Tagged: planet

An international team of researchers led by Alice Booth (Leiden University, the Netherlands) have discovered methanol-ijs in the warm part of a planet-forming disk. The methanol cannot have been produced there and must have originated in the cold gas clouds from which the star and...

“The temperature of the planet is approaching that of the exhaust from a rocket engine,” explains astrophysicist Brett Addison. TOI-1431b, a newly discovered planet located roughly 490 light-years from earth, is big. It’s three times more massive than Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar...

Researchers have weighed a planet orbiting a distant star by measuring the starlight passing through its atmosphere. The technique could accelerate the hunt for Earth-like worlds. Knowing the mass of an extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is an important step in determining whether it is rocky,...

“We’ve been talking for so long about our Wright brothers moment on Mars, and here it is.” Ingenuity, a NASA helicopter no heavier than a 2-liter bottle of soda, has pulled off the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. The feat took place at...

The red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 is home to the largest group of roughly Earth-size planets ever found in a single stellar system. Located about 40 light-years away, these seven rocky siblings provide an example of the tremendous variety of planetary systems that likely fill the...

A University of Arizona-led research team has found bands and stripes on the brown dwarf closest to Earth, hinting at the processes churning the brown dwarf’s atmosphere from within. Brown dwarfs are mysterious celestial objects that are not quite stars and not quite planets. They...

An atmosphere is what makes life on Earth’s surface possible, regulating our climate and sheltering us from damaging cosmic rays. But although telescopes have counted a growing number of rocky planets, scientists had thought most of their atmospheres long lost. However, a new study by...

Astronomers have discovered new hints of a giant, scorching-hot planet orbiting Vega, one of the brightest stars in the night sky. The research, published this month in The Astrophysical Journal, was led by University of Colorado Boulder student Spencer Hurt, an undergraduate in the Department...

A newly discovered exoplanet the size of Earth has one very peculiar characteristic — it orbits its star every 3.14 Earth days. The research, published in The Astronomical Journal, notes the “pi planet” known as K2-315b is relatively close to Earth at 186 light-years away....

An author called David Meade is convinced that in September ‘death planet’ Nibiru is going to kill us all. David, who wrote Planet X: The 2017 Arrival , believes the apocalypse will take place between September 20-23, and that clues are hidden in the Bible, and written...