Prenatal Protoplanet Upends Planet Formation Models

An international research team has discovered a new planet so young that it has yet to emerge from the womb of matter where it is forming.

Not so long ago, we lived in a universe with only a small number of known planets, all of them orbiting our Sun.

Major smashups between rocky bodies shaped our solar system. Observations of a similar crash give clues about how frequent these events are around other stars.

The first worlds beyond our solar system were discovered three decades ago.

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, now under construction, will test new technologies for space-based planet hunting.

MIT astronomers have obtained the clearest view yet of the perpetual dark side of an exoplanet that is "tidally locked" to its star.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered ∼5000 planets and planet candidates after three and a half years of observations.

Planets are usually not much older than the stars around which they revolve.

Astronomers have reported a second, super-sized moon orbiting a Jupiter-sized planet beyond our solar system.

Exomoons represent a crucial missing puzzle piece in our efforts to understand extrasolar planetary systems.

With the help of the CHEOPS space telescope, an international team including researchers from the Universities of Bern and Geneva as well as the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS, was able to detect the deformation of an exoplanet for the first time.

Gas giants are made of a massive solid core surrounded by an even larger mass of helium and hydrogen.

Using observations and archival data from several of NSF's NOIRLab's observatories, together with observations from telescopes around the world and in orbit, astronomers have discovered at least 70 new free-floating planets -- planets that wander through space without a parent star -- in a nearby region of the Milky Way.

Rogue planets are elusive cosmic objects that have masses comparable to those of the planets in our Solar System but do not orbit a star, instead roaming freely on their own.

The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) has captured an image of a planet orbiting b Centauri, a two-star system that can be seen with the naked eye.

As far as extrasolar planets go, 'GJ 367 b' is a featherweight. With half the mass of Earth, the newly discovered planet is one of the lightest among the nearly 5000 exoplanets known today.

The discovery: A new catalog of exoplanets - planets around other stars - includes 172 previously unknown planet candidates, as well as 18 possible multi-planet systems that also are newly identified.

The hunt for planets beyond our solar system has turned up more than 4,000 far-flung worlds, orbiting stars thousands of light years from Earth.

The majority of exoplanets discovered to date have been discovered using the transit method.

An astronomer from NSF's NOIRLab has teamed up with a geologist from California State University, Fresno, to make the first estimates of rock types that exist on planets orbiting nearby stars.

Hot Jupiters - giant gas planets that race around their host stars in extremely tight orbits - have become a little bit less mysterious thanks to a new study combining theoretical modeling with observations by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Young planetary systems generally experience extreme growing pains, as infant bodies collide and fuse to form progressively larger planets.

Exoplanet hunters have found thousands of planets, most orbiting close to their host stars, but relatively few alien worlds have been detected that float freely through the galaxy as so-called rogue planets, not bound to any star.

In a distant star system -- a mere 1,300 light years away from Earth -- UNLV researchers and colleagues may have identified the first known planet to orbit three stars.

An international team of astronomers has not only detected clouds on the distant exoplanet WASP-127b, but also measured their altitude with unprecedented precision.

Astronomers have captured the first-ever spin measurements of HR 8799, the famed system that made history as the very first exoplanetary system to have its image taken.

Astronomers have developed the most realistic model to date of planet formation in binary star systems.

Using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, astronomers have unambiguously detected the presence of a disc around a planet outside our Solar System for the first time.

Four planets locked in a perfect rhythm around a nearby star are destined to be pinballed around their solar system when their sun eventually dies, according to a study led by the University of Warwick that peers into its future.

Despite numerous attempts, no exomoon has firmly been confirmed to date. New missions like CHEOPS aim to characterize previously detected exoplanets, and potentially to discover exomoons.

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will create enormous cosmic panoramas, helping us answer questions about the evolution of our universe.

Astronomers have found evidence that the first exoplanet that was identified transiting its star could have migrated to a close orbit with its star from its original birthplace further away.

Astronomers have discovered new hints of a giant, scorching-hot planet orbiting Vega, one of the brightest stars in the night sky.

The newly discovered TOI 451 planetary system features three planets orbiting the same sun. CREDIT Illustration courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Among the most extreme planets discovered beyond the edges of our solar system are lava planets: fiery hot worlds that circle so close to their host star that some regions are likely oceans of molten lava.

A team led by an astronomer from the University of Kansas has crunched data from NASA's TESS and Spitzer space telescopes to portray for the first time the atmosphere of a highly unusual kind of exoplanet dubbed a "hot Neptune."

Astronomers using the GRAVITY instrument at the VLT telescopes in Chile have now obtained the first direct confirmation of an exoplanet discovered by radial velocity.

A team of astronomers have identified the first direct evidence that groups of stars can tear apart their planet-forming disc, leaving it warped and with tilted rings.

On July 4, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) finished its primary mission, imaging about 75% of the starry sky as part of a two-year-long survey.

An international team of astronomers including Gisela Ortiz-Leon from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn discovered a Saturn-like planet orbiting a small, cool star by detecting the "wobble" in the star's motion caused by the gravitational pull of the planet.

The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) has taken the first ever image of a young, Sun-like star accompanied by two giant exoplanets.

Several interacting exoplanets have already been spotted by satellites. But a new breakthrough has been achieved with, for the first time, the detection directly from the ground of an extrasolar system of this type.

Measurements from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have enabled astronomers to greatly improve their understanding of the bizarre environment of KELT-9 b, one of the hottest planets known.

The Vega planetary system hosts the archetype of extrasolar Kuiper belts, and is rich in dust from the sub-au region out to 100's of au, suggesting intense dynamical activity.

About the size of a briefcase, the CubeSat was built to test new technologies but exceeded expectations by spotting a planet outside our solar system.

An international team of researchers, led by astronomers from the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands), has directly demonstrated the presence of iron in the atmosphere of an exoplanet for the first time.

Our solar system has a king. The planet Jupiter, named for the most powerful god in the Greek pantheon, has bossed around the other planets through its gravitational influence.

Now you see it, now you don't.

A team of scientists using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope in the Netherlands has observed radio waves that carry the distinct signatures of aurorae, caused by the interaction between a star's magnetic field and a planet in orbit around it.

Is Earth the only habitable planet in the universe or are there more worlds somewhere out there that are capable of supporting life?

An updated visual orbit of the directly-imaged exoplanet 51 Eridani b and prospects for a dynamical mass measurement with Gaia

Astronomers have discovered a planet three times the mass of Jupiter that travels on a long, egg-shaped path around its star.

A new study using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope provides a rare glimpse of conditions on the surface of a rocky planet orbiting a star beyond the Sun.

A team of astronomers led by Anne-Marie Lagrange, a CNRS researcher at the Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes) (1), has discovered a second giant planet in orbit around β Pictoris, a star that is relatively young (23 million years old) and close (63.4 light years), and surrounded by a disk of dust.

Astronomers are planning to hunt for cores of exoplanets around white dwarf stars by 'tuning in' to the radio waves that they emit.

Researchers at Dartmouth College have discovered a planet orbiting one of the brightest young stars known, according to a study published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Gas-giant planets orbiting close to other stars have powerful magnetic fields, many times stronger than our own Jupiter, according to a new study by a team of astrophysicists.

The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), a dedicated planet-finding instrument at the Gemini South telescope in Chile, is concluding a 4-year survey - the GPI Exoplanet Survey (GPIES) - of 531 young, nearby stars searching for giant planets.

In the past three decades, almost 4,000 planet-like objects have been discovered orbiting isolated stars outside the Solar System (exoplanets).

Brown dwarfs fill the "gap" between stars and the much smaller planets - two very different types of astronomical objects.

Astronomers who study stars are providing a valuable assist to the planet-hunting astronomers pursuing the primary objective of NASA's new TESS mission.

We provide 28 new planet candidates that have been vetted by citizen scientists and expert astronomers.

NASA's Kepler space telescope may be retired, but the discoveries continue to rack up for this historic planet-hunting mission.

Astronomers have discovered a distant planet with an abundance of helium in its atmosphere, which has swollen to resemble an inflated balloon.

An international team including five Carnegie astronomers has discovered a frozen Super-Earth orbiting Barnard's star, the closest single star to our own Sun.

Meticulous analysis of hundreds of photographic plates from the star J1407 between 1890 and 2007 show no stellar eclipses.

Is there a second Earth out there in space? Our knowledge of planetary systems far, far away is increasing constantly, as new technologies continue to sharpen our gaze into space.

In this study, we investigated the differences between four commonly-used exoplanet catalogs (exoplanet.eu; exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu; openexoplanetcatalogue.com; exoplanets.org) using a Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test.

Exoplanets, planets in other solar systems, can orbit very close to their host star.

Imagine a place where the weather forecast is always the same: scorching temperatures, relentlessly sunny, and with absolutely zero chance of rain.

Forty-four planets in solar systems beyond our own have been unveiled in one go, dwarfing the usual number of confirmations from extrasolar surveys, which is typically a dozen or less.

Scientists at MIT and elsewhere have analyzed data from K2, the follow-up mission to NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, and have discovered a trove of possible exoplanets amid some 50,000 stars.

Construction of the space telescope CHEOPS is finished. The engineers from the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern will package the instrument this week and send it to Madrid, where it will be integrated on the satellite platform.

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is undergoing final preparations for its April 16 launch to find undiscovered worlds around nearby stars, providing targets where future studies will assess their capacity to harbor life.

A hot, metallic, Earth-sized planet with a density similar to Mercury - situated 339 million light years away -- has been detected and characterised by a global team of astronomers, including the University of Warwick.