Tagged: alien worlds

Worlds with oceans beneath layers of rock and ice are common in our solar system. According to research presented at last week’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (March 15-19, 2021), worlds with underground oceans are likely to be common in other solar systems in our...

Earth has raindrops of water, while, on Venus, the rain is made of sulfuric acid. Jupiter rains droplets of helium. Saturn’s moon Titan rains methane. On Neptune and other gas giants, a diamond rain may fall. And, in the case of exoplanet WASP-76b, raindrops are...

Many alien planets around stars like our sun are potentially extraordinarily tilted, leading to dramatic swings between extreme winters and summers, a new study finds. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft revealed that about 30 percent of stars similar to our sun harbor super-Earths. As their name implies,...

TESS (NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) is the first-ever spaceborne all-sky transit survey whose primary mission is to search for alien worlds outside of our Solar System. Most interesting planets are those that could support life but TESS is expected to discover thousands of new...