exoplanet tagged posts

How close can a rocky planet be to a star, and still sustain water and life? A recently discovered exoplanet may be key to solving that Edge of Habitabilitymystery.

“Super-Earth” LP 890-9c (also named SPECULOOS-2c) is providing important insights about conditions at the inner edge of a star’s habitable zone and why Earth and Venus developed so differently, according to new research led by Lisa Kaltenegger, associate professor of astronomy at Cornell University.

Her team found LP 890-9c, which orbits close to the inner edge of its solar system’s habitable zone, would look vastly different depending on whether it still had warm oceans, a ste...

Astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have helped detect the clear presence of a moon-forming region around an exoplanet — a planet outside of our Solar System. The new observations, published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, may shed light on how moons and planets form in young stellar systems.

The detected region is known as a circumplanetary disk, a ring-shaped area surrounding a planet where moons and other satellites may form. The observed disk surrounds exoplanet PDS 70c, one of two giant, Jupiter-like planets orbiting a star nearly 400 light-years away...

That evidence is a set of advanced simulations based on observations of the rocky planet LHS 3844b, which is slightly larger than Earth. Importantly for this particular piece of research, it doesn’t look as though the exoplanet has an atmosphere.

That leaves half of LHS 3844b permanently exposed to its sun and could mean temperatures of up to roughly 800 degrees Celsius (1,472 degrees Fahrenheit) on the ‘daytime’ side, and about minus 250 degrees Celsius (minus 418 degrees Fahrenheit) on the ‘night-time’ side.”We thought that this severe temperature contrast might affect material flow in the planet’s interior,” says astronomer Tobias Meier, from the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Based on phase curve o...

Our solar system has a king. The planet Jupiter, named for the most powerful god in the Greek pantheon, has bossed around the other planets through its gravitational influence. With twice the mass of Saturn, and 300 times that of Earth, Jupiter’s slightest movement is felt by all the other planets. Jupiter is thought to be responsible for the small size of Mars, the presence of the asteroid belt, and a cascade of comets that delivered water to young Earth.

Do other planetary systems have gravitational gods like Jupiter?

A team of astronomers led by the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (UH IfA) has discovered a planet three times the mass of Jupiter in a distant ...