Astronomers always knew that discovering moons around extrasolar planets would be no easy feat – but a debate currently raging in planetary science circles shows just how difficult detecting these so-called exomoons will be. The story begins in 2018, when astronomers including David Kipping, an assistant professor of astronomy at Columbia University, believed they had … Read more
What is going on In the four-year period between 1969 and 1972, twelve American astronauts walked on the moon. Not a single human being, from any country, has repeated this feat in the more than fifty years that have followed. The United States hopes to break this trend within the coming years through NASA’s new … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has seen Beta Pictoris like never before, capturing a previously unseen structure that is giving the young planetary system a dusty cat’s tail. Located 63 light-years away from us, Beta Pictoris is a star about twice the size of the Sun and eight times as bright, surrounded by a … Read more
When it comes to detecting the presence of liquid water on planets outside the solar system, and thus the conditions necessary for life, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may want to look for what’s missing rather than what is is. This is what that means. A team of researchers, including scientists from the Massachusetts … Read more
NASA is working on a roadmap for robots that could visit ocean worlds via future space missions and crack the world’s thick, icy shells to explore subterranean seas in search of life. Recently, the space agency unveiled the results of a NASA-sponsored workshop held in February 2023 that brought together scientists and engineers to discuss … Read more
Astronomers have discovered not one but two planetary systems with sun-like stars at their hearts. Both systems contain mini-Neptune planets and one is home to a huge “super-Jupiter” world, all of which are many times more massive than Earth. Studying these realms could lead to a better understanding of how planets form and evolve around … Read more
Moons come in many forms. In our solar system we have rocky moons (e.g Soil‘S Moon), ocean moons (e.g Europe And Enceladus) and frozen ice moons (e.g Triton) but there are no gas moons. Are we just unlucky not to have gas moons, or are there physical reasons why they can’t exist? There are actually … Read more
Astronomers have discovered an unusual star system located just 100 light-years away from us, with six planets immensely close to their parent star – so close, in fact, that all their orbits could fit within the distance between the stars. Mercury and our sun. It’s puzzling that this new part of the cosmos, unlike our … Read more