TESS tagged posts

Clingy planets can trigger their own doom, Cheops and TESS suggest

How planets orbiting close to their host stars can cause their own downfall by triggering flares
How planets orbiting close to their host stars can cause their own downfall by triggering flares

Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s Cheops mission have caught an exoplanet that seems to be triggering flares of radiation from the star it orbits. These tremendous explosions are blasting away the planet’s wispy atmosphere, causing it to shrink every year.

This is the first-ever evidence of a “planet with a death wish.” Though it was theorized to be possible since the nineties, the flares seen in this research are around 100 times more energetic than expected.

The work is published in the journal Nature.

This planet’s star makes our sun look sleepy
Thanks to telescopes like the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS...

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Astronomers just found a giant planet that shouldn’t exist

artist's illustration of the newly discovered exoplanet and star
Star TOI-6894 is just like many in our galaxy, a small red dwarf, and only ~20% of the mass of our Sun. Like many small stars, it is not expected to provide suitable conditions for the formation and hosting of a large planet.

Scientists have discovered a giant planet orbiting a tiny red dwarf star, something they believed wasn’t even possible. The planet, TOI-6894b, is about the size of Saturn but orbits a star just a fifth the mass of our Sun. This challenges long-standing ideas about how big planets form, especially around small stars. Current theories can’t fully explain how such a planet could have taken shape. Even more fascinating, this cold planet may have a rare kind of atmosphere rich in methane or even ammonia something we’ve never seen in an exoplanet before.

Star TOI-689...

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Astronomers Find Far-flung “Super Earths” Are Not Farfetched

This artist's concept illustrates the results of a new study that measured the masses of many planets relative to the stars that host them
Caption: This artist’s concept illustrates the results of a new study that measured the masses of many planets relative to the stars that host them, leading to new information about populations of planets in the direction of the bulge of the Milky Way. This study, published in the journal Science, shows that super-Earths are common and places them in context with gas giant planets.

Credit: Westlake University

A new study shows that planets bigger than Earth and smaller than Neptune are common outside the Solar System.

An international team including astronomers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) has announced the discovery of a planet about twice the size of Earth orbiting its star farther out than Saturn is to the sun.

These results are another examp...

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New Planet in Kepler-51 System discovered using James Webb Space Telescope, JWST

illustration of star with three planets
A fourth planet has been discovered in the Kepler-51 system using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The three previously known planets in the system, illustrated here,  are unusual ultra-low density “super-puff” planets. Credit: NASA, ESA, and L. Hustak, J. Olmsted, D. Player and F. Summers (STScI). All Rights Reserved.

The unusual system of three ‘super puff’ planets has at least one more planet, revealed by its gravitational tug on other planets. An unusual planetary system with three known ultra-low density “super-puff” planets has at least one more planet, according to new research led by researchers from Penn State and Osaka University...

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