TESS tagged posts

Striped or spotted? Winds and Jet Streams found on the closest Brown Dwarf

Using high-precision brightness measurements from NASA’s TESS space telescope, astronomers found that the nearby brown dwarf Luhman 16B’s atmosphere is dominated by high-speed, global winds akin to Earth’s jet stream system. This global circulation determines how clouds are distributed in the brown dwarf’s atmosphere, giving it a striped appearance.Daniel Apai

A University of Arizona-led research team has found bands and stripes on the brown dwarf closest to Earth, hinting at the processes churning the brown dwarf’s atmosphere from within.

Brown dwarfs are mysterious celestial objects that are not quite stars and not quite planets. They are about the size of Jupiter but typically dozens of times more massive...

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About Half of Sun-like Stars could Host Rocky, potentially Habitable Planets

This illustration depicts one possible appearance of the planet Kepler-452b, the first near-Earth-size world to be found in the habitable zone of a star similar to our Sun.
Credits: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

According to new research using data from NASA’s retired planet-hunting mission, the Kepler space telescope, about half the stars similar in temperature to our Sun could have a rocky planet capable of supporting liquid water on its surface.

Our galaxy holds at least an estimated 300 million of these potentially habitable worlds, based on even the most conservative interpretation of the results in a new study to be published in The Astronomical Journal...

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The first Ultra-Hot Neptune, LTT 9779b, is one of nature’s improbable planets

The Ultra Hot Neptune. Credit: Ricardo Ramirez

An international team of astronomers, including a group from the University of Warwick, have discovered the first Ultra Hot Neptune planet orbiting the nearby star LTT 9779.

The world orbits so close to its star that its year lasts only 19 hours, meaning the stellar radiation heats the planet to over 1700 degrees Celsius.

At these temperatures, heavy elements like iron can be ionized in the atmosphere and molecules disassociated, providing a unique laboratory to study the chemistry of planets outside the solar system.

Although the world weighs twice as much as Neptune does, it is also slightly larger and so has a similar density...

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A Warm Jupiter Orbiting a Cool Star

A planet observed crossing in front of, or transiting, a low-mass star has been determined to be about the size of Jupiter. While hundreds of Jupiter-sized planets have been discovered orbiting larger sun-like stars, it is rare to see these planets orbiting low-mass host stars and the discovery could help astronomers to better understand how these giant planets form.

“This is only the fifth Jupiter-sized planet transiting a low-mass star that has been observed and the first with such a long orbital period, which makes this discovery really exciting,” said Caleb Cañas, lead author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at Penn State and NASA Earth and Space Science Fellow.

Originally detected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spacecraft, astronomers characterized ...

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