JWST tagged posts

A team of astronomers have used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile to shed new light on planets around a nearby star, L98-59, that resemble those in the inner Solar System. Amongst the findings are a planet with half the mass of Venus — the lightest exoplanet ever to be measured using the radial velocity technique — an ocean world, and a possible planet in the habitable zone.

“The planet in the habitable zone may have an atmosphere that could protect and support life,” says María Rosa Zapatero Osorio, an astronomer at the Centre for Astrobiology in Madrid, Spain, and one of the authors of the study published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The results are an important step in the quest to find life on Earth-sized planets outside the...

A new analysis of known exoplanets has revealed that Earth-like conditions on potentially habitable planets may be much rarer than previously thought. The work focuses on the conditions required for oxygen-based photosynthesis to develop on a planet, which would enable complex biospheres of the type found on Earth. The study is published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The number of confirmed planets in our own Milky Way galaxy now numbers into the thousands...

Location of Eta twins in galaxies M51, M101, NGC 6946, and M83. Individual Image Credits: M51: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); M101:NASA/ESA/K. Kuntz (JHU), F. Bresolin (U. Hawaii), J. Trauger (Jet Propulsion Lab), J. Mould (NOAO), Y.-H. Chu (U. Illinois, Urbana), Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope/ J.-C. Cuillandre/Coelum/, Jacoby, B. Bohannan, and M. Hanna/ NOAO/AURA/NSF; NGC 6946: NASA/ESA/STScI/R. Gendler/Subaru Telescope (NAOJ); M83: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Credit: NASA, ESA and R. Khan (GSFC and ORAU)

Eta Carinae, the most luminous and massive stellar system within 10,000 light-yrs, is best known for an enormous eruption seen in the mid-19th century that hurled an amount of material at least 10X the sun’s mass into space...