exoplanet

The nearby star AS 209 is pretty astonishing.  Located about 400 light-years from Earth, it’s a little bit more massive than the Sun and very young, probably 1 – 2 million years old. It’s part of what’s called the…

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The very tiny motion of a small star has revealed the presence of a super-Earth exoplanet, orbiting at a distance that is close to habitable.Around a faint red dwarf called Ross 508, located just 36.5 light-years away (yet too dim to be…

As of this article’s writing, NASA has indicated that 5,030 extrasolar planets have been confirmed in 3,772 systems, with another 8,974 candidates awaiting confirmation. With next-generation instruments like the James Webb Space…

Hubble Space Telescope archival observations of 25 hot Jupiters have been analyzed by an international team of astronomers, enabling them to answer five open questions important to our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres. Amongst…

Direct images of exoplanets are rare and lack detail. Future observatories might change that, but for now, exoplanet images don’t tell researchers very much. They merely show the presence of the planets as blobs of light. But a new…

The next step to understanding exoplanets is to understand their atmospheres better. Astronomers can determine a planet’s mass, density, and other physical characteristics fairly routinely. But characterizing their atmospheres is more…

Not all planetary systems are alike. Out there in the big, wide galaxy, a number of different configurations have been spotted, some vastly different from our home system. These include extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that orbit not…

In the pantheon of weird exoplanets, one of the strangest has to be WASP-121 b. It’s so close to its star that not only is its surface temperature estimated to be up to an unimaginable 4,600 degrees Fahrenheit, but gravitational…

Astronomers have just peered into the atmosphere of one of the most extreme exoplanets ever discovered.Although it's absolutely not habitable (at least as we understand it), the exoplanet WASP-189b is the first in which scientists have…