When the James Webb Space Telescope finally launches (late this month, if the schedule holds) it will forever change astronomy. Assuming that its complex, month-long deployment in space works as planned, it will become the most powerful and far-seeing observatory in the sky. It will have unprecedented capabilities to probe the earliest days of the …
Why Does Our Solar System Have No Super-Earths, and Other Questions for Comparative Planetology
Before the explosion in discovery of extrasolar planets, the field of comparative planetology was pretty limited -- confined to examining the differences between planets in our solar system and how they may have come to pass. But over the past quarter century, comparative planetology and the demographics of planets came to mean something quite different. …
NASA Should Build a Grand Observatory Designed to Search For Life Beyond Earth, Top Panel Concludes
NASA should begin developing a mission that can tell us whether life in the near galaxy is abundant, rare or essentially absent, The National Academy of Sciences recommended yesterday. The call for a next Grand Observatory telescope with this ambitious goal represents the first time that the Academy, in its Decadal Survey for Astronomy and …
Many Planets Form in a Soup of Life-Friendly Organic Compounds
One of the more persuasive arguments in favor of the potential existence of life beyond Earth is that the well-known chemical building blocks of that life are found throughout the galaxy. These chemical components aren't all present in all examined solar systems and planets, but they are common and behave in ways familiar to scientists …
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Frigid Europa Holds a Huge and Maybe Habitable Ocean Beneath Its Thick Ice Covering. How is That Possible?
Jupiter's moon Europa is almost five times as far away from the sun as Earth is, with surface temperatures that don't rise above minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit. It's slightly smaller than our moon and orbits but 400,000 miles from the solar system's largest planet, which it takes but 3.5 Earth days to orbit. As a …
Introducing Hycean Planets
Planets beyond our solar system, we now know, come in all shapes, sizes and consistencies. There are rocky planets, water worlds, gaseous planets, super-Earths, hot Jupiters, tidally locked planets, planets in orbital resonance with each other, and so much more. A group of exoplanet researchers at the University of Cambridge have recently proposed a new …
Findings Suggest that Red Dwarf Stars May Not Sterilize As Many Exoplanets As Feared
Red dwarf suns are the most common in the universe, and many of the exoplanets officially discovered so far orbit this type of "cool" star. Red dwarfs are much smaller and less powerful than the G type stars such as our own sun, and it is easier to detect exoplanets orbiting them because of their …
The Many Ways The James Webb Space Telescope Could Fail
When a damaged Apollo 13 and its crew were careening to Earth, mission control director Gene Kranz famously told the assembled NASA team that "failure is not an option." Actually, the actor playing Kranz in the "Apollo 13" movie spoke those words, but by all accounts Kranz and his team lived that phrase, with a …
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A Young Planet Found That May Well Be Making Moons
Astronomers have many theories about how planets are formed within the gas, dust, pebbles and gradually rocks of the circumstellar disks that encircle a star after it has been born. While the general outlines of this remarkable process are pretty well established, many questions large and small remain unanswered. One is how and when exomoons …
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Earth as a Transiting Exoplanet
Exoplanet scientists and enthusiasts spend a lot of time trying to find, measure and understand distant planets that can -- under specific conditions -- be detected as passing in front of their host star. A majority of the 4000-plus exoplanets discovered so far were indirectly detected this way, by measuring the diminishing of stellar light …
Many Worlds 