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The discovery could challenge our theories of how gas giants like Jupiter form. A dark planet passes in front of a bright red star. Artist's conception of a large gas giant planet orbiting a small red dwarf star called TOI-5205. (Image credit: Katherine Cain, courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science) Astronomers have discovered an unusual planetary system consisting of a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a tiny star that is only four times the size of the solar system gas giant. This "forbidden" configuration of a massive planet orbiting a relatively tiny star could challenge theories of how gas giant planets...

Our Solar System is a pretty busy place. There are millions of objects moving around – everything from planets, to moons, to comets, and asteroids. And each year we're discovering more and more objects (usually small asteroids or speedy comets) that call the Solar System home. Astronomers had found all eight of the main planets by 1846. But that doesn't stop us from looking for more. In the past 100 years, we've found smaller distant bodies we call dwarf planets, which is what we now classify Pluto as. The discovery of some of these dwarf planets has given us reason...

With the confirmation of a dozen new moons in Jupiter’s orbit, the biggest planet in the Solar System is suddenly the neighborhood big dog when it comes to moon collection. With the advent of these 12 previously undiscovered moons, the gas giant now has 92 known orbiting entities, surpassing Saturn’s amazing collection of 83. Although scientists face a significant challenge in locating these tiny celestial entities, both planets are really expected to be joined by many more moons. The intense glare emitted by Jupiter further complicates things, and any that are tiny enough to have escaped discovery up to now...

Quaoar is one of the so-called trans-Neptunian objects, small planets orbiting beyond the solar system's outermost planet Neptune. Quaoar is a proud owner of its own moon, the 100-mile-wide Weywot. And a recent observation campaign revealed that it also has a ring of material in its orbit. Quaoar's ring is at a very unusual distance from its parent body. In fact, before astronomers discovered Quaoar's ring in observations from several telescopes conducted between 2018 and 2021, they had thought that it was impossible for a ring to exist at such a distance. With a radius of about 2,420 miles from...

In the 1960s, one pocket of uranium hidden within the mountains was transformed into a productive mine, and the massive element used as fuel for nuclear fission was extracted to the tune of more than 1,000 tonnes per year. But by 1990, the Königstein mine‘s production had fallen off, and much of the mine was flooded... Then strange life forms started to move in, prompting the mine’s keepers to call in scientists... In the damp, dark, acidic, uranium-filled environment, biofilms composed of microbes had taken over. Orange acidic “streamers” looking like long, thin worms lazily swayed in the liquid drainage...

An illustration of a the surface of a rocky exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star. (NASA/Ames Research Center/Daniel Rutter) We have a new exoplanet to one day scour for potential signs of life. Just 31 light-years away, astronomers have identified an incredibly rare Earth-sized world orbiting at a distance from its star that should be hospitable to life as we know it. If, that is, the exoplanet itself has the right conditions to be conducive to life's emergence. That information isn't available to us yet, but the world represents a promising candidate for a future...

A stunning, first-of-its-kind photo shows a huge, newfound alien world taking shape in the disk of gas and dust surrounding a young star. The image is the first confirmed direct observation of such a young exoplanet, discovery team members said. "These disks around young stars are the birthplaces of planets, but so far only a handful of observations have detected hints of baby planets in them," discovery leader Miriam Keppler, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, said in a statement. "The problem is that, until now, most of these planet candidates could just have been...

Four worlds 133 light-years away orbiting a young star. (Jason Wang/Northwestern University) ********************************************************* A new video shared on YouTube is one of the most amazing things we've ever seen in planetary science. The video shows four dots of light moving in partial concentric circles around a black disk at their center. What you're actually looking at is a planetary system. The four dots are exoplanets, with the black disk obscuring their star, 133.3 light-years away from Earth. The partial circles are their orbital motions, a time-lapse compiled from 12 years of observations. The star is HR8799, and in 2008 its...

Perseverance has been depositing secondary samples of rock collected from Mars across the planet’s surface just in case it fails to deliver its onboard samples during a future collection mission. Image: NASA =========================================================== NASA’s Perseverance rover has dropped the last of 10 sample tubes onto the surface of Mars, thereby completing humanity’s “first sample depot on another world.” The rover began depositing titanium tubes containing samples of rock and dust six weeks ago as part of the Mars sample return mission to collect Martian material and deliver it to Earth for further study. Perseverance landed on Mars in February 2021,...

The impending demise of Kepler-1658b as it orbits its aging star offers an opportunity for scientists to gain insight into the fate of other planets and their evolving solar systems....provides a new understanding of the gradual process of planetary orbital decay by offering the first glimpse of a solar system in its final stages.. the ultimate destiny for many planets, including Earth in about 5 billion years... the exoplanet Kepler-1568b has less than 3 million years left before it meets its demise...The first author is Shreyas Vissapragada, a 51 Pegasi b Fellow at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution...The ill-fated...

Exoplanet LHS 475 b and Its Star This illustration reflects that exoplanet LHS 475 b is rocky and almost precisely the same size as Earth based on new evidence from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The planet is only a few hundred degrees warmer than our home planet. The planet whips around its star in just two days, far faster than any planet in the solar system, but its red dwarf star is less than half the temperature of the Sun. Researchers will follow up this summer with another observation with Webb, which they hope will allow them to definitively...

There’s a great article in Bari Weiss’ The Free Press that has great bearing on why consensus in science is often a bad thing, and how the consensus is enforced. Called "The Reason There’s Been No Cure for Alzheimer’s," it was written by Joanne Silberner, a former NPR reporter. What I loved about the article was its insightful reporting about how the scientific process works in practice, rather than how it should in theory. Most people have little idea how academic science works, what the incentives are, how peer review works, how money gets distributed, and all the minutia that...

Bold Colour Image depicting the Solar System (NASA) Since the landmark discovery in 1992 of two planets orbiting a star outside of our Solar System, thousands of new worlds have been added to a rapidly growing list of 'exoplanets' in the Milky Way galaxy. We've learnt many things from this vast catalogue of alien worlds orbiting alien stars. But one small detail stands out like a sore thumb. We've found nothing else out there like our own Solar System. This has led some to conclude that our home star and its brood could be outliers in some way – perhaps...

Two Earth Mass Planets Orbiting Star GJ 100 Artist’s impression of two Earth-mass planets orbiting the star GJ 1002. Credit: Alejandro Suárez Mascareño and Inés Bonet (IAC) ************************************************************************** An international scientific team led by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has discovered the presence of two planets with Earth-like masses in orbit around the star GJ 1002, a red dwarf not far from the Solar System. Both planets are in the habitability zone of the star “Nature seems bent on showing us that Earth-like planets are very common. With these two we now know 7 in planetary...

A team of physicists affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. has collaborated on a paper that discusses the possibility of using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) to search for evidence of aliens piloting huge spacecraft around the Milky Way. They group has posted their paper on the arXiv preprint server. In this new effort, the researchers note that science has advanced to the point that gravity waves can be detected by technology such as LIGO. They further suggest that it is not beyond the realm of possibility that aliens piloting spacecraft could leave gravity waves in their...

Two super-hot planets have atmospheres laced with barium.Two gas planets have atmospheres peppered with barium — the heaviest element detected in any exoplanet atmosphere so far1.[ ... ]Nature 611, 12 (2022)doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03384-2ReferencesSilva, T. A. et al. Astron. Astrophys. 666, L10 (2022).

An artist's impression of a fluffy planet orbiting a red dwarf star. (NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/Spaceengine/M. Zamani) If exoplanet research is to be believed, the Milky Way galaxy could be like some sort of fantastical candy-land. First, there was the discovery of exoplanets with the density of cotton candy. Now, astronomers say they've discovered a world that is comparable to the density of marshmallow. It is, they say, the fluffiest exoplanet discovered to date orbiting a red dwarf star. This is important. It means that worlds with significant gas envelopes can be found closely orbiting the small, tempestuous dwarf stars, which...

an illustration of the boundaries of the solar system. The planetary system sits inside a glowing bubble, with a large blue bubble wrapped around it. bright lights resembling comets, possibly representative of cosmic rays, are unable to penetrate An illustration showing the Solar System inside the heliosphere, with the termination shock and heliopause represented by two bubbles, one inside the other. (NASA) The bubble of space encasing the Solar System might be wrinkled, at least sometimes. Data from a spacecraft orbiting Earth has revealed ripple structures in the termination shock and heliopause: shifting regions of space that mark one of...

Data from a spacecraft orbiting Earth has revealed ripple structures in the termination shock and heliopause: shifting regions of space that mark one of the boundaries between the space inside the Solar System, and...interstellar space. ...Sun affects the space around it...solar wind, a constant supersonic flow of ionized plasma. It blows out past the planets and the Kuiper Belt, eventually petering out in the great emptiness between the stars. The point at which this flow falls below the speed at which sound waves can travel through the diffuse interstallar medium is called the termination shock, and the point at which...

India's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) may have finally reached the end of its operations after eight years spent orbiting the Red Planet. Ground stations operated by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have lost communication with the spacecraft. The precise cause isn't yet clear; the orbiter may have run out of propellant, MOM's battery may drained beyond the safe operating limit, or an automated maneuver may have cut communications, according to media reports. Having operated at Mars for eight years, MOM — also called Mangalyaan — has far exceeded its expected mission life of just six to 10 months. The...