Nearly a decade after the discovery of LHS 1140b, a rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone of a nearby low-mass star, a new study reveals that the object may have its own atmosphere.

University of Florida Assistant Professor of Astronomy Jason Dittmann first discovered the planet in 2016. Now, he is a co-author of the new study, published in Science, that uses helium escape to explain a potential atmosphere.

“The exciting part about this paper, and why I think it was accepted into Science, was that this is the first time that we’re seeing a rocky, Earth-like planet that could still have an atmosphere,” Dittmann said.

How the planet was found
The Magellan Clay telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile showed evidence of helium escaping from the planet...

We may age at different rates, but none of us escapes aging. A study in mice and human cells by Stanford Medicine researchers pins much of the blame on a particular type of immune cell’s increasing inability, with advancing age, to gobble up another immune cell type.

So-called tissue-resident macrophages appear to be central coordinators of age-related organ decline. Blocking a single receptor on these cells preserved the youthfulness of multiple organs in mice, including the brain, heart, skeletal and heart muscle, liver, spleen, bone marrow, kidney and colon. The receptor binds specifically to a hormone known to cause inflammation and pain in humans as well as mice.

In mice, selectively disabling this receptor exclusively on tissue-resident ma...

High-frequency waves classified as terahertz occupy a relatively underused region of the electromagnetic spectrum between infrared light and microwaves. Researchers have long recognized their unique potential for applications including ultrafast wireless communication, security screening, remote sensing and medical imaging.

As technologies push toward higher operating frequencies and data rates, photonics-based terahertz systems, which use light at high speed to generate and process terahertz signals, have emerged as a promising alternative to conventional electronic technologies because of their superior bandwidth and p...

In a major milestone in the search for life on other planets, astronomers have detected, for the first time, an atmosphere surrounding an Earth-like, rocky planet orbiting within the habitable zone of another star...