Astronomy, features and articles | Educational Science

Apr 25, 2014

Habitable Exoplanets are Bad News for Humanity (Op-Ed)

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Last week, scientists announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, a planet 492 light years away in the Cygnus constellation. Kepler-186f is special because it marks the first planet almost exactly...

Apr 27, 2014

Move Over Exoplanets, Exomoons May Harbour Life Too

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. In the Star Wars universe, everyone’s favourite furry aliens, the Ewoks, famously lived on the “forest moon of Endor”. In scientific terms, the Ewok’s home world would be referred to...

Aug 14, 2015

Found! 'Young Jupiter,' the Smallest Exoplanet Directly Seen by Telescope

This newfound alien planet, called 51 Eridani b, orbits a star about 96 light-years from Earth in a planetary system that may be much like Earth's own solar system. The discovery could shed light on how our solar system formed, scientists added. Over the last 20 years, astronomers have confirmed...

Mar 15, 2019

The Great Exoplanet Bake-Off: Why NASA Made an Oven-Fresh Alien Atmosphere in Its Lab

Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California have developed a simple new recipe for baking oven-fresh alien atmospheres — and you can follow along at home, thanks to a handy study published Jan. 29 in The Astrophysical Journal. All you need is a beaker of hydrogen gas, a...

Jun 28, 2019

NASA's New Exoplanet-Hunting Telescope Has Spotted Its Tiniest Alien World Yet

NASA's new exoplanet-hunting telescope has discovered its smallest planet yet: a world somewhere between the sizes of Earth and its smaller sister Mars. The planet is called L 98-59b because it sits in a nearby star system called L 98-59 that's 35 light-years from our solar system in the southern...

Aug 2, 2019

Scientists Find a Boiling, Toxic Wasteland of an Exoplanet, and It's Shaped Like a Football

Nine-hundred light-years from Earth, there's a football-shaped planet so hot that heavy metals boil through its atmosphere, venting into space. The planet, called WASP-121b, is about 10 times hotter than any other known exoplanet, due to its proximity to its host star, which is hotter than the sun. This proximity...

Oct 14, 2019

Humans Will Never Live on an Exoplanet, Nobel Laureate Says. Here's Why.

Here's the reality: We're messing up the Earth and any far-out ideas of colonizing another orb when we're done with our own are wishful thinking. That's according to Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist who was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics this year for discovering the first planet orbiting...

Oct 16, 2019

How the Nobel Prize-Winning Exoplanet Was Found

The most recent Nobel Prize in Physics was split between Jim Peebles, a cosmologist extraordinaire, and a pair of Swiss astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. Mayor and Queloz found the first exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star, which was a landmark discovery for two reasons: it showed conclusively that the...

Oct 24, 2019

In a Distant Galaxy, Colliding Exoplanets Are Upending What We Knew About Solar System Formation

Solar systems form in a school of hard knocks. Take ours, for example: Earth had barely cooled 4.5 billion years ago when it got slapped in the face by a renegade Mars-size rock, reducing both bodies to giant balls of lava. Scientists believe this cosmic collision spewed so much debris...

Jan 28, 2020

The hottest exoplanet's atmosphere is melting before our eyes

When planning your next interstellar vacation, avoid planet KELT-9b. This hot Jupiter (so named because it is roughly three times the size of that planet and extremely hot) orbits its sun so closely that a year there lasts just one-and-a-half Earth days. Not only will your trip be over in...

Apr 20, 2020

Mysterious 'disappearing' exoplanet was just a big cloud of asteroid trash, study suggests

In 2014, a planet disappeared from the night sky. The distant world — known as Fomalhaut b and located a neighborly 25 light-years from Earth — was infamous for being one of the first exoplanets ever discovered in visible light by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope; when astronomers first caught sight...

May 21, 2020

Baby exoplanet spotted growing around distant star (photo)

Planets' origin stories apparently come with a twist. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile has captured an image of a planet being born around the young star AB Aurigae, which lies 520 light-years from Earth in the constellation Auriga (The Charioteer). Like previous AB Aurigae images...

Oct 28, 2020

Astronomers peer into the atmosphere of a rare exoplanet that 'shouldn't exist'

The discovery of the extraordinary exoplanet LTT 9779b was first announced a month ago. Just 260 light-years away, the planet was immediately pegged as an excellent candidate for follow-up study of its curious atmosphere. But it turns out we didn't even have to wait too long to learn more. LTT...

Mar 10, 2021

Can super-rotating oceans cool off extreme exoplanets?

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of How to Die in Space. He contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Opinions and Insights. Astronomers continue to find potentially habitable worlds around small,...

Apr 30, 2021

Dark matter could be destroying itself inside the bellies of exoplanets

Large gaseous exoplanets could be filled with self-destructing dark matter. And now, a team of researchers has proposed using the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope to scan distant behemoths in the galaxy for potential heating effects that could arise from the mysterious substance, which outweighs regular matter by almost 6...