Exoplanets
Rocky Planet Found With Only Half the Mass of Venus
When it comes to finding exoplanets, size matters, but so does weight. The larger and heavier the planet, the more…
Good News! Red Dwarfs Blast Their Superflares out the Poles, Sparing Their Planets From Destruction
The stellar flares of red dwarfs are mostly directed from their poles, which is good news for potentially habitable planets.
Astronomers Find a Huge Planet Orbiting its Star at 6,000 Times the Earth-Sun Distance
Tracking exoplanets is hard - especially when that exoplanet is so far away from its parent star that the normally…
Incredible! Astronomers see a Moon-Forming Disk Around a Newly Forming Planet
Planetary formation is a complicated, multilayered process. Even with the influx of data on exoplanets, there are still only two…
Could Life Exist in the Atmosphere of a sub-Neptune Planet?
Life could thrive in the atmosphere of warm gas planets, but only if they are seeded by asteroids.
Astronomers Have Found the Perfect Exoplanet to Study Another World’s Atmosphere
TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) has found a new planet, and the discovery of this sub-Neptune exoplanet has scientists excited…
What’s the Connection Between the Chemistry of a Star and the Formation of its Planets?
Scientists seem to have come up with a new parlor game - how many ways can we potentially detect exoplanets? …
How To Search the Chemical Makeup of Exoplanet Atmospheres for Hints at Their History
Author’s note – this article was written with Dr. Vincent Kofman, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), working in…
The Moons of Rogue Planets Could Have Liquid Surface Water and Thick Atmospheres. They Could be Habitable
A rocky world might not need a star to be habitable. It might just need to orbit a large gas…
Exoplanet Surveys are Leaning Towards the Possibility That our Solar System is… Normal
One of the unspoken caveats of most exoplanet discovery missions is that they only operate for a few years. Such…