Tagged: planets

Latest crop from the Kepler telescope brings small planets around Sun-like stars — and an ice world. NASA’s Kepler space telescope has hit a milestone: confirming the existence of 1,000 planets, including a fresh crop of alien worlds that are more Earth-like than any yet...

Luke Skywalker takes in Tatooine’s twin sunset in the original Star Wars. Scientists reckon such habitable planets might orbit multiple suns in real life. LucasFilm Desert planet Tatooine isn’t the most inviting world in the Star Wars galaxy, but its twin suns offer a visually...

Three OU astronomers today announced groundbreaking discoveries allowing scientists to understand planets outside the solar system. Professor Carole Haswell, Dr. Daniel Staab and Dr. John Barnes discovered three, new, nearby planetary systems. Research led by Professor Haswell found the exoplanets—planets outside the solar system—as part...

Remnants of planets with Earth-like crusts have been discovered in the atmospheres of four nearby white dwarf stars by University of Warwick astronomers, offering a glimpse of the planets that may have once orbited them up to billions of years ago. These crusts are from...

In the last 25 years, scientists have discovered over 4000 planets beyond the borders of our solar system. From relatively small rock and water worlds to blisteringly hot gas giants, the planets display a remarkable variety. This variety is not unexpected. The sophisticated computer models,...

It is now possible to capture images of planets that could potentially sustain life around nearby stars, thanks to advances reported by an international team of astronomers in the journal Nature Communications. Using a newly developed system for mid-infrared exoplanet imaging, in combination with a...

Early planetary migration in the solar system has been long established, and there are myriad theories that have been put forward to explain where the planets were coming from. Theories such as the Grand Tack Hypothesis an the Nice Model show how important that migration...

Astronomers have developed a new technique to search for exoplanets—by looking for their crushed up bones in the atmospheres of white dwarfs. And it’s working. The search for planets outside the solar system, known as exoplanets, has one significant limitation: We can only find exoplanets...

Scientists have discovered two planets orbiting a red dwarf, including a “Super-Earth,” just 120 light-years from Earth. The research, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, notes that exoplanets TOI-1266 b and TOI-1266 c take just 11 and 19 days to orbit their star. Red stars, which...

The seven rocky planets orbiting the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 have remarkably similar densities, suggesting they likely have similar compositions, too. Located about 40 light-years from Earth, TRAPPIST-1 hosts seven rocky planets that are about the size of Earth or smaller — the largest group...