Topic
Planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, catalogued mainly through transit dips, stellar wobbles and direct imaging.
INAF-led researchers sorted 300 well-characterized multiplanet systems into two families that track host-star mass and metal content. In Nature Astronomy, the authors say the split holds up against detection bias.
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Researchers from over a dozen institutions simulated Earth-mass planets in 70 Ophiuchi and found stable habitable-zone orbits over 10 million years. The same radial-velocity data exclude Jupiter-mass-or-larger planets out to about 5 AU from the primary star.
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Astronomers re-reading 1999 Hubble spectra of white dwarf HS 0209+0832 found unusually high niobium that may trace matter the star shed as it died. The team proposes that some of that debris built a gas giant hinted at in TESS data, though the planet remains a candidate.
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Warwick-led astronomers tie niobium at over 1,000 times solar levels in a white dwarf to a candidate planet made from what the star shed as it died. If it holds up, it shows planets can still form after a star has died.
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NASA's next flagship survey telescope will watch hundreds of millions of stars for one-off gravitational blips. That is how you count Earth-mass planets you will never get to look at a second time.
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Elias 2-24 b sits in a disk gap 55 times Earth's distance from its star, where formation models ask for at least five million years to build a Jupiter. Keck coronagraph images from 2018 and 2020 put it under a million years old.
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Two Nature Astronomy studies report a red dwarf drawing material off a brown dwarf and a white dwarf apparently fed by a second-generation planet. Each rests on a single system, so together they show that such feeding happens and leave open how often it does.
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UC Riverside simulations find an Earth-mass planet could orbit stably in the habitable zone of 70 Ophiuchi's larger star, about 5 parsecs away. A stable orbit is the first test a habitable world must pass, so the result tells planet hunters where in this pair to look.
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University of Geneva astronomers and colleagues report that GJ 3090 b circles its red dwarf backward, 136 degrees out of line with the star's spin. Finding no companion able to flip it, the team suggests the planet formed in a second, tilted disk.
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NASA says the Wide Field Instrument and the coronagraph are both working in space. The two published accounts of the milestone disagree about when science observations start and how long the mission runs.
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MPIA astronomers used ALMA to image WISPIT 2b, a gas giant five times Jupiter's mass, interacting with the gas it formed in. Formation models have rested on simulations and indirect evidence, so a planet still feeding on its birth gas gives them a direct check.
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Planets inherit their direction of travel from the disk that formed them. A planet running backward around a small cool star is therefore a formation problem, and one team's answer is a second disk, tilted from the first.
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Chris Doughty's team turned simulated exoplanet climates into lifetime carbon budgets. TRAPPIST-1e came out at 21% of Earth's, low enough for the authors to call it microbial, on a pace curve calibrated from Earth alone.
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A University of Tokyo group found the planet in brightness data already in hand, where the secondary eclipse arrived earlier than a circular orbit allows. Its star's surface is 8,400 C and the orbit takes two days.
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