In his search for giant stars hosting large worlds, Samuel Grunblatt, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, came across a strangely puffy planet that’s smaller, hotter, and older than it’s supposed to be. “We didn’t expect to find any planet that looks like this,” he told Gizmodo.
Do we live in an unusual star system? Astronomers have been trying to figure out if the Solar System is unique compared to other stars and their orbiting planets, and they just took a major step towards answering the longstanding cosmic mystery.
A newly discovered exoplanet, with its surface temperature estimated to be remarkably temperate, is suddenly one of the most intriguing objects in our immediate celestial neighborhood. This rocky Venus-sized world transits a red dwarf star, offering astronomers the rare opportunity to study whether such planets can…
Scientists have spotted a rocky exoplanet with a possible atmosphere, which they believe may be burbling out from a magma ocean on the distant world.
WASP-76b is a strange world. Located several hundred light-years away, the Jupiter-like planet is tidally locked to its star, has scorching temperatures, and rains molten iron. Recent observations of the hot gas giant reveal it may even have a rainbow-like optical phenomenon that’s only been observed on Earth and…
The Webb Space Telescope has revealed a world quite alien compared to our own: WASP-107b, a Neptune-like gas giant that orbits a star some 211 light-years from Earth. Webb has now detected water vapor and sulfur dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere, as well as sand-like silicate clouds.
The Webb Space Telescope recently turned its focus to a nearby exoplanet and found that it may be a Hycean world, or a world completely covered in a single global ocean, and with a hydrogen atmosphere. And what’s more, the telescope detected a possible detection—note, possible detection, of dimethyl sulfide, a…
