Content tagged "exoplanets".
31 items (31 articles, 0 stories)
The 'twin sunset' sky from Star Wars isn't just movie magic. Kepler-16b, a Saturn-sized gas planet 245 light-years away, orbits a pair of stars that circle each other every 41 days — completing its own lap around both of them every 229 days. It survives the double gravity simply by keeping its distance.
Around PDS 70, some 400 light-years away, a gas-giant planet several times Jupiter's mass is still gathering material inside a gap it carved in the star's disk. Its surface runs about 1,000°C, and it orbits roughly as far out as Uranus does from the Sun. This isn't a 'candidate' — it's the first time anyone has caught a planet mid-construction in a single clear image.
A Jupiter-sized planet circles a pulsar once every 7.8 hours. Its sky is made of helium and carbon, with no water or methane in sight. Daytime highs hit around 2,000°C, and deep in the atmosphere, carbon is thought to crystallize into clouds of diamond. Nobody can explain how it formed. JWST has found a sky unlike anything else in the solar system.
Planets don't shine on their own, yet astronomers have already confirmed more than 6,000 beyond our solar system. Some are found when a foreground star's gravity briefly bends and brightens the light of a star behind it, revealing a hidden world in the distortion. The Roman Space Telescope, with a field of view 100 times wider than Hubble's, is about to make this technique the main event.
NASA's TESS mission has flagged nearly 6,000 potential exoplanets as of September 2025, but only 679 have been confirmed as real. Here's how astronomers separate genuine planets from eclipsing binaries and starspots, then weigh them by measuring a star's wobble.
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.
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.
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.
JWST detected methane and an unusually high abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. The chemical ratios look nothing like those of comets born in our own solar system. This is the first time we have directly measured the composition of material made around another star.
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.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch on August 30, 2026. With a field of view 100 times wider than Hubble, it will simultaneously attack three of astronomy's biggest puzzles: dark energy, exoplanets, and galaxy evolution. Here's what's happening on the ground before it leaves.
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.
In June 2026, the SPHERE instrument at ESO's VLT captured four years of observations that reveal, for the first time, a protoplanetary disk actually rotating. The AB Aurigae system is messier than theory predicted — and that's exciting.
Red dwarfs — small, dim, and utterly unremarkable — have been quietly swallowing their own planets. A May 2026 discovery used lithium as the smoking gun. The same thing may have happened in our own solar system.
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.
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.
How did Earth, Mars, and Jupiter come to exist? Starting from clouds of gas and dust, this explainer walks through the step-by-step process of planet formation — and what the explosion of exoplanet discoveries has taught us about just how many ways a planetary system can turn out.
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.