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    The phoenix planet: Astronomers find a world reborn from its star’s ashes

    October 6, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Astronomers have discovered the first example of a second-generation planet orbiting a white dwarf, a world that appears to have formed from the remains of the dead star it now orbits.

    A team of astronomers led by the University of Warwick has identified the first second-generation planet ever found around a white dwarf. While similar “reborn” worlds have been suspected to exist around pulsars, this discovery shows that a second generation of planets can form around this much more common stellar remnant.

    First author Jamie Williams, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick, said, “Second-generation planets are worlds that form out of the material a star casts off as it dies...

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    TESS just found a planet in a new way—and more may be hiding in its eight years of data

    July 3, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    microlensing
    This animation illustrates the concept of gravitational microlensing. When one star in the sky appears to pass nearly in front of another, the light rays of the background source star become bent due to the warped space-time around the foreground star. This star acts like a virtual magnifying glass, amplifying the brightness of the background source star. If the nearer star harbors a planetary system, then those planets can also act as lenses, each one producing a short deviation in the brightness of the source. When astronomers find planets this way, they can measure their mass and orbital distance from their host star. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab

    For the first time, NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission has identified a planet orbiting a ...

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    ‘Super-puff’ planets lighter than candy floss discovered by international team

    June 26, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    'Super-puff' planets lighter than candy floss discovered by international team
    This illustration depicts the sun-like star TOI-791 and two giant planets that NASA’s TESS space telescope discovered in its orbit. These planets, designated TOI-791 b and TOI-791 c, are roughly the size of Jupiter but a tiny fraction of its mass, meaning they have an extraordinarily low density. Credit: NASA/Daniel Rutter.

    An international collaboration has discovered two of the lowest-density giant planets ever detected: rare “super-puff” planets with densities lower than candy floss. The study—led by the University of Oxford, in collaboration with Université Côte d’Azur/Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur and the University of Birmingham—has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

    The two planets, named TOI-791 b and TOI-791 c, orbit an F7-type dwar...

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    Triply-eclipsing triple star system discovered with TESS

    May 28, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers have discovered a triply-eclipsing star system. The newfound system, designated TIC295741342, consists of two sun-like stars in an eclipsing binary and a giant tertiary companion, which orbits the binary. The finding was reported in a paper published May 19 on the arXiv pre-print server.

    TESS is conducting a survey of about 200,000 bright stars near the sun with the aim of searching for transiting exoplanets. Besides identifying alien worlds, TESS is also a very useful tool in analyzing binary systems, tracking how mutual stellar eclipses twist and distort gravitational fields.

    Triply and triple
    Now, a team of astronomers led by Brian P...

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