Exoplanet – SpaceNews

Artist's rendering of planet 8 Ursae Minoris b – also known as "Halla" – amid the field of debris after a violent merger of two stars. The planet might have survived the merger, but also might be an entirely new planet formed from the debris. W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko

8 Ursae Minoris b: The Planet That Shouldn’t Be There

by SpaceRef EditorOctober 2, 2023July 15, 2024

The discovery: A large planet is somehow orbiting a star that should have destroyed it.

PLATO

Plato Undergoing Testing In ESA’s LEAF Room

by SpaceRef EditorJuly 15, 2023July 15, 2024

Giant exoplanet MWC 758c

Astronomers Discover Elusive Planet Responsible For Spiral Arms Around Its Star

by SpaceRef EditorJuly 6, 2023July 15, 2024

The movement of the extrasolar planet AF Lep b (white spot at about 10 o’clock) around its host star (center) can be seen in these two images taken in Dec. 2021 and Feb. 2023. Images were collected using the W. M. Keck Observatory’s 10-meter telescope in Hawaiʻi. Image credit: Kyle Franson/University of Texas at Austin.

Direct Images of ʻJupiterʻs Younger Siblingʻ

by SpaceRef EditorJune 25, 2023July 15, 2024

Circumbinary planet Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

A New Tatooine-like multi-planetary System Identified

by SpaceRef EditorJune 13, 2023July 15, 2024

The final observing campaign of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope lasted only a month. As the spacecraft began to run low on attitude control fuel, it couldn’t maintain its position long enough to collect useful observations. In the end, astronomers only had about seven days of high-quality data. A research team worked with a group of citizen scientists and professional astronomers and found three planets in the last bit of data. CREDIT NASA/JPL-Caltech (K. Walbolt)

Astronomers Discover Planets In NASA Kepler’s Final Days Of Observations

by SpaceRef EditorJune 2, 2023July 15, 2024

Light curves of each of the three planet candidate systems. Top row: The full 7.25-d high-quality discovery light curves of each of our systems are shown on the top produced via the process outlined in Section 2.1. Bottom row: Zoomed-in light curves near the three single transits, along with the best-fitting transit model from Section 3.2. The best-fitting parameters are outlined in Table 4. We detected additional transits of two of these three planet candidates, which are shown in Fig. 2. We also note that there are two small dipping features in the light curve of EPIC 245978988 that can be seen around t = 3538 d and t = 3543.5 d. We conclude that these are systematic because they are not robust to changing data reduction parameters. -- Royal Astronomical Society

Astronomers Discover The Last Planets Seen By Kepler Space Telescope

by SpaceRef EditorMay 30, 2023July 15, 2024

LP 791-18 d, shown here in an artist's concept, is an Earth-size world about 90 light-years away. The gravitational tug from a more massive planet in the system, shown as a blue disk in the background, may result in internal heating and volcanic eruptions – as much as Jupiter’s moon Io, the most geologically active body in the solar system. Astronomers discovered and studied the planet using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) along with many other observatories. Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (KRBwyle)

A Potentially Volcano-Covered Earth-Size World Discovered

by SpaceRef EditorMay 17, 2023July 15, 2024

Radiation Belts

Astronomers Discover The First Known Extrasolar Radiation Belt

by SpaceRef EditorMay 15, 2023July 15, 2024

Artist illustration

Astronomers Detect A Star Devouring A Planet

by SpaceRef EditorMay 4, 2023July 15, 2024