Artist’s impression of the exomoon candidate Kepler-1625b-i, the planet it is orbiting and the star. (NASA/ESA/L. Hustak, STScI) “Moons are where planets were in the 1990s,” predicted René Heller from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research a few years ago. “We’re on the brink.” Heller was predicting that we were close to the …
Continue reading "The Giant Moon That Might Be the Heart of a Jupiter"
Artist rendering of a red dwarf , with three exoplanets orbiting. About 75% of all stars in the sky are the cooler, smaller red dwarfs. (NASA) Two giant planets have been found orbiting a tiny star, defying our theories for how planets are formed. To be entirely truthful, there is nothing new in an exoplanet …
The newest space telescope in the sky -- NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS -- has been searching for exoplanets for less than a year, but already it has quite a collection to its name. The TESS mission is to find relatively nearby planets orbiting bright and stable suns, and so expectations were high from …
Continue reading "Exoplanets Discoveries Flood in From TESS"
With so many exoplanets already detected, with the pace of discovery continuing to be so fast, and with efforts to find more distant worlds so constant and global, it's easy to become somewhat blase´ about new discoveries. After so many "firsts," and so many different kinds of planets found in very different ways, it certainly …
The very first planet detected outside our solar system powerfully made clear that our prior understanding of what planets and solar systems could be like was sorely mistaken. 51 Pegasi was a Jupiter-like massive gas planet, but it was burning hot rather than freezing cold because it orbited close to its host star -- circling …
The Kepler Space Telescope is dead. Long live the Kepler. NASA officials announced on Tuesday that the pioneering exoplanet survey telescope -- which had led to the identification of almost 2,700 exoplanets -- had finally reached its end, having essentially run out of fuel. This is after nine years of observing, after a malfunctioning …
Continue reading "The Kepler Space Telescope Mission Is Ending But Its Legacy Will Keep Growing."
The more exoplanet scientists learn about the billions and billions of celestial bodies out there, the more the question of unusual planets -- those with characteristics quite different from those in our solar system -- has come into play. Hot Jupiters, super-Earths, planets orbiting much smaller red dwarf stars -- they are all grist …
Continue reading "Water Worlds, Aquaplanets and Habitability"
The first exoplanets were all found using the radial velocity method of measuring the "wobble" of a star -- movement caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet. Radial velocity has been great for detecting large exoplanets relatively close to our solar system, for assessing their mass and for finding out how long …
Before the discovery of the first exoplanet that orbits a star like ours, 51 Pegasi b, the assumption of solar system scientists was that others planetary systems that might exist were likely to be like ours. Small rocky planets in the inner solar system, big gas giants like Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune beyond and, back …
Early this spring, the organizers of an exoplanet science gathering at Cambridge University put out the word that they would host a major meeting this summer. Within a week, the 300 allotted slots had been filled by scientists aspiring and veteran, and within a short time the waiting list was up to 150 more. …
Many Worlds 