mother star

NASA’s exoplanet hunter TESS may have spotted its first rogue planet

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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

A doomed egg-shaped exoplanet spirals toward its star

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Astronomers have discovered that a distant, scorching-hot planet twice the size of Jupiter is in a death spiral that will send it spiraling toward its parent star. Cosmically, a crash is expected to occur relatively soon. Researchers have been predicting for some time that this planet, called WASP-12b, will eventually plunge into its star located … Read more