Category Astronomy/Space

Hot Jupiters — giant gas planets that race around their host stars in extremely tight orbits — have become a little bit less mysterious thanks to a new study combining theoretical modeling with observations by the Hubble Space Telescope.

While previous studies mostly focused on individual worlds classified as “hot Jupiters” due to their superficial similarity to the gas giant in our own solar system, the new study is the first to look at a broader population of the st...

New images have revealed detailed clues about how the first stars and structures were formed in the Universe and suggest the formation of the Galaxy got off to a fitful start.

An international team of astronomers from the University of Nottingham and Centro de Astrobiología (CAB, CSIC-INTA) used data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), the so-called Frontier Fields, to locate and study some of the smallest faintest galaxies in the nearby universe. This has revealed the formation of the galaxy was likely to be fitful. The first results have just been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

One of the most interesting questions that astronomers have been trying to answer for decades is how and w...

Young planetary systems generally experience extreme growing pains, as infant bodies collide and fuse to form progressively larger planets. In our own solar system, the Earth and moon are thought to be products of this type of giant impact. Astronomers surmise that such smashups should be commonplace in early systems, but they have been difficult to observe around other stars.

Now astronomers at MIT, the National University of Ireland at Galway, Cambridge University, and elsewhere have discovered evidence...

New results from NASA satellite data show that space weather—the changing conditions in space driven by the sun—can heat up Earth’s hottest and highest atmospheric layer.

The findings, published in July in Geophysical Research Letters, used data from NASA’s Global Observations of the Limb and Disk, or GOLD mission. Launched in 2018 aboard the SES-14 communications satellite, GOLD looks down on Earth’s upper atmosphere from what’s known as geosynchronous orbit, effectively “hovering” over the western hemisphere as Earth turns...