In every planet-forming disk there's a point where the heat from a host star needed to keep H2O molecules as vapor peters out, and the H2O be becomes a solid crystal. This is the snow line, and it looms large in most theories of planet formation. Most broadly, planets formed inside the snow line will …
Three Star Ballet, With Exoplanet
It hardly seems possible, but researchers have detected a planet in apparently stable orbit within a three star system -- a configuration now known as a trinary. The ubiquity of binary stars has been understood for some time, and the presence of exoplanets orbiting around and within them is no longer a surprise. But this …
The Still Mysterious "Tabby’s Star"
It's been eight months since citizen "Planet Hunters" working with Yale postdoc Tabetha Boyajian announced the discovery of a most unusual star, or rather a star where something most unusual was intermittently and erratically happening. The puzzle began with some light curve data, taken over a four year period, by the Kepler Space Telescope The …
Big Bangs
What can get the imagination into super-drive more quickly than the crashing of really huge objects? Like when a Mars-sized planet did a head-on into the Earth and, the scientific consensus says, created the moon. Or when a potentially dinosaur-exterminating asteroid heads towards Earth, or when what are now called "near-Earth objects" seems to be …
A Flood of Newly Confirmed Exoplanets
In the biggest haul ever of new exoplanets, scientists with NASA's Kepler mission announced the confirmation of 1,284 additional planets outside our solar system -- including nine that are relatively small and within the habitable zones of their host stars. That almost doubles the number of these treasured rocky planets that orbit their stars at …
A Dwarf Star, Trappist-1, Produces a Major Discovery
The detection of potentially habitable exoplanets is not the big news it once was -- there have been so many identified already that the novelty has faded a bit. But that hardly means surprising and potentially breakthrough discoveries aren't being made. They are, and one of them was just announced Monday. This is how the …
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Cloudy, With a Chance of Iron Rain
From an Earth-centric point of view, rain of course means falling water. We can have storms with falling dust -- I experienced a few of those while a reporter in India -- but rain is pretty much exclusively H2O falling from the clouds. But as the study of exoplanets moves aggressively into the realm …
How Planet 9 Would Make Ours a More Typical Solar System
There’s been a ton of justifiable excitement these days about the possible discovery of a ninth planet in our solar system — an object ten time the mass of Earth and 200 times further from the sun. Especially in the context of the recent demotion of Pluto from a planet to a dwarf planet, …
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How Will We Know What Exoplanets Look Like, and When?
An earlier version of this article was accidently published last week before it was completed. This is the finished version, with information from this week's AAS annual conference. Let's face it: the field of exoplanets has a significant deficit when it comes to producing drop-dead beautiful pictures. We all know why. Exoplanets are just too …
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(Mostly) Thumbs Down on ExoNames
The name 51 Pegasi B, the first planet identified outside of our solar system, has been eclipsed. Now it is Dimidium. The (at least) five planet system orbiting the star formerly known as 55 Cancri now circles the star Copernicus. And those planets 55 Cancri B, C, D, E, and F are Galileo, Brahe, Lippershey, …
Many Worlds 