Space and astronomy news
Astronomers have found plenty of white dwarf stars surrounded by debris disks. Those disks are the remains of planets destroyed by the star as it evolved. But they’ve found one intact Jupiter-mass planet orbiting a white dwarf. Are there more white dwarf planets? Can terrestrial, Earth-like planets exist around white dwarfs?
Despite the fact that we’ve discovered thousands of them, exoplanets are hard to find. And some types are harder to find than others. Naturally, some of the hardest ones to find are the ones we most want to find. What can we do? Keep working on it, and that’s what a trio of Chinese scientists …
Continue reading “What’s the Best Way to Find Planets in the Habitable Zone?”
Earth is our only example of a habitable planet, so it makes sense to search for Earth-size worlds when we’re hunting for potentially-habitable exoplanets. When astronomers found seven of them orbiting a red dwarf star in the TRAPPIST-1 system, people wondered if Earth-size planets are more common around red dwarfs than Sun-like stars. But are …
Continue reading “Do Red Dwarfs or Sunlike Stars Have More Earth-Sized Worlds?”
Even with the clearest image from the best telescope in the world, astronomers still won’t know what they’re looking at. It takes a fundamental understanding of physics, particularly how light works, to glean scientific data from the images that telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) capture. To help with that understanding, a whole …
Continue reading “What Would It Take to See Exoplanet Volcanoes?”
As of this month, astronomers have discovered 5,506 exoplanets orbiting other stars. That number is growing daily, and astronomers are hoping, among other things, to find Earth-like worlds. But will we know one when we see it? How might we be able to tell an Earth-like garden from a Venus-like pressure cooker from upwards of …
Continue reading “Can JWST Tell the Difference Between an Exo-Earth and an Exo-Venus?”
The ESA launched Gaia in 2013 with one overarching goal: to map more than one billion stars in the Milky Way. Its vast collection of data is frequently used in published research. Gaia is an ambitious mission, though it seldom makes headlines on its own. But that could change.
We can’t understand nature without understanding its range. That’s apparent in exoplanet science and in our theories of planetary formation. Nature’s outliers and oddballs put pressure on our models and motivate scientists to dig deeper.
With JWST safely in space, researchers are designing the next generation of space telescope that could Earth-sized worlds orbiting sunlike stars. Chinese scientists released a concept paper this week for the Tianlin mission, a 6-meter UV/Optical/IR space telescope, which could begin operations in 2045. This telescope would search for rocky planets in the habitable zones around nearby stars and search for biosignatures using direct imaging. The team estimates they could obtain the spectrum of 20 candidate exoplanets in the first five years of operation.
A new study has found that some of the building blocks of organic molecules could survive in Venus clouds, suggesting life could exist there.
When our Sun runs out of hydrogen fuel in its core, it’ll switch to burning helium and bloat up as a red giant. This will make it 100 times larger, gobbling up the inner planets and maybe even Earth. Maybe there’s hope. Astronomers have found a planet orbiting a dying star that must have been swallowed up during that expansion phase. The star would have been 1.5 times bigger during the red giant phase than the planet’s orbit. Being inside a red giant star doesn’t lead to the inevitable death of a planet.