Exoplanetology

Five years since the Kepler Space Telescope was retired, a team of astronomers believe they’ve found exoplanets captured by some of the veteran observatory’s last light.What Is Planet Nine and Why Can’t We Find It?Kepler launched to…

A team of astronomers has proposed peering into the inconspicuous region between host stars and their soot lines to find habitable worlds beyond our solar system.First Full-Color Images From Webb Space TelescopeThere are few known…

An artist’s rendering of the planet, called LP 791-18 d.Illustration: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (KRBwyle)On this world, the floor is lava and there’s no couch to jump to: Astronomers have described a planet that…

Astronomers think they’re the first to see a star swallowing a planet, after piecing together a cosmic whodunnit in data collected by several telescopes.First Full-Color Images From Webb Space TelescopeThe host star and the doomedplanet…

The Webb Space Telescope recently trained its perceptive gaze on a rocky exoplanet about 26 light-years from Earth and found that it appears to have water vapor in its atmosphere—a shock, given its extremeheat and its proximity to its…

The Webb Space Telescope just turned its infrared gaze at an exoplanet and found dense clouds swirling in the atmosphere of this quirky world.The planet—VHS 1256b—has a 22-hour day but sits extraordinarily far from the two stars it…

In October 2017, astronomers detected an interstellar object traveling through our solar system for the first time. Theories abounded as to the nature of the oblong object, named ‘Oumuamua, which accelerated as it made its transit. Now,…

A view of LAWD 37 as seen by Hubble.Image: NASA, ESA, P. McGill (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz and University of Cambridge), K. Sahu (STScI), J. Depasquale (STScI)Astronomers just directly measured the mass of a lone white dwarf using…

Four exoplanets, each larger than Jupiter, orbit HR8799, represented by the yellow star shape at the center.Image: Gizmodo/Jason Wang/Northwestern UniversityAstronomical phenomena tend to occur over timespans that dwarf our human scale—a…

LP 413-53AB is estimated to be billions of years old, but has an incredibly short orbital period. Illustration: Adam Burgasser/University of California San DiegoResearchers have found an extreme binary system that features two dwarf…