In our Earthling minds, planets exist in solar systems with a Sun in the middle and objects large and small orbiting around it. This is hardly surprising since planets are pretty much exclusively illustrated in solar systems and, until the onset of the 21st century, no other kind of planet had been identified. That changed …
What the JWST is Learning About Exoplanet Atmospheres
The James Webb Space Telescope is beginning to reveal previously unknowable facts about the composition of exoplanets -- about the presence or absence of atmospheres around the exoplanets and the makeup of any atmospheres that are detected. The results have been coming in for some months and they are a delight to scientists. And as …
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What The James Webb Space Telescope Can Do For Exoplanet Science and What It Cannot Do
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. …
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 …
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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A Close Exoplanet Found That May Have An Atmosphere Ideal For Study
Different methods of searching for and finding distant exoplanets give different information about the planets found. The transit method -- where an exoplanets passed in front of its sun and dims the bright sunlight ever so slightly -- gives astronomers not only a detection but also its radius or size. The radial velocity method -- …
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More Weird and Wild Planets
The more we learn about the billions upon billions of planets that orbit beyond our solar system, the more we are surprised by the wild menagerie of objects out there. From the start, many of these untolled planets have been startling, paradigm-breaking, mysterious, hellish, potentially habitable and just plain weird. Despite the confirmed detection of …
Sparkling Gifts From the Hubble Space Telescope, Thirty Years Into Its Mission
For almost 30 years now, the Hubble Space Telescope has transformed how we see the cosmos. In terms of scientific output as well as making visible the splendors of the sky above us, the Hubble has been arguably the most consequential telescope ever to peer into space. To commemorate 30 years of Hubble science and …
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Cores, Planets and The Mission to Psyche
Deep inside the rocky planets of our solar system, as well as some solar system moons, is an iron-based core. Some, such as Earth's core, have an inner solid phase and outer molten phase, but the solar system cores studied so far are of significantly varied sizes and contain a pretty wide variety of elements …
Many Worlds 