exoplanet

For The First Time, Astronomers Detect Rugby-Ball Shape of a Deformed Exoplanet

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Beyond the Solar System, out there in the wider galaxy, a very strange subset of exoplanets exists. Called hot Jupiters, these are majorly clingy – hugging so close to their host stars, they’re not just intensely hot, but also likely warped by gravitational forces.   Now, for the first time, astronomers have actually detected the … Read more

Strange and hidden Jupiter-size exoplanet spotted by astronomers and citizen scientists

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A group of astronomers and citizen scientists has uncovered a hidden planet the size of Jupiter in a distant solar system, and they should get the chance to see it again soon. The planet, designated TOI-2180 b, is relatively close to us here on Earth, at only 379 light-years away. But what makes this world … Read more

Astronomers Detect Water Vapor in The Atmosphere of a ‘Super Neptune’ Exoplanet

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New Year’s Day comes around once every 47.5 hours on the roughly Neptune-sized exoplanet TOI 674b, which makes it something of a rare creature.  In spite of years of hunting, surprisingly few middle-sized gas giants have ever been seen with orbits shorter than a few days in length, creating what astronomers refer to as a … Read more

Weird ‘hot Jupiter’ exoplanet is shaped like a football

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A distant exoplanet looks more like a football than the usual sphere, researchers report in a groundbreaking new study. The strange shape of ultrahot WASP-103b, which is more than 1,000 light-years from Earth, is due to the planet being stretched by the gravitational forces of its parent star, according to the new research. WASP-103b was … Read more

NASA’s TESS exoplanet mission reveals dusty mystery, puzzling astronomers

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The universe is full of mysteries. In observations gathered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers stumbled on yet another mystery, and a dusty one at that. In new research, a team of scientists examines potential causes of strange signals emitted by an object dubbed TIC 400799224. Based on what astronomers have seen so … Read more

The 10 biggest exoplanet discoveries of 2021

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The place that humans know most intimately in all the universe is a rocky planet called Earth. It makes sense, then, that humans are existentially driven to imagine what other such celestial bodies may be like. The scientific curiosity about what planets exist beyond the sun’s neighborhood is supported by several missions, like NASA’s Transiting … Read more

Exoplanets: Small Jupiter-like worlds hint we need to rethink gas giant formation

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We thought young gas giant planets would be large and low-density, but the gas giants around a star that is just 20 million years old don’t fit this model Space 2 December 2021 By Chen Ly An artist’s impression of a Jupiter-like exoplanet Alexandr Yurtchenko/Alamy Two Jupiter-like planets that orbit a young star are much … Read more

Planets: An unexpected gas giant is orbiting a massive pair of stars

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We thought that planets couldn’t form around stars with more than three times the mass of the sun, but planet b Cen (AB)b challenges the idea Space 8 December 2021 By Chen Ly The twin stars of the most massive planet-hosting star system to date, b Centauri, and its giant planet b Cen (AB)b ESO/Janson … Read more