Exoplanets
Purple Bacteria — Not Green Plants — Might Be the Strongest Indication of Life
Astrobiologists continue to work towards determining which biosignatures might be best to look for when searching for life on other…
Radiating Exoplanet Discovered in “Perfect Tidal Storm”
Can tidal forces cause an exoplanet’s surface to radiate heat? This is what a recent study accepted to The Astronomical…
The Seven Most Intriguing Worlds to Search for Advanced Civilizations (So Far)
Sometimes, the easy calculations are the most interesting. A recent paper from Balázs Bradák of Kobe University in Japan is…
The First Atmospheric Rainbow on an Exoplanet?
Astronomers think they've detected the first-ever rainbow-like "glory effect" on an exoplanet. The observations were made with ESA's Cheops mission,…
Could We Directly Observe Volcanoes on an Exoplanet?
After a few decades of simply finding exoplanets, humanity is starting to be able to do something more - peer…
The Search for the Perfect Coronagraph to Find Earth 2.0
Studying exoplanets is made more difficult by the light from the host star. Coronagraphs are devices that block out the…
Life Might Be Difficult to Find on a Single Planet But Obvious Across Many Worlds
If we could detect a clear, unambiguous biosignature on just one of the thousands of exoplanets we know of, it…
Finding Atmospheres on Red Dwarf Planets Will Take Hundreds of Hours of Webb Time
The JWST is enormously powerful. One of the reasons it was launched is to examine exoplanet atmospheres to determine their…
Could Earth Life Survive on a Red Dwarf Planet?
Even though exoplanet science has advanced significantly in the last decade or two, we're still in an unfortunate situation. Scientists…
Another Hycean Planet Found? TOI-270 d
Hycean planets may be able to host life even though they're outside what scientists consider the regular habitable zone. Their…