Astronomy, features and articles | Educational Science

Aug 4, 2021

These 10 extreme exoplanets are out of this world

It's almost hard to believe that until the early years of the 1990s, astronomers had yet to discover a planet outside the solar system. Even though scientists were certain that other stars orbited other stars, there was little evidence of other planetary systems until the discovery of two extrasolar planets...

Oct 26, 2021

1st exoplanet outside the Milky Way possibly discovered

For the first time in history, scientists may have just discovered a planet in another galaxy. The potential exoplanet, called M51-ULS-1b, lies 28 million light-years away in the spiral galaxy Messier 51 (M51), also known as the Whirlpool galaxy. This discovery could be just the tip of the iceberg, revealing...

Nov 24, 2021

Never-before-seen rocks found in these exoplanet graveyards

Astronomers have discovered never-seen-before rock types, made up of unusual ratios of minerals, within the remains of alien worlds ripped apart by their dying host stars. The research suggests that such exoplanets are built from a much wider array of materials than previously thought. In the new study, researchers looked...

Feb 3, 2022

Inside All About Space issue 126: Complete guide to exoplanets

Inside All About Space magazine issue 126, on sale now, read our ultimate guide to exoplanets and see how our knowledge of worlds beyond the solar system has exploded in the last three decades. For this cover feature, All About Space spoke with Nikku Madhusudham, a professor of astrophysics and...

Mar 8, 2022

Exoplanets: Alien worlds beyond our solar system

Exoplanets have long occupied the thoughts scientists and dreamers. Ever since humanity first discovered that the stars in the night sky were bodies similar to our own sun, we have imagined and speculated about the worlds that could orbit these stars. Would these exoplanets be rocky terrestrial bodies similar to...

Sep 12, 2022

New class of exoplanet — half-rock, half-water — discovered orbiting red dwarf

A new type of exoplanet — one made half of rock and half of water — has been discovered around the most common stars in the universe, which may have great consequences in the search for life in the cosmos, researchers say. Red dwarfs are the most common type of...

Dec 9, 2022

Distant 'hell planet' with diamond core is the victim of a gravitational catastrophe

Scientists studying a distant hell planet where clouds rain lava, the oceans are molten and the core is filled with diamonds have found that the nightmarish planet wasn’t always so bad; but it became infernally hot after being yanked closer to its sun. The planet, classified as 55 Cancri e,...

Jan 24, 2023

Deep space 'hurricanes' could point the way to alien worlds

Young stars are surrounded by chaos: Clouds of gas, dust and ice swirl about in a so-called protoplanetary disk. And when gravity binds this material together, planets are born. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, researchers developed a new technique to measure and date infant exoplanets forming...

Mar 23, 2023

James Webb telescope spots dust storm raging on a giant planet nearly 20 times the size of Jupiter

Forty light-years away, an extraterrestrial sandstorm rages on a planet orbiting two stars. Although this might sound like Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine, this sandstorm was spotted on a gaseous world up to 20 times the size of Jupiter. Using the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) powerful detectors, scientists...

Mar 24, 2023

How to watch Ceres, a dwarf planet 14 times smaller than Pluto, photobomb a spiral galaxy in the sky this weekend

This weekend, you can watch live as the first asteroid ever discovered passes across one of the night sky's most beautiful spiral galaxies. The Rome-based Virtual Telescope Project will host a livestream starting at 11 p.m. EDT on Sunday, March 26 (03:00 UTC on Monday, March 27), when Ceres will...

Mar 31, 2023

James Webb telescope detects light from a small, Earth-like planet — and finds it's missing its atmosphere

Five years ago, NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope helped discover a family of seven rocky exoplanets orbiting the same star, known as TRAPPIST-1. Now, NASA's new infrared powerhouse — the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — measured the temperature of one of those worlds, TRAPPIST-1b, in new research published in...

May 4, 2023

For the first time, scientists watched a dying star swallow a planet whole

Astronomers have spotted a star devouring one of its planets for the first time. It is a stunning preview of our own planet's fate, when, in roughly 5 billion years time, Earth too will likely be engulfed by our rapidly expanding sun. The distant planet met its gory demise 13,000...

May 15, 2023

James Webb telescope discovers ancient 'water world' in nearby star system

Astronomers have finally peered past the clouds on the exoplanet GJ 1214b, a mini-Neptune planet around a star about 40 light-years away. Mini-Neptunes, like a shrunken down version of the familiar gas giant, are a common type of planet in our galaxy — but because there isn't one in our...

Jun 1, 2023

There may be hundreds of millions of habitable planets in the Milky Way, new study suggests

The sun is an ordinary star, but it's not the only kind of star out there. Most stars in our galaxy are M dwarfs (sometimes called red dwarfs), which are significantly smaller and redder than the sun — and many of them may have the potential to host life, new...

Jun 21, 2023

Bizarre object hotter than the sun is orbiting a distant star at breakneck speed

A weird, super-hot celestial body is breaking records and challenging astronomers' understanding of the boundary between stars and planets. The object, called WD0032-317B, is a brown dwarf — a type of bright, gaseous protostar. Brown dwarves typically have a similar atmospheric composition to Jupiter but are 13 to 80 times...