Planets beneath Neptune that dance in time with the rest of their planetary systems have lower densities than planets that don’t, planetary scientist David Brown has discovered. Though conspicuously absent from the solar system, the most common planets in the Milky Way are known as “sub-Neptunes,” or worlds with sizes between Earth and the ice … Read more
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) may have discovered its first free-floating or “orphaned” planet. That’s a planet wandering through the cosmos, without a star, all alone. The potential discovery shows that TESS can use a phenomenon first suggested by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago to detect these so-called rogue planets. Despite the … Read more
Scientists have discovered that some planets migrate to the hearts of their planetary systems early in their lives, which may explain the lack of planets we see that are about twice the width of Earth. Over the years, scientists have managed to observe many exoplanets smaller or larger than Earth, but planets exactly between 1.6 … Read more