canterbury (UC) have found an incredibly rare new Super-Earth planet towards the centre of the galaxy. The planet is one of only a handful that have been discovered with both size and orbit ...
Astronomy
May 13, 2020
3
1529
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
The path of a light beam is bent by the presence of mass, as explained by General Relativity. A massive body can therefore act like a lens—a so called "gravitational lens"—to distort the image of an object seen behind ...
Astronomy
Mar 30, 2020
16
493
A 500-day global observation campaign spearheaded more than three years ago by ESA's galaxy-mapping powerhouse Gaia has provided unprecedented insights into the binary system of stars that caused an unusual brightening of ...
Astronomy
Jan 21, 2020
2
318
The path of a light beam is bent by the presence of mass, and a massive body can therefore act like a lens (a "gravitational lens") to distort the image of an object seen behind it. Scientists first confirmed Einstein's prediction ...
Astronomy
Nov 1, 2019
0
845
Researchers using telescopes around the world confirmed and characterized an exoplanet orbiting a nearby star through a rare phenomenon known as gravitational microlensing. The exoplanet has a mass similar to Neptune, but ...
Astronomy
Nov 1, 2019
9
5890
Brown dwarfs are stars less massive than the sun and unable to burn hydrogen. They comprise (at least in mass) a bridge between planets and stars, and astronomers think that they form and evolve in ways different from either ...
Astronomy
Mar 4, 2019
2
282
