Measurements from NASA’s Transit Exoplanet Study Satellite (TESS) have enabled astronomers to greatly improve their understanding of the strange environment of KELT-9b, one of the hottest known planets. “The rarity factor is high with KELT-9b,” said John Ahlers, an astronomer at the Universities Space Research Association in Columbia, Maryland, and …
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Scientists may be one step closer to discovering whether we are alone in the universe. Astronomers recently discovered several nearby exoplanets that they say could “potentially harbor life,” orbiting the brightest red dwarf star in the sky. According to a study published Thursday in the journal Science, a team of …
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In the Serpens constellation, about 1,400 light years from Earth, a fledgling star flaps its wings. OK, I’m being a little poetic there. It is more like a planet in formation gravitationally deformed from its circumstellar disk into a quadrupole shape, so that the shadow cast by the star on …
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We have long known that planets like Earth are born from disks of gas, ice, and dust that surround stars as they form. But the details are important: planets like Earth form differently than Jupiter, and where On the album they are born it makes a difference in their potential …
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