NASA’s Kepler mission discovered a world where two suns set over the horizon instead of…
Browsing: Exoplanet
An exoplanet, or extrasolar planet, is a planet that orbits a star outside our solar system. The study of exoplanets has become a significant field within astronomy, especially since the first confirmed detection in 1992. Exoplanets vary widely in size, composition, and orbit, ranging from gas giants many times the mass of Jupiter to small, rocky planets akin to Earth. They are often discovered using indirect methods such as the transit method, where a planet passing in front of its host star causes a measurable dip in the star’s brightness, or the radial velocity method, which detects variations in a star’s motion due to gravitational pulls from orbiting planets. The study of exoplanets includes understanding their atmospheres, potential to support life, and formation and evolution processes. These discoveries have not only expanded our knowledge of planetary systems but also challenged existing theories about planet formation and the uniqueness of our solar system.
According to calculations, an exoplanet similar in size to Mercury and roughly 1,500 light years…
Tidal heating, which is basically the gravitational heating of a planet via tides, suggests that…
Sitting 40 million light-years away, researchers were able to gain a better understanding of 55…
As NASA’s Kepler Mission continues to supply important data and continuously monitors stars for transit…
Scientists now have a better understanding of gas giant exoplanets and what is going on…
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers probed the atmosphere around the transiting super-Earth known as…
By analyzing earthshine and observing the Moon using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, researchers are using…
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope helped astronomers analyze the previously discovered world GJ1214b and helped them…
Researchers have gained a deeper insight into planet formation by studying the phase changes between…
Trace elements in extrasolar systems might influence the evolution of habitable zones around their stars,…
NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered 11 new planetary systems, with an additional 26 confirmed planets,…
In the past, astronomers had no evidence that there were planets orbiting other stars. Now,…
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered the three smallest exoplanets ever detected. All of them are…
According to a recently completed statistical study by an international team of astronomers, our galaxy…
Kepler’s mission is to find potentially habitable planets around Earth size and smaller in a…