TESS tagged posts

Stars with less than half the mass of our sun are able to host giant Jupiter-style planets, in conflict with the most widely accepted theory of how such planets form, according to a new study led by UCL (University College London) and University of Warwick researchers.

Gas giants, like other planets, form from disks of material surrounding young stars. According to core accretion theory, they first form a core of rock, ice and other heavy solids, attracting an outer layer of gas once this core is sufficiently massive (about 15 to 20 times that of Earth).

However, low-mass stars have low-mass disks that, models predict, would not provide enough material to form a gas giant in this way, or at least not quickly enough before the disk breaks up.

In the study, accepted for publica...

For the first time, astronomers have spotted an exoplanet whose orbit is decaying around an evolved, or older, host star. The stricken world appears destined to spiral closer and closer to its maturing star until collision and ultimate obliteration.

The discovery offers new insights into the long-winded process of planetary orbital decay by providing the first look at a system at this late stage of evolution.

Death-by-star is a fate thought to await many worlds and could be the Earth’s ultimate adios billions of years from now as our Sun grows older.

“We’ve previously detected evidence for exoplanets inspiraling toward their stars, but we have never before seen such a planet around an evolved star,” says Shreyas ...

An international team of researchers led by Charles Cadieux, a Ph.D. student at the Université de Montréal and member of the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx), has announced the discovery of TOI-1452 b, an exoplanet orbiting one of two small stars in a binary system located in the Draco constellation about 100 light-years from Earth.

The exoplanet is slightly greater in size and mass than Earth and is located at a distance from its star where its temperature would be neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on its surface. The astronomers believe it could be an “ocean planet,” a planet completely covered by a thick layer of water, similar to some of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons.

In an article published today in The Astronomical Journal, Cadieux and his ...

For the past thirty years, the star β Pictoris has fascinated astronomers because it enables them to observe a planetary system in the process of formation. It is made up of at least two young planets, and also contains comets, which were detected as early as 1987. These were the first comets ever observed around a star other than the Sun.

Now, an international research team headed by Alain Lecavelier des Etangs, CNRS researcher at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (CNRS/Sorbonne Université)1, has discovered 30 such exocomets and determined the size of their nuclei1, which vary between 3 and 14 kilometres in diameter...