Extrasolar Planets News

March 2, 2025

Top Headlines

Young Star Clusters Give Birth to Rogue Planetary-Mass Objects

Feb. 27, 2025 — How do rogue planetary-mass objects -- celestial bodies with masses between stars and planets -- form? An international team of astronomers has used advanced simulations to show that these enigmatic objects are linked to the chaotic dynamics of ...

Today's Forecast: Partially Cloudy Skies on an 'Ultra-Hot Neptune'

Feb. 25, 2025 — Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers investigate the extreme weather patterns and atmospheric properties of exoplanet LTT 9779 b. New JWST observations with NIRISS reveal a dynamic atmosphere: powerful winds sweep around the planet, ...

'Out of Science Fiction': First 3D Observations of an Exoplanet's Atmosphere Reveal a Unique Climate

Feb. 18, 2025 — Astronomers have peered through the atmosphere of a planet beyond the Solar System, mapping its 3D structure for the first time. By combining all four telescope units of the European Southern ...

Astronomers Gauge Livability of Exoplanets Orbiting White Dwarf Stars

Feb. 13, 2025 — Astronomers used a 3D global computer model to compare the climates of exoplanets in different stellar and orbital configurations. They found that a planet orbiting a white dwarf star would offer a warmer climate than one orbiting a main sequence ...

Latest Headlines

updated 11:02pm EST

Temperamental Stars Are Distorting Our View of Distant Planets

Feb. 7, 2025 — 'Temperamental' stars that brighten and dim over a matter of hours or days may be distorting our view of thousands of distant planets, suggests a new ...

Dusting for Stars' Magnetic Fingerprints

Feb. 5, 2025 — Astronomers have succeeded in observing the magnetic field around a young star where planets are thought to be forming. The team was able to use dust to measure the three-dimensional structure ...

Wobbling Stars Reveal Hidden Companions in Gaia Data

Feb. 4, 2025 — Using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, scientists have found a huge exoplanet and a brown dwarf. This is the first time a planet has been uniquely discovered by Gaia's ability to ...

A Super-Earth Laboratory for Searching Life Elsewhere in the Universe

Jan. 28, 2025 — Thirty years after the discovery of the first exoplanet, we detected more than 7000 of them in our Galaxy. But there are still billions more to be discovered! At the same time, exoplanetologists have ...

Extreme Supersonic Winds Measured on Planet Outside Our Solar System

Jan. 21, 2025 — Astronomers have discovered extremely powerful winds pummeling the equator of WASP-127b, a giant exoplanet. Reaching speeds up to 33,000 km/h, the winds make up the fastest jet-stream of its kind ...

NASA's Pandora Mission One Step Closer to Probing Alien Atmospheres

Jan. 16, 2025 — Pandora, a small satellite mission poised to provide in-depth study of at least 20 known planets orbiting distant stars to determine the composition of their atmospheres cleared an important ...

Super-Earth Vs. Sub-Neptune? The Winner Is Super-Venus!

Jan. 15, 2025 — New observational data and simulation models have confirmed a new type of planet unlike anything found in the Solar System. This provides another piece of the puzzle to understand how planets and ...

Not All Hot Jupiters Orbit Solo

Jan. 15, 2025 — Hot Jupiters are giant planets initially known to orbit alone close to their star. During their migration towards their star, these planets were thought to accrete or eject any other planets present. ...

The Carbon in Our Bodies Probably Left the Galaxy and Came Back on Cosmic 'Conveyer Belt'

Jan. 3, 2025 — Scientists recently discovered that the giant 'conveyer belt' currents that push star-forged material out of our galaxy and pull it back in can also ...

Young Exoplanet's Atmosphere Unexpectedly Differs from Its Birthplace

Dec. 18, 2024 — Conventional wisdom assumes the ratio of gases in a planet's atmosphere should match the ratio of gases in the natal disk that birthed it. For the first time, researchers compared gases in a ...

Does the Exoplanet Trappist-1 B Have an Atmosphere After All?

Dec. 16, 2024 — Recent measurements with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) cast doubt on the current understanding of the exoplanet Trappist-1 b's nature. Until now, it was assumed to be a dark rocky planet ...

Planets Form Through Domino Effect

Dec. 13, 2024 — New radio astronomy observations of a planetary system in the process of forming show that once the first planets form close to the central star, these planets can help shepherd the material to form ...

New Planet in Kepler-51 System Discovered Using James Webb Space Telescope

Dec. 3, 2024 — An unusual planetary system with three known ultra-low density 'super-puff' planets has at least one more planet, according to new ...

Researchers Deal a Blow to Theory That Venus Once Had Liquid Water on Its Surface

Dec. 2, 2024 — A team of astronomers has found that Venus has never been habitable, despite decades of speculation that our closest planetary neighbor was once much more like Earth than it is ...

New Solar Composition Ratios That Could Reconcile Longstanding Questions

Nov. 12, 2024 — A team combined compositional data of primitive bodies like Kuiper Belt objects, asteroids and comets with new solar data sets to develop a revised solar composition that potentially reconciles ...

NASA's Hubble, Webb Probe Surprisingly Smooth Disk Around Vega

Nov. 1, 2024 — Teams of astronomers used the combined power of NASA's Hubble and James Webb space telescopes to revisit the legendary Vega ...

Rocky Planets Orbiting Small Stars Could Have Stable Atmospheres Needed to Support Life

Oct. 23, 2024 — A sequence of events during the evolution of certain rocky planets orbiting M-dwarfs, the most common stars in the universe, creates an atmosphere that would be stable over time. This is true for ...

Are Nearby Planets Sending Radio Signals to Each Other?

Oct. 16, 2024 — Researchers have developed a new method using the Allen Telescope Array to search for interplanetary radio communication in the TRAPPIST-1 star ...

NASA's Hubble, New Horizons Team Up for a Simultaneous Look at Uranus

Oct. 11, 2024 — NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and New Horizons spacecraft simultaneously set their sights on Uranus recently, allowing scientists to make a direct comparison of the planet from two very ...

Physicists Explore Possibility of Life Beyond Earth

Oct. 1, 2024 — Are there planets beyond Earth where humans can live? The answer is maybe, according to physicists examining F-type star ...

Scientists Discover Planet Orbiting Closest Single Star to Our Sun

Oct. 1, 2024 — Astronomers have discovered an exoplanet orbiting Barnard's star, the closest single star to our Sun. On this newly discovered exoplanet, which has at least half the mass of Venus, a year lasts ...

This Rocky Planet Around a White Dwarf Resembles Earth -- 8 Billion Years from Now

Sep. 26, 2024 — A 2020 microlensing event was caused by a planetary system with an Earth-like planet and brown dwarf. The star type was uncertain. The team has determined that the star is a white dwarf, a system ...

Mapping Distant Planets: 'Ridges', 'Deserts' and 'Savannahs'

Sep. 25, 2024 — Researchers examined Neptunian exoplanets -- these planets share similar characteristics to our own Neptune, but orbit outside of our solar system. Scientists discovered a new area called the ...

Astronomers Catch a Glimpse of a Uniquely Inflated and Asymmetric Exoplanet

Sep. 24, 2024 — Astronomers have observed the atmosphere of a hot and uniquely inflated exoplanet using NASA's James Webb Space ...

Formation of Super-Earths Is Limited Near Metal-Poor Stars

Sep. 9, 2024 — In a new study, astronomers report novel evidence regarding the limits of planet formation, finding that after a certain point, planets larger than Earth have difficulty forming near low-metallicity ...

Researchers Discover a Space Oddity -- An Exoplanet Moving in Mysterious Ways

Sep. 5, 2024 — A research team has discovered a small planet that displays peculiar orbital motion. The shimmying planet, located 455 light-years from Earth, shows that planetary systems can be considerably more ...

Six New Rogue Worlds: Star Birth Clues

Aug. 27, 2024 — The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted six likely rogue worlds -- objects with planet-like masses but untethered from any star's gravity -- including the lightest ever identified with a ...

Key to Rapid Planet Formation

Aug. 1, 2024 — Researchers have developed a new model to explain the formation of giant planets such as Jupiter, which furnishes deeper insights into the processes of planet formation and could expand our ...

Images of Nearest 'Super-Jupiter' Open a New Window to Exoplanet Research

July 24, 2024 — Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers imaged a new exoplanet that orbits a star in the nearby triple system Epsilon Indi. The planet is a cold super-Jupiter exhibiting a ...

Researchers Explore the Effects of Stellar Magnetism on Potential Habitability of Exoplanets

July 22, 2024 — A study extends the definition of a habitable zone for planets to include their star's magnetic ...