Tiny Earth Light Years Away

The nearest single star to the Solar System has just yielded up a rare and wonderful treasure.

Around a red dwarf known as Barnard's star, which lies just 5.96 light-years away, astronomers have found evidence of an exoplanet.


And not just any exoplanet. This fascinating world, known as Barnard b, is tiny, clocking in with a minimum mass of 37 percent of the mass of Earth. That's a little shy of half a Venus, and about 3.5 Marses.


The reason it's so marvelous is that tiny exoplanets are really, really hard to find. Although Barnard b is not habitable to life as we know it, its discovery is leading us closer to the identification of Earth-sized worlds that may be scattered elsewhere throughout the galaxy.  READ MORE...

NASA Found a Super Earth

A NASA telescope orbiting our planet has spotted an intriguing super-Earth — a world some 30 to 70 percent bigger than Earth.

This rocky planet is in another solar system 137 light-years away, which in the vastness of space is considered relatively close (a light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles). The exoplanet, called TOI-715 b, is about 1.5 times the size of Earth. And, crucially, this world orbits inside the habitable, or "Goldilocks," zone.

"That’s the distance from the star that could give the planet the right temperature for liquid water to form on its surface," NASA explained on its website. "Several other factors would have to line up, of course, for surface water to be present, especially having a suitable atmosphere."

TOI-715 b orbits quite close to its star (each orbit lasts just 19 days) — but scientists don't think its a hellish, scorching world, like some other exoplanets. That's because its star is a "red dwarf," which is both cooler and smaller than our medium-sized star, the sun.   READ MORE...

A New Class of ExoPlanet

Artist's illustration of a half-rock, half-water world orbiting a red dwarf star. 

(Image credit: Pilar Montañés (@pilar.monro))

A new type of exoplanet — one made half of rock and half of water — has been discovered around the most common stars in the universe, which may have great consequences in the search for life in the cosmos, researchers say.


Red dwarfs are the most common type of star, making up more than 70% of the universe's stellar population. These stars are small and cold, typically about one-fifth as massive as the sun and up to 50 times dimmer.

The fact that red dwarfs are so very common has made scientists wonder if they might be the best chance for discovering planets that can possess life as we know it on Earth. For example, in 2020, astronomers that discovered Gliese 887, the brightest red dwarf in our sky at visible wavelengths of light, may host a planet within its habitable zone, where surface temperatures are suitable to host liquid water.

However, whether the worlds orbiting red dwarfs are potentially habitable remains unclear, in part because of the lack of understanding that researchers have about these worlds' composition. Previous research suggested that small exoplanets — ones less than four times Earth's diameter — orbiting sun-like stars are generally either rocky or gassy, possessing either a thin or thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium.


In the new study, astrophysicists sought to examine the compositions of exoplanets around red dwarfs. 

They focused on small worlds found around closer — and thus brighter and easier to inspect — red dwarfs observed by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).  READ MORE...

Zodiacal Light on Exoplanets

Watch the sun set from a particularly dark patch of Earth and you may spot a triangle of what scientists call zodiacal light extending from where our star passed below the horizon.

Zodiacal light in Earth's skies is created when sunlight bounces off the dust that fills the solar system, the remains of pulverized asteroids and flurry left by passing comets. 

And according to new research by a team of astronomers and high school students based in China, a similar phenomenon occurs in the skies of at least a few potentially habitable exoplanets. The light could be one more clue for scientists seeking to puzzle out what those exotic neighborhoods might look like.

"If we can detect zodiacal light from a distant planet system, then this system likely has components like asteroids and comets, which can't be easily detected directly in other ways," lead author Jian Ge, an astronomer at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, said during a news conference held virtually on Jan. 13 by the American Astronomical Society. 

Ge had been scheduled to present the research at a meeting organized by the group that was canceled due to COVID-19.  TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS, CLICK HERE...

Unique Exoplanet

The CHEOPS satellite accidentally spotted a rare exoplanet with no known equivalent. The satellite detected this unique exoplanet while looking for two exoplanets in a bright nearby star system.

This planet called ‘Nu2 Lupi d’ is located 50 light-years away in the constellation Lupus (Latin for Wolf), around a star called Nu2 Lupi. It is about 2.5 times the size of Earth and almost 9 times its mass.

What’s more, scientists used measurements with archival data from other observatories and numerical models to characterize the density and composition of the planet and its neighbors. 

They found that the planet has a rocky interior. It has far more water than the Earth. However, the water is not liquid; instead in the form of high-pressure ice or high-temperature steam, making the planets uninhabitable.

In 2019, Swiss astronomers announced the detection of three exoplanets around this bright, Sun-like star. 

The three exoplanets have masses between those of Earth and Neptune (17 times the Earth) and take 12, 28, and 107 days to circle their parent star.

Yann Alibert, professor of astrophysics at the University of Bern and co-author of the study, said, “We knew that already for the two inner planets, which led us to point CHEOPS to the system in the first place. 

However, the third planet is quite far away from the star; no one was expected to see its transit!”  READ MORE

Disk Around Exoplanet

For The First Time, Astronomers Witness a Moon-Forming Disk Around an Exoplanet

ANDY TOMASWICK, UNIVERSE TODAY 26 JULY 2021


Planetary formation is a complicated, multilayered process. Even with the influx of data on exoplanets, there are still only two known planets that are not yet fully formed.

Known as PDS 70b and PDS 70c, the two planets, which were originally found by the Very Large Telescope, are some of the best objects we have to flesh out our planetary formation models. 

And now, one of them has been confirmed to have a moon-forming disk around it.  READ MORE