Temperatures on Exoplanet WASP 43b
3.05.2024

A mere 280 light-years from Earth, tidally locked, Jupiter-sized exoplanet WASP-43b orbits its parent star once every 0.8 Earth days. That puts it about 2 million kilometers (less than 1/25th the orbital distance of Mercury) from a small, cool sun.

HD 189733b: Hot Jupiter
12.05.2007

HD 189733b is a Jupiter-sized planet known to orbit a star some 63 light-years away. But while the distant world is approximately the size of Jupiter, its close-in orbit makes it much hotter than our solar system's ruling gas giant.

Ring Around Fomalhaut
1.07.2005

Fomalhaut (sounds like "foam-a-lot") is a bright, young, star, a mere 25 light-year trip from planet Earth in the direction of the constellation Piscis Austrinus. Earlier infrared observations identified a torus of cold material...

APOD: 2020 August 18 Б TYC 8998 760 1: Multiple Planets around a Sun Like Star
18.08.2020

Do other stars have planets like our Sun? Previous evidence shows that they do, coming mostly from slight shifts in the star's light created by the orbiting planets. Recently, however, and for the first time, a pair of planets has been directly imaged around a Sun-like star.

50 Light years to 51 Pegasi
9.10.2021

It's only 50 light-years to 51 Pegasi. That star's position is indicated in this snapshot from August, taken on a hazy night with mostly brighter stars visible above the dome at Observatoire de Haute-Provence in France.

APOD: 2023 February 1 Б The Seventh World of Trappist 1
1.02.2023

Seven worlds orbit the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1. A mere 40 light-years away, many of the exoplanets were discovered in 2016 using the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) located in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, and later confirmed with telescope including NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

The Kepler 90 Planetary System
28.04.2020

Do other stars have planetary systems like our own? Yes -- one such system is Kepler-90. Cataloged by the Kepler satellite that operated from Earth orbit between 2009 and 2018, eight planets were discovered, giving Kepler-90 the same number of known planets as our Solar System.

APOD: 2023 January 24 Б LHS 475 b: Earth Sized Exoplanet
24.01.2023

If you could stand on exoplanet LHS 475 b, what might you see? No one knows for sure but pictured here is an interesting guess made by an Earth-based artificial intelligence (AI) engine.

PDS 70: Disk, Planets, and Moons
24.08.2021

It's not the big disk that's attracting the most attention. Although the big planet-forming disk around the star PDS 70 is clearly imaged and itself quite interesting. It's also not the planet on the right, just inside the big disk, thatБs being talked about the most.

Goldilocks Zones and Stars
31.01.2020

The Goldilocks zone is the habitable zone around a star where it's not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to exist on the surface of orbiting planets. This intriguing infographic...