Exoplanet exploration and the search for a second Earth—the habitable zone and conditions for life, gently explained.
11 articles
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.