Exoplanet exploration and the search for a second Earth—the habitable zone and conditions for life, gently explained.
29 articles
A planet bigger than Jupiter orbits close beside a white dwarf—the burned-out core of a dead star—at an average temperature of about -87°C. WD 1856+534 b is the coldest exoplanet ever directly imaged by JWST. SORABUMI explains how a planet survived a fate that should have destroyed it.
Behind every splashy exoplanet-discovery headline sits a quiet library that just keeps growing. In January 2026, it added 468 spectra at once — a 40% jump in its collection. SORABUMI explains why simply hoarding data is, itself, how science moves forward.
SORABUMI explains: JWST peered into the atmosphere of exoplanet PSR J2322-2650b and found neither water nor methane, but bare molecular carbon. It's the first detection of its kind among roughly 150 exoplanets studied, and current planet-formation models can't account for what's inside.
Most exoplanets never show up in a photo. So how did JWST directly image a gas giant 7.6 times the mass of Jupiter, 12 light-years away? The answer comes down to three things: brightness contrast, distance, and temperature.
Keck Observatory's KPIC instrument measured the spin of giant gas planets and brown dwarfs ('failed stars') using spectroscopy. In the HR 8799 system, the brown dwarf — more than three times heavier — rotates about six times slower than its lighter planetary neighbor. The likely culprit: a newborn planet's magnetic field braking against its birth disk, offering a new way to tell planets and stars apart.
As Earth crosses the Sun's face, it dims the Sun's light by only 0.008%. ESA's PLATO exoplanet telescope, targeting a 2027 launch, will watch over 200,000 stars for years hoping to catch that same fleeting shadow. SORABUMI explains why hunting for a second Earth is such a patient game.
When a possible sign of life turns up in an exoplanet's atmosphere, scientists don't celebrate right away. Until the chance of a fluke falls below roughly 1 in 3.5 million — the '5-sigma' threshold — and until they've finished doubting their own wishful thinking, it isn't a 'discovery' yet. SORABUMI explains the yardstick of scientific confidence and why researchers hold their excitement in check.
On the rocky exoplanet LHS 1140 b, 48 light-years away, astronomers have confirmed the first atmosphere ever detected on a habitable-zone rocky world. The clincher: catching helium from its upper layers escaping into space. SORABUMI unpacks the July 2026 milestone.
How can we tell whether a rocky planet dozens of light-years away has an atmosphere? For a few hours, as the planet crosses in front of its star, starlight grazes its air and comes out with a few colors missing. SORABUMI explains how transit spectroscopy reads that 'color fingerprint,' and why the clue shrinks to the thickness of an apple peel once you're talking about an Earth-sized world.
Astronomers just found a third planet, d, orbiting Beta Pictoris through direct imaging. But when they went back through old archives, it turned out the planet had already been photographed more than 11 years earlier. SORABUMI explains how a world 100 times fainter than its neighbor slipped past notice for so long.
GJ 3378 b, a super-Earth found 25 light-years away, sits right in the middle of its habitable zone, soaking up about 90% as much starlight as Earth gets from the Sun. But the real test for finding life isn't distance — it's whether a planet can hold onto its atmosphere. SORABUMI explains the new yardstick astronomers call the cosmic shoreline.
JWST tracked the scorching gas giant WASP-121b for a full orbit and found something strange: the escaping atmosphere trails behind the planet, but also stretches out ahead of it. SORABUMI breaks down what a complete-orbit observation of atmospheric loss, 858 light-years away, actually revealed.
SORABUMI explains: 190 light-years away, in the TOI-1130 system, a Neptune-sized planet survives on a 4-day orbit even closer to the star than a hot Jupiter that should have cleared everything out. JWST read the atmosphere and found a story of two worlds that migrated inward together.
In March 2025, ESA's Euclid space telescope trained its lens on a densely packed region toward the Milky Way's core. Here's what gravitational microlensing — the technique that lets stars find other stars' planets — could uncover, as data from the survey prepares for public release on June 24.
A red dwarf barely 40% the mass of our Sun is orbited by a gas giant nearly the size of Jupiter. TOI-5205b shouldn't exist according to planet formation theory — and when JWST peered at its atmosphere, the surprises kept coming.
On WASP-94Ab, a giant planet 690 light-years away, silicate clouds made of vaporized rock form every morning and vanish by dusk. JWST's first direct observation of this rock-cloud cycle — and why it changes everything we know about planetary atmospheres.
Astronomers have discovered a super-Earth orbiting the red dwarf Ross 318, a mere 28 light-years from Earth. With six times our planet's mass, it sits inside the habitable zone where liquid water could exist — and hints of an atmosphere make it one of the most compelling nearby finds in years.
JWST has detected methane in the atmosphere of exoplanet TOI-199b — a planet roughly the size of Saturn with temperatures around 79°C. This 'temperate giant' is a new category of world, and it's already shaking up our models of how planets form.
ESA's exoplanet-hunting mission PLATO bundles 26 cameras to monitor up to 1 million stars. It aims to measure planetary radii to within 3% and even determine stellar ages. What sets it apart from previous telescopes, and what does it really mean to find an 'Earth-like planet'?
The AI pipeline RAVEN analyzed light curves from 2.2 million TESS-observed stars, confirming 118 new planets and revealing that roughly 10% of Sun-like stars host a close-in planet. Here's how it works and why it matters.
M-type dwarf stars — red dwarfs — make up more than 70% of all stars in the galaxy. They're small, long-lived, and surrounded by rocky planets. So why are they so hostile to life? SORABUMI breaks down the battle between stellar flares and planetary atmospheres.
What exactly is a rogue planet? This piece explores the strange class of worlds that belong to no star, drift freely through the Milky Way, and — as of January 2026 — can finally be measured for both mass and distance at the same time.
JWST's observations of Epsilon Indi Ab, a giant planet just 12 light-years away, turned up something no one expected: water-ice clouds instead of the ammonia clouds theory had promised. Here's what that means for atmospheric models.
JWST has confirmed that more than 97% of GJ 9827d's atmosphere is water vapor. Neither a rocky planet nor a gas giant, this 'steam world' represents a genuinely new category in exoplanet science.
GJ 9827 d, a planet 97 light-years from Earth, has an atmosphere composed almost entirely of water vapor. Neither rocky, icy, nor gaseous, it represents a fourth planetary category — one that has now been observationally confirmed for the first time.
The 'habitable zone' gets thrown around a lot in exoplanet news. But it's never just about distance. Atmosphere, magnetic fields, rotation, and hidden subsurface oceans beyond the zone entirely — here's what conditions for life actually look like, explained with diagrams.
JWST detected a thick atmosphere on TOI-561 b, a scorching rocky planet orbiting its star in just 11 hours. Here's why an atmosphere can survive in that environment — and why the discovery changes everything about how we study exoplanets.
With more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets, have we found a second Earth? We break down what the habitable zone actually means, how similarity is measured, and how the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is about to change the search.
Benzene has been found in space. Amino acids and nucleobases hitchhike on comets. Organic molecules are everywhere. So why does life seem to exist only on Earth? JWST's latest observations are forcing us to rethink the enormous gap between raw ingredients and living things.