Radio Telescope Confirms Free-Floating Binary Planets in the Orion Nebula

Planets orbit stars. That’s axiomatic. Or at least it was until astronomers started finding rogue planets, also called free-floating planets (FFPs). Some of these planets were torn from their stars’ gravitational grip and now drift through the cosmos, untethered to any star. Others formed in isolation. Now, astronomers have discovered that some FFPs can orbit …

The Next Generation LIFE Telescope Could Detect Some Intriguing Biosignatures

JWST has shown that it can detect various chemicals in the atmospheres of other worlds, from water vapor to carbon dioxide. Although it’s an incredible demonstration of the telescope’s power, it wasn’t designed for only this job. The Large Interferometer for Exoplanets (LIFE) is a next-generation space telescope under consideration by ESA. According to a new paper, this telescope could detect rare biosignatures like laughing gas within a few days of study.

Exomoons Defy Discovery

For a long time, we wondered if other stars hosted planets like the Sun does. Finally, in the 1990s, we got our answer. Now, another question lingers. Most of the planets in our Solar System have moons. Do exoplanets have exomoons?

Telescopes Didn’t Always Play Nicely with Each Other. That’s About to Change

Those readers who have dabbled with astronomical imaging will be familiar with the technique of taking multiple images and then stacking them together to improve the strength of the signal, yielding better images. Taking this technique further many research projects require date of the same object spanning longer time frames than a nights observing. This …

After DART Smashed Into Dimorphos, What Happened to the Larger Asteroid Didymos?

NASA’s DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) slammed into asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022, changing its orbital period. Ground and space-based telescopes turned to watch the event unfold, not only to study what happened to the asteroid, but also to help inform planetary defense efforts that might one day be needed to mitigate potential collisions …

A Sneak Peek at the Next Generation Very Large Array’s New Antennae

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) recently disclosed a prototype radio telescope antennae for its next generation Very Large Array (ngVLA) to a group of press, scientists, engineers, and government and business leaders from the United States and Germany at the end of a workshop held at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the …