Astronomers have found the strongest evidence yet that a rocky planet beyond our solar system has managed to hold onto an atmosphere — a crucial ingredient for life as we know it.

The discovery marks the first time scientists have detected an atmosphere surrounding a rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone of another star, the region around a star where temperatures could enable liquid water to exist on a planet's surface. The findings, published July 16 in the journal Science, could help astronomers narrow the search for potentially habitable worlds beyond our cosmic backyard.

"It's absolutely exciting," Edward Schwieterman, associate professor of astrobiology at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "We are getting closer to studying the atmospheres of worlds that could plausibly harbor life, with evidence of that life embedded in their observable spectra."

The planet, known as LHS 1140 b, lies about 48 light-years away from Earth and orbits a small, cool red dwarf star. At roughly 5.6 times Earth's mass, the exoplanet is classified as a super-Earth: a rocky planet larger than our own but much smaller than gas giants like Neptune.

It receives less than half the sunlight Earth gets, giving it an estimated surface temperature of around minus 53 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 47 degrees Celsius), according to previous estimates not accounting for an atmosphere. That makes the planet cold, but in the range astronomers consider potentially habitable.

Cosmic gas leak

Scientists have discovered thousands of exoplanets over the past few decades, including many rocky worlds. But determining whether those planets have atmospheres has proven far more difficult, because atmospheres around rocky planets are incredibly thin compared with those of giant planets, making them much harder to detect across vast cosmic distances.

Instead of looking for the atmosphere directly, the researchers behind the new study searched for a subtle clue that one existed: helium gas leaking into space. Using the WINERED spectrograph on the Magellan Clay Telescope in Chile, the team watched LHS 1140 b cross in front of its star and let a sliver of starlight filter through the planet's atmosphere on its way to Earth. As it did, the team looked for a tiny dip in the star’s light at the exact wavelength of infrared light that helium blocks — a telltale sign that gas was streaming off the planet and into space.

The prediction rested entirely on a mathematical model that had never been confirmed for a rocky planet. However, in September 2024, the team caught LHS 1140 b and a smaller, hotter neighboring planet, LHS 1140 c, transiting their star on the same night, less than 40 minutes apart. The researchers detected a clear helium signal from LHS 1140 b, while LHS 1140 c showed nothing.

The contrast matters: LHS 1140 c orbits much closer to its star than LHS 1140 b does and receives roughly five times the radiation, yet it's also smaller and less gravitationally bound — conditions that should make any escaping gas easier, not harder, to spot. Finding nothing there suggests LHS 1140 c's atmosphere was stripped away long ago, while LHS 1140 b, sitting farther out in cooler, calmer conditions, has managed to hold onto its own.

The discovery addresses a question astronomers have been working to answer for decades.

"Twenty years ago we wondered whether other terrestrial-type planets even existed," study co-author Robin Wordsworth, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard, said in a statement. "Then we learned they're common, and found some in the habitable zone. The next question was whether any of them had managed to keep an atmosphere. Now we know at least one has."

A step forward in the hunt for life

The find is especially notable because red dwarf stars like LHS 1140 can bombard nearby planets with high-energy radiation capable of stripping atmospheres away over time. Based on the star's estimated age of at least 3.1 billion years, the researchers say LHS 1140 b's atmosphere has likely persisted despite that bombardment, suggesting some rocky planets around these common stars can hang onto their atmospheres for far longer than once assumed.

But the researchers caution that detecting helium does not mean the planet is inhabited — or even that it is habitable. The observations reveal only the planet's thin upper atmosphere, not its full composition. Scientists still don't know whether LHS 1140 b has oxygen, carbon dioxide, water vapor or other gases that could make its surface more Earth-like and hospitable to life.

Instead, the discovery opens a new way to study distant rocky worlds.

"The study demonstrates that, at least in some cases, we will be able to begin characterizing the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets," Schwieterman said. "If only rocky planets orbiting Sun-like stars retained atmospheres, we might have to wait one to two decades for the launch of the Habitable Worlds Observatory to search for biosignatures on rocky planets. I'm certainly excited about what comes next!"

Future observations will aim to determine what the rest of LHS 1140 b's atmosphere is made of and investigate whether it may harbor oceans or other features associated with habitability.

A hefty "super Earth" lurking in one of the closest star systems to our planet may be much better suited to supporting extraterrestrial life than scientists initially thought, a new study suggests. The alien world's relative proximity to Earth, and the nature of its home star, make it a prime candidate for follow-up observations, researchers say.

The exoplanet, dubbed GJ 3378b, was discovered in 2024 and orbits a red dwarf star around 25 light-years from our planet. The alien world circles its star every 21.5 days at a distance around 10 times closer than Earth orbits the sun, which would make it completely inhospitable in our solar system. But because the red dwarf emits around 90% less radiation than the sun does, GJ 3378b is slap bang in the middle of this star system’s "habitable zone," where liquid water could exist on the exoplanet's surface.

Researchers initially thought that GJ 3378b was around five times more massive than Earth. If the planet is rocky like ours, it would qualify as a "super Earth" — often considered the best candidates for sustaining extraterrestrial life. However, it was hard to tell if this world had a solid surface or was actually a mini gas giant. And even if it was rocky, its immense size would probably mean that its atmospheric pressure would be crushing, making it less likely to harbor life.

But in a new study, published June 30 in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers recalculated the exoplanet's size, using the Habitable-zone Planet Finder instrument attached to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas. This device measures subtle wobbles in the host star, caused by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets, and can be used to calculate the planet’s mass and trajectory.

This revealed that GJ 3378b is actually only 2.3 times more massive than Earth, which almost guarantees it is a rocky world and means it could have an atmosphere with a similar pressure to our own, raising the chances that extraterrestrial lifeforms could thrive there.

While researchers have found several other exoplanets that could harbor life, the fact that GJ 3378b is so close to us makes it particularly intriguing, as it will be easier to confirm whether it is truly habitable.

"This one’s exciting," study first author Paul Robertson, an astronomer at the University of California, Irvine, said in a statement. "25 light-years sounds like a long way, but the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across, so in that respect it’s our next-door neighbor."

Before we get too carried away, there is still no evidence that GJ 3378b has an atmosphere or liquid water. Its proximity to its home star may mean that any atmosphere it once had was stripped away by stellar winds, similar to how solar radiation likely stripped Mars of its atmosphere and ancient oceans.

Therefore, more observations are needed. But if an atmosphere is detected, GJ 3378b would likely jump to near the front of the queue of exoplanets that researchers want to study further.

"If a planet in the habitable zone has a proper atmosphere, we can justify further research looking for biosignatures, liquid water or other signs of life," study co-author Gogod James, an undergraduate student at UC Irvine, said in the statement.

The fact that GJ 3378b orbits a red dwarf also makes it more appealing for future study because this is the most common star type in the Milky Way, so experts are keen to learn more about these stars' planetary systems and potential to nurture life.

"About 70% of stars in our galaxy are red dwarfs, so they represent the standard," study co-author Michael Endl, an astronomer at the McDonald Observatory and the University of Texas at Austin, said in another statement. "It’s really important that we understand the planet population around these stars."

In a first-of-its-kind discovery, astronomers claim they have directly measured the magnetic fields of multiple planets beyond our solar system — potentially providing a crucial new tool in the search for habitable planets and alien life.

Magnetic fields exert a vital influence on planetary atmospheres and, therefore, their ultimate fate and prospects for habitability. We know, for example, that Earth's magnetic field has long protected our planet from harmful radiation, allowing our world to become a flourishing blue-green planet while inert Mars has grown barren and ostensibly dead.

The importance of a guardian magnetosphere is clearly evident. Yet magnetic fields on exoplanets, or alien worlds that orbit stars beyond our solar system, have remained poorly constrained, until now.

In a study published Tuesday (June 2) in the journal Nature Astronomy, a massive, multinational team of astronomers observed seven sizzling planets and found that their winds were slower than expected, suggesting that magnetic fields were slowing them down.

"This breakthrough opens a completely new window on exoplanet research," study co-author Julia Seidel, an astronomer at the Lagrange Laboratory in Nice, France, said in a statement. "It's the first time we can compare the magnetic environments of other worlds — a key step toward ultimately understanding which planets can stay alive, keep their water, and perhaps even, one day, host life as we know it."

Unexpected astronomy

The researchers were not specifically seeking exoplanetary magnetic fields. Instead, they sought to determine whether winds throughout the cosmos behave similarly on hot planets.

So they focused on seven "ultra-hot Jupiters," or sizzling gas giants swirling so close to their stellar parents that they're tidally locked, with one side always facing their star and the other side perpetually drenched in darkness.

Under such intense stellar irradiation, these seven planets attain estimated equilibrium temperatures of approximately 2,600 Kelvin (over 4,200 degrees Fahrenheit), whipping up unimaginable winds ranging from nearly 4,500 miles (7,200 kilometers) per hour to almost 16,000 mph (25,000 kmh). For comparison, our own not-so-hot Jupiter only manages to power winds to a relatively tame 900 mph (1,500 kmh).

The researchers clocked these otherworldly wind speeds using the ESPRESSO instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile and the MAROON-X instrument on the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii.

These are both spectrographs, which are tools that split a celestial object's light into its constituent wavelengths to reveal its atmospheric composition. Accordingly, these observations allowed the astronomers to measure wind speeds by tracing the movement of iron through the atmospheres of these exoplanets.

A counterintuitive discovery

In doing so, they revealed several surprises. First, wind speeds on these hot, gassy planets actually declined with temperature — the hotter the planet, the lower the wind speed.

"This is totally counterintuitive because, all things being equal, hot planets have more energy to accelerate the winds," study co-author Vivien Parmentier, an astronomer and professor at Lagrange Laboratory, explained in a separate statement. "Something must happen that slows down the wind speeds for hotter objects."

The researchers concluded that the magnetic fields may be responsible for putting the "brakes" on these winds, by slowing the movement of charged particles in the atmospheres of these exoplanets.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the research suggests that these magnetic fields are only several gauss in strength — rather than hundreds of gauss, as predicted by some models. Such values are on par with the much colder gas giants in our solar system. This finding may therefore also help to reconcile predictive models for planetary magnetic fields.

Overall, this breakthrough study may set the standard for detecting magnetic fields around planets beyond our own. Applying this technique elsewhere could guide future searches for potentially habitable worlds, an ever-appealing prospect as next-generation facilities begin aiming their electric eyes toward other possible Earths throughout the universe.

Scientists may have detected more than 10,000 never-before-seen exoplanets in a single survey, potentially tripling the number of known alien worlds in one fell swoop. The record-breaking haul was possible thanks to a new algorithm that helped researchers analyze more than 80 million stars — revealing subtle clues that would otherwise be "impossible" for us to see.

Since the first alien planet was spotted in 1995, the number of exoplanet discoveries has slowly risen in line with new technologies, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, which are better equipped to spot these weird alien worlds. In September 2025, astronomers revealed that the number of confirmed exoplanets had surpassed 6,000, and nearly 300 have been added to the list since then, according to NASA.

But in a new study uploaded April 20 to the preprint server arXiv, researchers report that they've uncovered an astonishing 11,554 exoplanet candidates at once. If all of them can be confirmed, it would bring the total number of exoplanets to nearly 18,000, which is almost triple the current total. (The study has not been peer-reviewed yet.)

Using a machine learning algorithm, the team analyzed the light curves of precisely 83,717,159 stars captured by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a car-sized space telescope that has been circling Earth since 2018. By looking for subtle dips in the stars' brightness, astronomers can tell when a planet has likely passed in front of, or transited, its home star.

This revealed more than 11,000 exoplanet candidates, of which 10,052 had never been seen before. (Other scientists had previously identified the rest, but they are not yet confirmed as exoplanets.) Around 87% of the candidates were spotted transiting twice or more, allowing the researchers to calculate the planets' orbital periods, which range from 0.5 to 27 days, according to StellarCatalog.com.

But the researchers didn't stop there. To test the validity of their model, they attempted to confirm one of the new candidates themselves.

Using one of the 21-foot (6.5 meters) Magellan telescopes in Chile's Atacama Desert, the team identified a "hot Jupiter" exoplanet, dubbed TIC 183374187 b, that orbits a star around 3,950 light-years from Earth — right where the algorithm predicted.

The confirmation of TIC 183374187 b hints that at least a few of the other exoplanet candidates will also end up being confirmed. However, first these planets must be verified by independent surveys and studied in greater detail, which can take months or years to do properly.

Finding "impossible" planets

TESS was specifically designed to detect transiting objects, and it has already discovered 882 confirmed exoplanets — roughly 14% of the current total — so it may seem strange that no one has seen most of the new candidates until now. However, there is a good reason why.

Most researchers prioritize analyzing the light curves of the brightest stars in the TESS dataset, because transit events for these stars are much more noticeable and easier to confirm. But there are many more faint stars that end up being captured in the telescope's wide-field photos.

In the new study, the researchers looked at every star — up to 16 magnitudes dimmer than the normal threshold for a transit study — from TESS' first wide-field image. The researchers call this idea the T16 project.

The extreme dimness of these light curves makes it extraordinarily hard to spot potential transit events, which is why they are normally overlooked. To overcome this hurdle, the team created a machine learning algorithm that learned to distinguish subtle clues that a transit had potentially occurred. (Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence where computers learn from data to make predictions, rather than being explicitly programmed.)

A computer program also allowed the team to analyze the enormous dataset, which would "be impossible" for humans to sort through on their own, Universe Today reported.

"This work shows that large-scale, machine-learning-assisted transit searches can significantly expand the census of transiting planet candidates, particularly around faint stars," researchers wrote in the paper.

Unfortunately, the brief orbital periods of the exoplanet candidates hint that they are probably too close to their home stars to support life as we know it. (This is because more distant planets orbit their stars less often and are less likely to align with an observer for a transit.)

Scientists have found a potential shortcut for identifying stars that host planets. The technique, based on specific signals in starlight, could make it easier to search for exoplanets, according to a new study.

The team has already used their new method to turn up half a dozen previously undiscovered planets — but because most of the alien worlds are very close to their stars, they are unlikely to be habitable, the study authors say.

Many of the 6,000-plus known exoplanets are located extremely close to their host stars. This proximity often doesn't turn out well for such close-in worlds, whose surfaces get whipped up by the stars' intense radiation and form comet-like tails of debris. This includes exoplanets like K2-22b, which was analyzed by the James Webb Space Telescope in 2025. The debris typically remains, for millions of years, as a cloud circling the planet's host star.

But this clutter could help astronomers pinpoint stars that host undiscovered exoplanets orbiting close to their stars. That's because the debris, which is mainly a mixture of different gases, absorbs some of its parent star's light at specific visible frequencies.

"That absorption could make the star appear artificially [magnetically] less active," Matthew Standing, a research fellow at the European Space Agency's European Space Astronomy Centre in Madrid and the new study's lead author, told Live Science via email. In other words, magnetically inactive stars are potentially good targets in the search for crumbling, close-in exoplanets.

If this hypothesis is confirmed, it could make planet-searching ventures less random.

Signals from the stars

To test the idea, Standing and an international team of collaborators first identified a set of 24 stars with apparently low magnetic activity as part of the Dispersed Matter Planet Project (DMPP), including a handful of stars that the DMPP had analyzed in 2020. The researchers then collected visible-light spectra — the light curves that correspond to wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation that humans can see — from these stars, using telescopes at the European Space Observatory in Chile.

They observed each star at least 10 times for up to two weeks. If a star hosted one or more planets, its gravitational "tugs" on its star would cause it to wobble, which would be visible in the spectra. (This method of identifying exoplanets is called the radial-velocity technique.)

Next, the team used a computational algorithm to determine if such changes in the light curves could correspond to as many as four planets for each star system. The analysis also allowed the researchers to determine how sensitive the survey was and how common close-in planets are around stars with low magnetic activity levels.

The results, published Feb. 28 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, showed that 14 stars hosted a total of 24 exoplanets, including a total of seven newly discovered worlds in five of these systems.

The team also calculated that the occurrence of exoplanets around the stars they selected was between eight and 10 times higher than in other radial-velocity surveys. This occurrence rate supports the hypothesis that stars that seem magnetically inactive are likely hosts of close-in, highly irradiated exoplanets.

Additionally, the researchers found that the survey was very comprehensive, identifying nearly 95% of exoplanets that were more than 10 times as massive as Earth and orbited their host stars in five days or less.

The team also extrapolated their results to our cosmic neighborhood, curating a list of roughly 16,000 stars lying within 1,600 light-years from the solar system. (For reference, a light-year is the distance light travels in a year — approximately 5.88 trillion miles, or 9.46 trillion kilometers.) From this list, the researchers found 241 stars with similar signatures of low magnetic activity. Given the proportion of exoplanets in the study, they estimate that these stars may host around 300 planets, just waiting to be discovered.

Standing is cautiously enthusiastic about the technique's potential. "If confirmed with larger samples, this method could help make exoplanet searches more efficient," he said.

The team plans to do just that, expanding the size of their sample and continuing to monitor radial-velocity data for signs of planets, he added.

Astronomers have gotten a rare glimpse at four baby planets as they're growing up, and it reveals something surprising: These toddler worlds are getting lighter as they age.

The quadruplet worlds orbit in tightly packed paths around the star V1298 Tau, a young system that's just 20 million years old (compared with our sun's 4.5 billion years) located about 350 light-years from Earth. A new analysis, which drew on a decade of observations, shows that the planets are surprisingly lightweight, with low densities — so puffed up, in fact, that researchers likened them to Styrofoam.

The findings offer a rare snapshot of planetary architecture just after formation, the researchers said — a long-sought-for "missing link" between newborn disks of gas and dust and the mature planetary systems astronomers commonly observe across the Milky Way.

Those older systems are often crowded with planets between the sizes of Earth and Neptune on tight, Mercury-like orbits. The origins of such worlds have remained one of astronomy's enduring mysteries.

"What's so exciting is that we're seeing a preview of what will become a very normal planetary system," study lead author John Livingston, an assistant professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, said in a statement. "We've never had such a clear picture of them in their formative years."

Over time, the bloated worlds around V1298 Tau are expected to shrink as they shed their thick atmospheres, eventually becoming super-Earths and sub-Neptunes — planetary types that are absent from our own solar system but ubiquitous throughout the galaxy.

By capturing the planets at such a pivotal stage of development, the study, published Jan. 7 in the journal Nature, enables astronomers to trace the chaotic processes that sculpt planetary systems over billions of years.

'I couldn't believe it!'

The four planets orbiting V1298 Tau were first identified in 2019 in data from NASA's Kepler space telescope. One is roughly Jupiter-size, while the other three fall between the sizes of Neptune and Saturn.

What immediately set the system apart was its crowded layout of multiple oversized planets packed into relatively tight orbits — a configuration known in only one other system, Kepler-51, among more than 500 known multi-planet systems.

While the planets' existence was clear, their fundamental properties remained elusive. To pin them down, Livingston and his team embarked on a nearly decade-long observation campaign using half a dozen telescopes in space and on the ground. They tracked the planets as they passed in front of their star — events known as transits, which cause tiny dips in starlight that reveal a planet's size and orbital period.

Crucially, small variations in the timing of the transits, caused by the planets tugging gravitationally on one another, enabled the team to measure their masses. The technique is especially powerful because it is largely immune to interference from stellar flares common around young stars, the study noted.

But the method only works if astronomers know each planet's orbital period precisely — and for the outermost planet, V1298 Tau e, that information was missing. Only two of its transits had ever been observed, separated by 6.5 years across observations from Kepler and NASA's exoplanet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) telescope, leaving astronomers unsure how many transits had gone unseen in between, according to the study.

A stroke of good luck came when the ground-based Las Cumbres Observatory network — which operates telescopes in the United States, Chile and South Africa — spotted a third transit, enabling the researchers to finally lock down the planet's orbit and model the system's full gravitational choreography.

"I couldn't believe it!" study co-author Erik Petigura, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCLA, said in the statement. "The timing was so uncertain that I thought we would have to try half a dozen times at least. It was like getting a hole-in-one in golf."

The results showed that despite being five to 10 times Earth's radius, the planets have masses only five to 15 times greater than Earth's, making them among the least dense planets ever discovered, Livingston said.

"By weighing these planets for the first time, we have provided the first observational proof," study co-author Trevor David, an astrophysicist formerly at the Flatiron Institute in New York, who led the system's discovery in 2019, said in the statement. "They are indeed exceptionally 'puffy,' which gives us a crucial, long-awaited benchmark for theories of planet evolution."

The team then simulated the planets' evolution and found that they have already lost much of their original atmospheres and cooled faster than predicted by standard models.

"But they're still evolving," study co-author James Owen, an associate professor of astrophysics at Imperial College London, said in the statement. The planets are expected to continue shedding gas and contracting into super-Earths and sub-Neptunes, he said.

"Over the next few billion years, they will continue to lose their atmosphere and shrink significantly, transforming into the compact systems of super-Earths and sub-Neptunes we see throughout the galaxy," Owen added.

NASA recently revealed the first pictures of its newly constructed Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which could soon help researchers hunt for exoplanets, map the Milky Way and unravel some of the universe's biggest mysteries, such as the true nature of dark matter.

Experts have also revealed the most probable launch date for the next-generation spacecraft, confirming that it will likely lift off ahead of schedule — and could begin collecting data before the end of 2026.

Roman is NASA's next flagship space telescope, following on from the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990, and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which launched in 2021. The orbital observatory is named after pioneering scientist Nancy Grace Roman — who served as NASA's first chief astronomer between 1960 and 1962 — and will work alongside Hubble and JWST, rather than replacing the existing telescopes.

New photos, released Dec. 4, show Roman standing upright in a clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The telescope is around 42 feet (12.7 meters) tall and weighs a hefty 9,184 pounds (4,166 kilograms). It began construction in February 2016, and the project has so far stayed within its initial budget of $4.3 billion, researchers say.

Once launched, Roman will be positioned around 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth at a Lagrange point — a fixed point relative to our planet where the gravity of two objects cancels out. Its specific Lagrange point will be Sun-Earth L2, where JWST and the European Space Agency's Gaia and Euclid space telescopes already reside.

"Completing the Roman observatory brings us to a defining moment for the agency," NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said in a statement. "Transformative science depends on disciplined engineering, and this team has delivered — piece by piece, test by test — an observatory that will expand our understanding of the universe."

"With Roman's construction complete, we are poised at the brink of unfathomable scientific discovery," Julie McEnery, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard and Roman's senior project scientist, said in the statement. "In the mission's first five years, it's expected to unveil more than 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars, and billions of galaxies."

What will Roman do?

Roman is equipped with two key instruments, which will define its objectives throughout its initial five-year mission. (Roman will likely remain operational beyond five years, but researchers have only planned what it will do until then.)

The first is the Wide Field Instrument (WFI), a 288-megapixel camera attached to a 7.9-foot (2.4 meters) mirror, capable of capturing high-definition photos of the outer solar system, the edges of the visible universe and anything in-between in infrared light too faint to be seen by human eyes.

One of Roman's main goals will be to create the most detailed map of the Milky Way's center yet in the Galactic Plane Survey, which will account for at least 25% of its total observing time. But it will also search the wider universe for things like distant galaxy clusters and giant "cosmic voids," which could help reveal the identity of dark matter and dark energy, NASA recently announced.

But the telescope's secret weapon is arguably its Coronograph Instrument, which will block out the light from distant stars, allowing WFI to snap photos of their surrounding exoplanets, which would normally be obscured by stellar glare.

As of September 2025, scientists have discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets in roughly 30 years. However, Roman is expected to find more than 15 times as many in half a decade, which would be a huge boon to scientists exploring the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

"The question of 'Are we alone?' is a big one, and it's an equally big task to build tools that can help us answer it," Feng Zhao, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California and the Roman Coronagraph Instrument manager, said in the statement. This device could "bring us one step closer to that goal," Zhao added.

In total, Roman is expected to collect more than 20,000 terabytes of data over the course of its initial five-year mission, which is equivalent to the storage space of around 3,000 iPhones: "The sheer volume of the data Roman will return is mind-boggling," Dominic Benford, a NASA researcher and Roman's program scientist, said in the statement.

When will Roman launch?

For years, Roman's prospective launch has been earmarked for May 2027, with some predicting this date would be pushed back, like other previous NASA missions. For example, JWST was originally planned to launch in 2014, according to the Planetary Society.

However, early last year, rumors began to spread that Roman would not only meet its deadline but may actually launch early.

And on Jan. 5, at the 247th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix, Arizona, project scientists confirmed that these rumors were true, revealing that, as it stands, the earliest likely launch date for Roman is Sept. 28, according to Space News.

Roman will launch onboard one of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rockets from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, meaning it will need to be transported more than 900 miles (1,450 km) from Goddard before lift-off. This is scheduled to occur in June, and whether or not this happens on time will give us a better indication of how likely a September launch date really is.

Once Roman is in orbit, it will take approximately 90 days for mission scientists to carry out the necessary steps to start collecting data, according to NASA. Therefore, if the telescope does launch on Sept. 28, it will likely start collecting data around Dec. 27.

What if some of the alien worlds we've discovered are not actually planets at all?

Astronomers have spent years cataloging thousands of worlds orbiting distant stars, assuming that if something has the mass of a planet and exerts a gravitational pull on its parent star, it must be a planet.

But there may be a ghostly alternative lurking in the early universe. In a recent paper that was uploaded to the arXiv preprint server but has not been peer-reviewed, researchers suggest that some "exoplanets" we've detected might actually be something far more exotic — primordial black holes.

These are not your garden-variety black holes, born from dying stars. Instead, they are hypothetical leftovers from the Big Bang itself, formed when the newborn universe was a chaotic, high-pressure soup of energy. These "mini" black holes could have the mass of Earth or Jupiter but be the size of a grapefruit.

Our current methods for finding planets are exceptionally good at measuring mass but less so at determining the physical size of a planet. For example, we often use the radial velocity method — a technique that involves watching a star "wobble" because the gravity of an orbiting object is yanking on it. If the wobble is big, the object is heavy. If the wobble is small, the object is light.

But here's the catch: A planet with the mass of Neptune and a black hole with the mass of Neptune produce the exact same wobble.

In an attempt to separate the two, the authors of the new study looked at exoplanets that have been detected via these wobbles but have never been seen crossing the face of their star — a process called a transit. When a planet transits, it blocks some light, telling us its physical size. If an object pulls on a star but never blocks any light, it might be because it is too small to see, or it might be because it is a black hole.

The researchers identified several intriguing suspects, including Kepler-21 Ac, HD 219134 f and Wolf 1061 d. These objects are heavy enough to make their stars wobble, yet they remain invisible to our telescopes. The team pointed to microlensing events — brief flashes of light caused when a massive object passes in front of a distant star and acts like a magnifying glass — as potential hiding spots for these ancient nomads.

The authors admitted that these candidates are merely representative possibilities, rather than a definitive gallery of tiny black holes. Most will likely turn out to be ordinary planets that just happen to have tilted orbits that prevent them from transiting.

The next decade of data from missions like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — a NASA telescope that will take a broad survey of exoplanets, due to launch as soon as this fall — will be crucial for learning more about these objects. We might catch one evaporating via Hawking radiation, a theoretical process whereby black holes slowly leak energy until they vanish. If so, we might discover that the universe is a lot more crowded with ancient black holes than we ever imagined.

The idea of humans living beyond Earth was once only possible in science fiction, but now space agencies are making plans to bring space colonization closer to reality. NASA and SpaceX are exploring long-term missions to the moon and Mars, while astronomers continue to discover potentially habitable exoplanets orbiting distant stars beyond our solar system.

Supporters of planetary colonization argue that becoming a multi-planet species could safeguard us from potentially Earth-ending events. However, it will require an enormous effort to colonize another planet or moon. And if we look beyond Mars, potentially habitable planets may take thousands of years to reach.

But as technology advances and space agencies consider long-term human settlements on other planets, a more fundamental issue now beckons — not whether we can expand to other worlds, but whether we should.

What's your take? Answer our poll below and share the reasoning behind your choice in the comments.

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—'Eyeball' planet spied by James Webb telescope might be habitable

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted a distant exoplanet that should be impossible. The ultrahot super-Earth, named TOI-561 b, is surrounded by a thick atmosphere of hot gas that blankets a planet covered by a broiling magma ocean.

Astronomers have been surprised by several of the hell planet's features, which don't match what we've found elsewhere in the universe. The discovery could reshape what we know about the types of planets that can form and evolve.

"What's really exciting is that this new data set is opening up even more questions than it's answering," study lead author Johanna Teske, staff scientist at Carnegie Science Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington D.C. said in a statement from NASA.

Hot, close to the sun, and tidally locked

TOI-561 b is located around 280 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sextans, and it has a radius about 1.4 times that of our own planet. It circles its sun, which is slightly smaller and cooler than our own, every 11 hours, according to the statement. That puts it in a rare class of objects known as ultra-short period exoplanets, according to NASA.

The planet orbits incredibly closely to its parent star — just 1/40th the distance between Mercury and the sun, the statement noted. That means it is "tidally locked," or keeps one side of the planet perpetually facing the star — much like Earth's moon is tidally locked with our planet. Such tidally locked planets have a permanent dayside and permanent nightside.

Too light, too cool, too atmospheric

The distant hell planet is puzzling to researchers in many ways.

For one, it has an unusually low density. That is likely because it formed very differently than the planets we are most familiar with.

"TOI-561 b is distinct among ultra-short period planets in that it orbits a very old (twice as old as the Sun), iron-poor star in a region of the Milky Way known as the thick disk," Teske said. "It must have formed in a very different chemical environment from the planets in our own solar system."

But the bigger surprise came when researchers took a look using JWST. The telescope's NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument revealed the planet's dayside temperature by measuring how much the light from the planet dimmed as it moved behind its host star. Based on the type of star it circles and its distance, the temperature should be up to 4,900 degrees Fahrenheit (2,700 degrees Celsius) if the planet were bare rock. Yet TOI-561 b measured just 3,200 F (1,800 C).

The team tested, then discarded, a number of explanations for the anomalously cool temperature. None could explain the discrepancy except for one: that the planet has a thick atmosphere.

That defied their expectations. Planets that have been orbiting so closely to their star for so long are expected not to have an atmosphere, because eons of radiation from the parent star should have blasted it away. So how did TOI-601 b hold on to its atmosphere?

The atmosphere must contain more volatile chemicals than Earth's atmosphere does, study co-author Tim Lichtenberg, an astronomer at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, said in the statement.

That would confer strong winds that carry heat from the planet's dayside to its permanent nightside. An atmosphere would also provide water vapor that could soak up some near-infrared light before it could pass through the atmosphere and into JWST's instruments. And bright clouds filled with silicates, a key ingredient in rocks on Earth, could also reflect starlight, study co-author Anjali Piette, an astronomer at the University of Birmingham, U.K., said in the statement.

"We really need a thick volatile-rich atmosphere to explain all the observations," Piette said.

The researchers published their findings Dec. 11 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

One of JWST's core missions is finding and characterizing atmospheres around exoplanets, because (as far as we know) an atmosphere is a prerequisite for life. While it's extremely unlikely that this broiling hell planet is habitable in any sense, studying its atmosphere with JWST could help scientists better understand how planetary atmospheres form, and how the powerful telescope could be best used to find evidence of alien life.

A "super-puff" exoplanet is leaking a lot of helium into space, new observations show — and may be in the process of losing a lot of its atmosphere.

A large plume of helium gas was spotted evaporating from the giant planet, known as WASP-107b, according to research based on observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The results, published Monday (Dec. 1) in the journal Nature Astronomy, show that the gas spanned an area nearly five times the diameter of the planet and that the gas was visible speeding far ahead of the planet along WASP-107b's orbital path.

The research represents the first time JWST has "captured helium escape from this planet," lead author Vigneshwaran Krishnamurthy, a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University's Trottier Space Institute in Montreal, said in a statement.

The discovery could help researchers better understand how exoplanet atmospheres behave, especially in extreme star systems like WASP-107, where WASP-107b resides, the team said.

Planet puff-ball

WASP-107b was discovered in 2017 near a star about 210 light-years from Earth. (For comparison, the closest planets to us are about 4 light-years away.) WASP-107b is almost the same size as Jupiter, at 94% of the gas giant's diameter, but its mass is just 12% that of Jupiter. This extremely low density and large size place WASP-107b in the "super-puff" category of exoplanets.

Aside from its unusual density, WASP-107b is in an interesting spot: It is seven times closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun. In Earth's neighborhood, by contrast, rocky planets are closer to the sun and gas giants like Jupiter are farther away. That means scientists must come up with models to explain that difference.

They think WASP-107b, like Jupiter and Saturn, formed much farther from its star but something in the system — possibly another planet — forced WASP-107b to migrate closer to its star over time.

"WASP-107c, much farther out than WASP-107b, could have played a role in this migration," study co-author Caroline Piaulet-Ghorayeb, an exoplanet researcher now at the University of Chicago who completed her Ph.D. at the University of Montreal in 2024, said in the statement.

Once the planet got close enough to its star, the extreme heat of its new orbit began gutting the exoplanet's gassy atmosphere, the researchers explained. The new JWST observations confirmed the extent of the damage: The powerful telescope spotted the helium cloud of the exoplanet's atmosphere passing in front of the system's parent star about 1.5 hours before WASP-107b itself.

The researchers spotted several elements in WASP-107b's atmosphere that reveal more clues about the planet's complicated history. For example, there was more oxygen in the planet's atmosphere than would be predicted if it had formed close to its star, which provides more evidence that its migration was relatively recent.

JWST also found water in the planet's atmosphere — confirming previous observations from the Hubble Space Telescope — alongside traces of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and ammonia. But methane, which was predicted to be part of the planet's atmosphere due to its chemistry, was curiously absent.

Because JWST's instruments are sensitive enough to detect methane from afar, the researchers suggest other gases poor in methane must have instead been drawn up from deep in the planet's atmosphere due to "vigorous vertical mixing" driven by the heat of the star, Piaulet-Ghorayeb added.

While planets like Earth also have some atmospheric loss, it is not this extreme. Studying worlds like WASP-107b could help us understand how atmospheric escape works on planets like Venus, which lost water over the eons, the research team said in a statement from the University of Geneva.

After Christmas dinner in 2021, our family was glued to the television, watching the nail-biting launch of NASA's $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope. There had not been such a leap forward in telescope technology since Hubble was launched in 1990.

En route to its deployment, Webb had to successfully navigate 344 potential points of failure. Thankfully, the launch went better than expected, and we could finally breathe again.

Six months later, Webb's first images were revealed, of the most distant galaxies yet seen. However, for our team in Australia, the work was only beginning.

We would be using Webb's highest-resolution mode, called the aperture masking interferometer or AMI for short. It's a tiny piece of precisely machined metal that slots into one of the telescope's cameras, enhancing its resolution.

Our results on painstakingly testing and enhancing AMI are now released on the open-access archive arXiv in a pair of papers. We can finally present its first successful observations of stars, planets, moons and even black hole jets.

Working with an instrument a million miles away

Hubble started its life seeing out of focus — its mirror had been ground precisely, but incorrectly. By looking at known stars and comparing the ideal and measured images (exactly like what optometrists do), it was possible to figure out a "prescription" for this optical error and design a lens to compensate.

The correction required seven astronauts to fly up on the Space Shuttle Endeavor in 1993 to install the new optics. Hubble orbits Earth just a few hundred miles above the surface, and can be reached by astronauts.

By contrast, Webb is roughly 1 million miles (1.5 million km) away — we can't visit and service it, and need to be able to fix issues without changing any hardware.

This is where AMI comes in. This is the only Australian hardware on board, designed by astronomer Peter Tuthill.

It was put on Webb to diagnose and measure any blur in its images. Even nanometers of distortion in Webb's 18 hexagonal primary mirrors and many internal surfaces will blur the images enough to hinder the study of planets or black holes, where sensitivity and resolution are key.

AMI filters the light with a carefully structured pattern of holes in a simple metal plate, to make it much easier to tell if there are any optical misalignments.

Hunting blurry pixels

We wanted to use this mode to observe the birth places of planets, as well as material being sucked into black holes. But before any of this, AMI showed Webb wasn't working entirely as hoped.

At very fine resolution — at the level of individual pixels — all the images were slightly blurry due to an electronic effect: brighter pixels leaking into their darker neighbors.

This is not a mistake or flaw, but a fundamental feature of infrared cameras that turned out to be unexpectedly serious for Webb.

This was a dealbreaker for seeing distant planets many thousands of times fainter than their stars a few pixels away: my colleagues quickly showed that its limits were more than ten times worse than hoped.

So, we set out to correct it.

How we sharpened Webb's vision

In a new paper led by University of Sydney PhD student Louis Desdoigts, we looked at stars with AMI to learn and correct the optical and electronic distortions simultaneously.

We built a computer model to simulate AMI's optical physics, with flexibility about the shapes of the mirrors and apertures and about the colours of the stars.

We connected this to a machine learning model to represent the electronics with an "effective detector model" — where we only care about how well it can reproduce the data, not about why.

After training and validation on some test stars, this setup allowed us to calculate and undo the blur in other data, restoring AMI to full function. It doesn't change what Webb does in space, but rather corrects the data during processing.

It worked beautifully — the star HD 206893 hosts a faint planet and the reddest-known brown dwarf (an object between a star and a planet). They were known but out of reach with Webb before applying this correction. Now, both little dots popped out clearly in our new maps of the system.

This correction has opened the door to using AMI to prospect for unknown planets at previously impossible resolutions and sensitivities.

It works not just on dots

In a companion paper by University of Sydney PhD student Max Charles, we applied this to looking not just at dots — even if these dots are planets — but forming complex images at the highest resolution made with Webb. We revisited well-studied targets that push the limits of the telescope, testing its performance.

With the new correction, we brought Jupiter's moon Io into focus, clearly tracking its volcanoes as it rotates over an hour-long timelapse.

As seen by AMI, the jet launched from the black hole at the centre of the galaxy NGC 1068 closely matched images from much-larger telescopes.

Finally, AMI can sharply resolve a ribbon of dust around a pair of stars called WR 137, a faint cousin of the spectacular Apep system, lining up with theory.

The code built for AMI is a demo for much more complex cameras on Webb and its follow-up, Roman space telescope. These tools demand an optical calibration so fine, it's just a fraction of a nanometre — beyond the capacity of any known materials.

Our work shows that if we can measure, control, and correct the materials we do have to work with, we can still hope to find Earth-like planets in the far reaches of our galaxy.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In September 1994, a pair of Swiss astronomers at a little observatory nestled in the south of France began training their telescopes on a star about 50 light-years from Earth — and created the field of exoplanet research.

The duo, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, had finally found something they'd spent 18 months searching for: a planet orbiting a star like our own.

The discovery was the first step in a much more ambitious goal: to prove we are not alone in the universe. Carl Sagan and other astronomers had begun searching for intelligent life as early as the 1960s, but many of those efforts were focused on finding radio signals or other deliberate communications from intelligent, technological life-forms.

But by the 1980s, astronomers realized they could find potentially habitable planets by looking at the light from their companion stars. Astronomers had found hints of a planet circling a pulsar — an ultradense, magnetized star that beams radiation like a lighthouse. But the extreme, destructive conditions surrounding a pulsar made it highly unlikely that life could exist there.

And back in 1987, a Canadian team of astronomers thought they had spotted a planet around another star, only to conclude five years later that the signal did not indicate a planet. (Their first hypothesis was ultimately confirmed in 2003.)

So Queloz and Mayor, who were astronomers at the Geneva Observatory at the time, began looking for anomalies in the trajectories of nearly 150 smaller, more ordinary stars.

After months of observations, they noticed a handful of stars with significant deviations, or wobbles, in their trajectories. They zeroed in on one of those stars: Pegasi 51, located about 50 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. The middle-age, main sequence star looked a lot like our sun, and the wobble of the star's velocity suggested it was being tugged back and forth by a planet.

An analysis of the star's light unmasked the planet, which scientists dubbed 51 Pegasi b, or Dimidium. The astronomers found that the planet was likely a "hot Jupiter" — a giant gas planet that orbits very close to its star. Dimidium, the team found, was a gas giant bigger in diameter than Jupiter with about half its mass. It orbited just 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) from its star. That close orbit meant the planet completed a revolution around its star every 4.2 days. Soon after, scientists at the Lick Observatory in California confirmed the discovery.

On Nov. 1, 1995, Queloz and Mayor described their findings in the journal Nature — and opened the floodgates to exoplanet discovery. Soon after, dozens of exoplanets were found, setting off a race to search for planets that could harbor life and ushering in new techniques to discover them. In 2004, astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile captured the first photographic evidence of an exoplanet orbiting a distant star, with hundreds of others soon to follow.

In 2019, Mayor and Queloz won the Nobel Prize in physics for their work on Dimidium, sharing their prize with Canadian physicist James Peebles, who helped quantify how much of the universe was made of dark energy and dark matter.

Over the next three decades, astronomers would find many more hot Jupiters, hell planets, super-Earths, water worlds and desert planets in the cosmos. To date, we know of at least 6,000 exoplanets — and though none has been found to harbor life so far, we've had a few promising candidates.

The age of exoplanets began in 1992, when astronomers detected a pair of planets orbiting a pulsar. Then, in 1995, astronomers discovered the first exoplanet orbiting a main sequence star. As NASA's Kepler and TESS missions got going, the number of confirmed exoplanets continued to rise.

By 2015, NASA announced that Kepler had discovered its 1000th exoplanet. 2016 was a banner year for exoplanet detections with nearly 1500 in that year alone. The total number reached 5000 in March of 2022. Now, NASA has announced that there are 6,000 confirmed exoplanets.

6,000 is a lot, though compared to the one hundred billion that may exist in the Milky Way, it's a tiny amount. Still, for a fledgling space-faring civilization like ours, it's something to celebrate.

The fact that we've found 6,000 is impressive, considering how challenging they are to detect. There are vast distances between us and other stars. Many exoplanets will be hidden in the glare from their stars, or they're so far from their stars that they're practically undetectable. With history as a guide, it's clear that technological advances will bring more of them within reach, barring the collapse of civilization or the abandonment of science.

Exoplanet science is, obviously, about more than sheer numbers. The variety of planets we've discovered teaches us vital things about nature, our own Solar System, and about the precious Earth. Curiously, many of the planets we've discovered are unlike anything in our own Solar System.

There are hot Jupiters, massive gas giants that orbit their stars in a matter of days. There are ultra-short period planets that put Mercury's short orbital period to shame by completing orbits in mere hours. One strange type of planet are so close to their stars that they're tidally locked to their star like the Moon is to Earth. These planets have one scorching hot side and one frigid side. Some of them may be hot enough to remain molten.

Others have such extreme temperatures, pressures, and chemical constituents that they may rain iron, or may be no denser than styrofoam. Some could be covered in oceans. Others swathed in toxic gases.

Somehow they're all part of nature. Determining how they came to be is an enduring fascination.

But at the base of all of this searching and wondering is the one big question: Are we alone?

"Each of the different types of planets we discover gives us information about the conditions under which planets can form and, ultimately, how common planets like Earth might be, and where we should be looking for them," said Dawn Gelino, head of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program (ExEP) at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "If we want to find out if we're alone in the universe, all of this knowledge is essential."

The vast majority of exoplanet detections are indirect. The transit method detects planets by measuring how much light an exoplanet blocks when it passes in front of its star. The radial velocity method detects the slight tugs exoplanets give to their stars and measure how the star's light changes by wobbling. Astrometry detects miniscule movements, and in gravitational lensing, the presence of a planet introduces anomalies into the observed light. Both Kepler and TESS used the transit method, and that method is responsible for most exoplanet detections with almost 4500. Radial velocity is next with about 1140 detections.

Though effective, they're indirect. Only direct imaging can measure the chemistry of exoplanet atmospheres and doesn't require particular orbital alignments or orientations. But it's difficult, and fewer than 100 exoplanets have been directly imaged.

6,000 confirmed exoplanets is a definite, concrete scientific milestone. But there are thousands of other candidates, and it takes a lot of work to confirm a candidate. Something else could be creating the signal, like stellar flaring or artifacts with the transit method. Follow up observations, sometimes with a different telescope, confirms them, and that takes a lot of time and observing resources. As of July 2025, TESS had a list of 7655 exoplanet candidates of which just over 600 have been confirmed.

"We really need the whole community working together if we want to maximize our investments in these missions that are churning out exoplanets candidates," said Aurora Kesseli, the deputy science lead for the NASA Exoplanet Archive at IPAC. "A big part of what we do at NExScI is build tools that help the community go out and turn candidate planets into confirmed planets."

We could be facing a glut of exoplanet discoveries that was unimaginable a couple of decades ago.

Candidate exoplanets are still being found in Gaia data, even though that mission ended. NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which should launch in 2027 unless the current administration's threats to cancel it come true, should discover thousands more through microlensing.

The age of exoplanets is beginning to shift, though. Our searches are becoming more targeted. Rather than casting a wide net and seeing what they catch, astronomers are seeking to find more specific types of exoplanets. ESA's PLATO is poised to detect many more rocky exoplanets around Sun-like stars after its launched in 2026. The Habitable Worlds Observatory is just a proposal at this point, but it will search for habitable exoplanets in habitable zones and will also contribute to the ballooning list of exoplanets. Other missions, like CHEOPS and ARIEL will study known exoplanets in greater detail.

The holy grail in exoplanet science is habitability. A lot goes into determining habitability, with only a few exoplanets displaying any possibility of being habitable. The key is finding biosignatures, particular chemicals that tell us life is active on a planet. The JWST with its infrared atmospheric spectrometry, is just beginning to address this and has already produced some tantalizing results, though nothing concrete yet.

Like all scientific endeavours, the search for exoplanets has been boosted by technological advances, and that will continue in the future. One of the big obstacles in exoplanet science concerns that stars that planets orbit. Stars are extraordinarily bright and the presence of a comparatively dim exoplanet can be entirely obfuscated by starlight. This is especially true in focused searchers for Earth-like worlds around Sun-like stars like the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is conceived to detect.

The HWO will need a powerful coronagraph or starshade to do its job. If a distant astronomer were searching for Earth around the Sun, they would have a tough time detecting it in all that starlight. That's effectively what astronomers will be doing with the HWO.

China is beginning to leverage its technological prowess in the exoplanet sphere, too. Its Earth 2.0 (ET) Space Telescope is set for launch in 2028 and will spend four years searching for exoplanet transits. It's China's first dedicated exoplanet-hunting mission and is focused on Earth-sized exoplanets.

Eventually, we will have a list of confirmed Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars. Then we'll face an even more challenging task: figuring out if any of those worlds actually host life.

The original version of this article was published on Universe Today.

TRAPPIST-1 is a red dwarf star located about 40 light years away that hosts seven Earth sized rocky planets, with at least three orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water could potentially exist. This makes it one of the most Solar System like exoplanet systems discovered, with TRAPPIST-1e considered among the best potentially habitable exoplanets. The system's proximity and multiple potentially habitable worlds make it an ideal target for searching for technological civilizations.

The research team conducted their search using the Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) to exploit its unprecedented sensitivity. The observations consisted of five independent L-band pointings, each with a 20 minute integration, for a total time of 1.67 hours. The frequency coverage spanned 1.05 to 1.45GHz with a spectral resolution of ~7.5Hz allowing them to detect extremely weak radio signals that might indicate alien technology.

The team led by Guang-Yuan Song from the Dezhou University in China looked for very precise radio frequencies that slowly changed over time due to planetary motion.

Related: Will the James Webb telescope lead us to alien life? Scientists say we're getting closer than ever.

Such signals would be virtually impossible to produce naturally and would strongly suggest artificial origin from an advanced civilization. Based on the configuration of FAST, the researchers had the ability to detect radio signals as weak as 2.04×10^10 watts. This means they were able to detect fainter signals than any previous studies. If there were aliens transmitting radio signals regularly on a specific frequency, this study would be more likely to find them than earlier attempts.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Alas, the search found no convincing evidence of alien technology. However, rather than being disappointing, this result still provides valuable scientific information. It places upper limits on the presence of certain types of alien transmitters in the TRAPPIST-1 system and demonstrates the remarkable capabilities of modern SETI searches.

It may be some years or even decades before we can completely rule out life in the TRAPPIST-1 system but at least for now, it remains a compelling target for future SETI efforts. The team plans to expand their search to look for other types of signals, including periodic or transient transmissions that might be missed by current methods.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence remains one of our most profound scientific endeavors, with the potential to fundamentally transform our understanding of our place in the universe. As we continue to peer out into space with ever greater precision, we're not just looking for aliens, we're taking the first steps toward what may be the most significant moment in human history.​​​​​​​​​​

Science advances through data that don't fit our current understanding. At least that was Thomas Kuhn's theory in his famous On the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So scientists should welcome new data that challenges their understanding of how the universe works. A recent paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might just had found some data that can do that. It looked at an exoplanet around a millisecond pulsar and found its atmosphere is made up of almost entirely pure carbon.

This type of pulsar, PSR J2322-2650, is known as a "black widow" system, as it powers its high energy outbursts by stealing material from a neighboring star. In this case, that neighboring star has likely been degraded to a "hot Jupiter" companion planet that orbits its parent neutron star every 7.8 hours. A typical "black widow" formation process has two steps - one where the neutron star (which in this case is also a pulsar) steals the material, and a second step where it blasts its companion with high energy gamma radiation, ripping off most of the companion star's outer layers and resulting in a Jupiter-sized exoplanet composed mainly of helium.

The exoplanet around PSR J2322-2650, known as PSR J2322-2650b, does fit the description of a Jupiter-sized planet that seems to have the same density as what would be expected if it was made up primarily of helium. However, its atmosphere is unlike any other black widow companion ever seen. According to the spectrographic reports from JWST, its atmosphere is composed mainly of elemental carbon, taking the form of tricarbon (C3) or dicarbon (C2).

Usually those types of elements are found in the tails of comets, or in actual flames here on Earth. Their presence in a planet's atmosphere, especially in such abundant quantities, is new to science.

Related: Will the James Webb telescope lead us to alien life? Scientists say we're getting closer than ever.

Another interesting thing about the planet's atmosphere is the difference between the day and night side. On the dayside, which is always facing the pulsar since the planet is tidally locked, temperatures can reach above 2000 C and there are very clear chemical signatures. However, on the night side, there were almost no features at all, suggesting that side of the planet is covered in soot or something similar that doesn't have any distinct features.

To further prove how strange this planet's atmosphere is, the researchers calculated the ratios between carbon and oxygen as well as carbon and nitrogen. The C/O ratio was over 100, while the C/N ratio was over 10,000. In comparison, the Earth has a C/O ratio of .01 and a C/N ratio of 40. Obviously, there's a lot of carbon on this planet.

And that doesn't fit well with models of how scientists thought the planet should form. As part of the "black widow" process, the outer layers of the planet should have been either siphoned up by the companion star or burned away by that star's radiation. The fact that such a rich carbon atmosphere still exists remains a mystery. There are processes that can create such an atmosphere, such as a white-dwarf merger between who "carbon stars", but even that falls short of explaining how the planet's C/O ratio got so high.

Other aspects of the planet align with general theory though. Circulation models predict that rapidly rotating planets, like PSR J2322-2650b, would have strong westerly winds, which is different from the typical easterly winds on other tidally locked hot Jupiters. The JWST data show that the hottest part of the planet is about 12 degrees west of center, providing the first ever observational evidence of this western wind phenomena.

In other words, PSR J2322-2650b is contradictory. It's the right size and shape for a typical black widow pulsar system. Its window circulation also fits well with our best models. But its atmosphere is something else entirely, and scientists will have to go back to the theory to try to find a way to make it make sense with the new data. While they're busy doing that, JWST will continue scanning the sky for more anomalies that could drive the next scientific revolution.

A potential gas giant recently discovered orbiting in the habitable zone of one of the closest stars to Earth could have a moon capable of sustaining life — just like the alien world "Pandora" from the "Avatar" movies, researchers have speculated.

However, there is currently no evidence to suggest that such a moon exists or that it could support life. In fact, scientists are still unsure if its host planet is actually where they think it is.

A study published Aug. 11 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters revealed the potential discovery of a Saturn-size gas giant, dubbed S1, orbiting Alpha Centauri A — one of three stars that make up the Alpha Centauri system, which lies roughly 4.25 light-years from our own solar system.

The potential exoplanet, which likely orbits its home star at up to twice the distance between Earth and the sun, was initially spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in August 2024. However, the powerful telescope failed to spot the world again when it was expected to become visible in February and April this year, leading to it being dubbed a "disappearing planet."

Researchers believe that S1's orbit may have moved it in front of Alpha Centauri A, making it much harder for JWST to spot the gas giant. By their calculations, it should become visible again in 2026 and 2027, meaning we will need to wait a few more years before we can be certain of its existence.

But if it is eventually confirmed, "It would be the most significant JWST discovery to date," study co-author Stanimir Metchev, an exoplanet researcher at Western University in Ontario, told Live Science.

Related: Proposed spacecraft could carry up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri

To date, only two planets have been confirmed within our adjacent neighborhood, both of which orbit Proxima Centauri — the closest star to Earth, which circles the binary star pair of Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B. But as our closest stellar neighbors, the idea of traveling to Alpha Centauri and potentially establishing a human colony there has long piqued humanity's interest in both science and science fiction.

The triple stars' most notable sci-fi inclusion is probably in the "Avatar" franchise, as the home system of Pandora — the fictional homeworld of the blue-skinned aliens, known as the Na'vi, who go to war with humans who invade the moon (which purportedly orbits a gas giant) after traveling to Alpha Centauri on interstellar starships in the 22nd century.

Interestingly, S1 is likely around the same size as Polyphemus, the fictional gas giant orbited by Pandora. And both S1 and Polyphemus also supposedly reside within Alpha Centauri A's habitable zone, where there are suitable conditions for extraterrestrial life to emerge.

Real-life Pandora?

Until now, the idea that there could be a real-life Pandora in Alpha Centauri seemed like a very long shot. But if S1 is confirmed to be a real planet, there is a high chance that it could have a number of moons.

"I would expect that there are probably moons there," Mary Anne Limbach, an exoplanet researcher at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the new study, told NPR. "Moon formation around giant planets generally should be quite common."

In our own solar system, for example, the largest gas giants Jupiter and Saturn have a combined 369 natural satellites at the latest count, including sizable moons such as Titan, Europa, Io, Ganymede, Enceladus and Mimas, some of which may even be capable of supporting life themselves.

Related: 32 alien planets that really exist

But if S1 does have a moon, what are the chances that it can support some form of extraterrestrial life? The answer likely lies in how large it is. Limbach said she is "optimistic" that S1 could support a Mars-size moon, which would make it large enough to have its own atmosphere and large surface oceans, similar to those found on Earth.

However, David Kipping, an exoplanet researcher at Columbia University in New York who was not involved in the new study, is more skeptical and told NPR that any moon around S1 would likely only grow to the size of Titan, which is around two-thirds the size of Mars but slightly larger than Mercury.

At this size, the moon is unlikely to be able to hold together an atmosphere, making extraterrestrial life — especially on the scale seen in the "Avatar" movies — very unlikely. Therefore, to get a real-life Pandora, "you need this planet to have an unexpectedly big moon," Kipping said, though he added that "it's not impossible."

The next challenge, if and when S1 is confirmed to exist, will be to spot any potential exomoons surrounding it. However, this could be tricky as exomoons are notoriously hard to spot, as they are so much smaller and colder than planets. Therefore, we may need to wait for a space telescope several orders of magnitude more powerful than JWST to see anything, which could take decades.

There might be a huge planet lurking near one of the closest stars to Earth.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has imaged a possible planet near Alpha Centauri A, a sun-like star that forms part of the triplet Alpha Centauri star group. The mini-cluster is just four light-years from Earth and is a rich ground for astronomers to learn about other star systems.

But there's a catch: JWST only spotted the supposed Saturn-size world once — in August 2024 — and two more tries in 2025 came up empty. "We are faced with the case of a disappearing planet," study co-lead author Aniket Sanghi, a doctoral student at Caltech, said in a statement.

Astronomers aren't giving up yet. The research team said the planet may have moved in its orbit into the glare of the star — making it temporarily invisible to JWST.

"This is a plausible explanation," Stanimir Metchev, Canada Research Chair in Extrasolar Planets at Western University in Ontario, told Live Science via email. Metchev was not involved in the research.

"[It] comes with a strict prediction that the planet should again be visible in 2026 or 2027. These follow-up observations will be key for confirming this planet," Metchev added. But assuming the planet is there, "it would be the most significant JWST discovery to date."

Related: 'The early universe is nothing like we expected': James Webb telescope reveals 'new understanding' of how galaxies formed at cosmic dawn

If confirmed, the planet would be the closest world to Earth that orbits in the habitable zone of a star — the area around a star where water could exist in liquid form, on the rocky surface of an Earth-size world. The newfound Saturn-size exoplanet, however, is likely too large for life as we know it.

The purported planet would also be the closest planet to its star ever imaged directly, as it orbits at twice the equivalent distance between Earth and the sun.

But none of this is a slam-dunk yet.

"The signal is at the limit of what contrast-enhancement techniques applied to JWST images can deliver," Metchev said. "The authors go through a painstaking and believable analysis, but nonetheless any direct image of an exoplanet — especially one with such potential significance — will require an independent confirmation."

The Alpha Centauri system is made up of three stars: the sun-like stars Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, and a fainter red dwarf called Proxima Centauri. Astronomers have already confirmed three planets circling Proxima Centauri.

JWST used its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) for the observations..

Planet-hunting in Alpha Centauri required a custom observing sequence. A coronagraphic mask was also used to block out the light of Alpha Centauri A, enabling JWST to image much fainter planets orbiting nearby.

"Their extra effort paid off spectacularly," study lead co-author Charles Beichman, executive director of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech, said in the statement.

"These are incredibly challenging observations to make, even with the world's most powerful space telescope, because these stars are so bright, close, and move across the sky quickly," Beichman added.

In the meantime, the research team hinted more planet-hunting may be coming: "The next closest sun-like star, Tau Ceti [about 12 light-years from Earth], will be much harder even with Webb," Beichman said. NASA"s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will launch as soon as May 2027, will also be used to search for new worlds.

Beautiful light displays in the sky, such as glowing halos around the moon or bright spots beside the sun, aren't just Earthly wonders. According to new research, similar dazzling effects might also occur on planets light-years away.

In a study published July 21 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Cornell University scientists propose that WASP-17b, a gas giant roughly 1,300 light-years from Earth, could host shimmering optical effects in its atmosphere. Discovered in 2009, WASP-17b is what scientists call a "hot Jupiter," a type of gas giant that orbits very close to its star. As a result, the world experiences intense heat and hurricane-force winds that can reach up to 10,000 miles per hour (16,000 kilometers per hour).

These fierce winds, the researchers suggest, might be powerful enough to align tiny quartz crystals suspended in the planet's upper atmosphere — similar to how ice crystals align in Earth's atmosphere to create "sun dogs," which are halos and rainbow-colored light pillars, by bending and scattering sunlight.

"If we were able to take a picture of WASP-17b at optical wavelengths and resolve the disk of the planet, we would see these types of sun dog features," Nikole Lewis, an associate professor of astronomy at Cornell University in New York and co-author of the new paper, said in a statement.

The crystals responsible for these displays are composed of quartz, the same mineral commonly found in sand and gemstones. They are minuscule — about 10,000 could fit across the width of a human hair. Under the force of high-velocity winds, these particles could become mechanically aligned, like tiny boats drifting in formation down a river, Elijah Mullens, a graduate student in the astronomy and space science department at the university who led the new study, said in the statement.

The concept of mechanical alignment, where particles orient themselves in response to aerodynamic forces, was first proposed in 1952 by Cornell astronomer Tommy Gold to explain how interstellar dust particles might align with gas flows. While newer theories have replaced that model for cosmic dust, study authors Mullens and Lewis argue it may still apply in the extreme conditions of exoplanetary atmospheres.

Related: 'A completely new phenomenon': Astronomers spot a planet causing its star to constantly explode

Where the JWST's eye comes in

Although telescopes can't directly image these phenomena on WASP-17b due to its vast distance, scientists can infer their presence by studying the planet's atmosphere with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which observes the universe in infrared light. In 2023, Lewis and Mullens were part of a team that used JWST to identify signs of quartz nanocrystals in WASP-17b's high-altitude clouds.

"We didn't expect to see quartz crystals in a hot Jupiter atmosphere," Lewis said in the statement.

To investigate further, the researchers built detailed models simulating how different crystals, including quartz, enstatite and forsterite, would reflect or transmit light depending on how they're oriented. Their results showed that even small changes in particle orientation could produce noticeable differences in the light signals the JWST could detect.

"When we started looking at planetary atmospheres, in particular these hot Jupiters, it occurred to me that with 10,000 mile per hour winds zipping around in these very dense atmospheres, surely the grains would align," Lewis said in the statement.

Even if the crystals don't align perfectly with the wind, they may still orient themselves vertically or be influenced by electric fields, creating distinct visual effects as they interact with starlight, scientists say.

Mullens will continue exploring particle alignment in WASP-17b's atmosphere through a newly approved JWST observation program he's leading in the coming year, according to the statement.

"Other than being pretty, these effects can teach us about how crystals are interacting in the atmosphere — they're really information-rich," he said in the statement.

A fifth planet has been detected within the habitable zone of a neighboring star, where conditions could perhaps support liquid water and potentially life.

Located about 35 light-years from Earth, L 98-59 is a cool, dim red dwarf star already known to host a compact system of small, rocky planets. The latest discovery, led by researchers at the Université de Montréal's Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets, confirms the presence of L 98-59 f, a super-Earth with a minimum mass 2.8 times that of our planet.

The newly discovered exoplanet follows an almost perfectly circular 23-Earth-day orbit around its star. The world receives roughly the same amount of stellar energy as Earth, placing it in the star's habitable zone — a range of distances where liquid water could exist under suitable atmospheric conditions, according to a statement from the university.

"Finding a temperate planet in such a compact system makes this discovery particularly exciting," Charles Cadieux, a postdoctoral researcher at the university and lead author of the study, said in the statement. "It highlights the remarkable diversity of exoplanetary systems and strengthens the case for studying potentially habitable worlds around low-mass stars."

L 98-59 f was discovered by reanalyzing data from the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) and ESPRESSO (Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations) spectrographs. Since the exoplanet doesn't transit, or pass in front of, its host star from our perspective, astronomers spotted it by tracking subtle shifts in the star's motion that are caused by the planet's gravitational pull.

By combining the spectrograph data with observations from NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — and using advanced techniques to filter out stellar noise — researchers were able to determine the size, mass and key properties of all five planets.

Related: Alcohol-soaked star system could help explain 'why life, including us, was able to form'

The study shows that L 98-59 b, the innermost planet, is just 84% the size of Earth and half its mass, making it one of the smallest exoplanets measured. Tidal forces may drive volcanic activity on the system's two innermost planets, while the third's unusually low density suggests it could be a water-rich world unlike any in our solar system. This diversity offers a rare opportunity to investigate the formation and evolution of planetary systems beyond our own, team members said.

"These new results paint the most complete picture we've ever had of the fascinating L 98-59 system," Cadieux said. "It's a powerful demonstration of what we can achieve by combining data from space telescopes and high-precision instruments on Earth, and it gives us key targets for future atmospheric studies with the James Webb Space Telescope."

Because L 98-59 is small and nearby, its planets are especially well-suited for follow-up atmospheric studies. If L 98-59 f has an atmosphere, telescopes like JWST may be able to detect water vapor, carbon dioxide — or even biosignatures.

The new study was published July 12 in the journal Earth and Planetary Astrophysics.

This article was originally published on Space

Deep within a swirling disk of gas and dust around the star HD 135344B, a young planet appears to be sculpting intricate spiral arms around its stellar host. It is the first time a planet has been found embedded inside a dust spiral around a star, actively shaping its environment.

The discovery is further proof that the building blocks of planets emerge from protoplanetary disks — giant, doughnut-shaped disks of gas and dust that circle young stars, according to NASA.

These dense, rotating clouds of material around young stars have been seen to feature rings and spirals suspected to be caused by the presence of baby planets, but this is the first direct evidence. In fact, the sculpted protoplanetary disk around the host star, HD 135344B, had been seen before by astronomers using the SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research) instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.

However, by using a new instrument called the Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS), scientists finally discovered a planetary candidate. The planet is nestled at the base of one spiral arm — exactly where models predicted a planet would be needed to generate such a feature — and is thought to be twice the size of Jupiter. It's about as far from its host star as Neptune is from the sun, or about 30 times the distance from Earth to the sun.

"What makes this detection potentially a turning point is that, unlike many previous observations, we are able to directly detect the signal of the protoplanet, which is still highly embedded in the disc," Francesco Maio, a doctoral researcher at the University of Florence and lead author of a study describing the discovery, said in a statement.

Related: 32 alien planets that really exist

The existence of many exoplanets — planets that orbit a star other than the sun — is inferred from other information, such as the dip in a star's brightness that is assumed to be caused by a planet. Observing the planet's own light — reflected light from its host star — gives the proto-planet’s discoverers a much higher level of confidence in its existence.

"We will never witness the formation of Earth, but here, around a young star 440 light-years away, we may be watching a planet come into existence in real time," Maio said.

ERIS had a similarly decisive role in another recent discovery. Using ERIS, astronomers found an object — possibly a brown dwarf, an object halfway between a giant planet and a small star — in the protoplanetary disk around the young star V960 Mon, located 5,000 light-years away, in the constellation Monoceros.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Most exoplanets are discovered as they transit, or move across, their parent stars. But a new study details the opposite scenario: As a giant planet crossed its host star, peculiarities in its transit signature revealed a new discovery about the star itself — in particular, a spot that occupies an enormous 7% of the star's surface and has lasted at least seven years.

Nearly 6,000 exoplanets — planets beyond our solar system — have been confirmed to date. While many methods have helped amass this trove, the most successful has been the transit method. This technique, which has helped to reveal nearly 75% of known exoplanets, measures the transient, tiny decrease in a star's brightness when an orbiting planet passes along the line of sight between the star and an observing telescope.

Most transit signatures in a star's light curve are similar, comprising a single-step drop. But the planet described in the new study is unusual. Known as TOI-3884 b, it is a Neptune-like world 33 times the mass of Earth. When transiting its star — the tiny M-dwarf star TOI-3884 — the planet creates a two-bump drop in the star's light curve.

First recorded by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), these asymmetrical transits piqued astronomers' curiosity. In a 2022 study, they reasoned that the strange transits meant the star's surface wasn't uniformly bright, with the fainter patch possibly being a starspot. (Starspots — like sunspots, but on stars other than the sun — are bunches of tangled magnetic-field lines that are dimmer than the surrounding photosphere.)

To determine features of this starspot, the new study’s authors — astrophysicists from Harvard University and MIT — drew on both the TESS observations along with a computational model of TOI-3884 (starspot included) and its planet. Their analysis revealed that the spot, with a radius of 76,000 miles (122,000 kilometers), occupies "about 7% of the surface area of the star," Patrick Tamburo, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University and the new study's first author, told Live Science by email. In contrast, the largest recorded sunspots, measuring 99,000 miles (160,000 km) across, cover a mere 0.3% of Earth's sun.

Related: Bottom of the sun becomes visible to humans for the first time in history (photos)

TOI-3884's starspot also differs from sunspots in its lifespan. "On the Sun, the longest-lived spots last for a few months," Tamburo said. But using observational data collected by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California in previous years, the researchers showed that TOI-3884's "pimple" has been around for at least seven years. Tamburo noted that this isn't surprising, however, as polar spots on rapidly rotating stars have been known to last for decades.

But how could a starspot cause such a peculiar pattern? The 2022 study proposed two possibilities. One is that TOI-3884’s day — the time the star takes to rotate around its axis — is equal to (or a multiple of) the time TOI-3884 b takes to orbit the star once. The second possibility is that the planet orbits over one of the star's poles, which hosts a large, long-lasting, starspot that is slightly off-center.

Such spots "have been observed on many different types of stars," including M dwarfs like TOI-3884, Tamburo said. This latter scenario also suggested the planet's orbit was highly tilted — perhaps even perpendicular — compared to the star's equator. (In contrast, all of the solar system's planets have orbits inclined by less than 10 degrees.)

To investigate the first scenario, the researchers estimated TOI-3884's rotational period. Using observations of TOI-3884 taken from the Arizona-based Tierras Observatory in 2024 and 2025, the researchers discovered that the planet rotated once every 11 days.

The data also showed that TOI-3884 b transited every 4.5 days, suggesting that this was the planet's orbital period. This meant the ratio of the planet's orbital period to the star's rotational period wasn't a whole number, ruling out the first hypothesis.

To test the second hypothesis, the researchers relied on their computational model, searching for values for various parameters that would best explain the observations. The best-fitting explanation, they found, is that TOI-3884 b orbits along a near-perpendicular path around its star, whose spot lies at a latitude of 80 degrees. The modeling also implied that the starspot likely pirouetted around the star's pole, making it partly or fully visible to Earth-based viewers, which would explain the slight variations in TOI 3884-b's transits.

As for TOI-3884 b's perpendicular path, Tamburo said that either another planet or a star shoved it from its original orbit, or the disk of material from which TOI-3884 b was born was itself tilted relative to the star.

The study, which hasn't yet been peer-reviewed, is available as a preprint on the arXiv server.

A massive planet trapped in a death spiral around its star could unlock some of the secrets surrounding star systems. However, the fate of this world is not yet set in stone, with two deaths and one "rebirth" possible in its future.

The extrasolar planet or "exoplanet" in question is TOI-2109b, which has five times the mass of Jupiter and is located around 870 light-years from our solar system. The planet orbits so close to its parent star, TOI-2109, that it has a year that lasts just 16 hours.

These characteristics mean that TOI-2109b is classified as an "ultrahot Jupiter," a rare class of planets that account for around 1 in 500 planets in the over 5,000 worlds in the catalog of known exoplanets. But TOI-2109b stands out even among those incredibly hot, star-hugging worlds.

"This is an ultra-hot Jupiter, and orbits much closer to its star than any other hot Jupiter ever discovered," Macquarie University Research Fellow Jaime A. Alvarado-Montes said in a statement."Just to put it into context, Mercury's mass is almost 6,000 times smaller than Jupiter's, but it still takes 88 days to orbit our sun.

"For a huge gas giant such as TOI-2109b to fully orbit in 16 hours, it tells us that this is a planet located super-close to its star."

That makes TOI-2109b the perfect laboratory to study planets' death spirals into their host stars, or more accurately, the phenomenon of orbital decay.

Related: Astronomers discover origins of mysterious double hot Jupiter exoplanets: 'It is a dance of sorts'

The three deaths of TOI-2109b

Alvarado-Montes and colleagues set about investigating TOI-2109b using archival data from multiple telescopes, including NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the European Space Agency (ESA) space mission Cheops.

This constituted data regarding the transits of TOI-2109b across the face of its parent star from 2010 to 2024.

"Using all of the data available for this planet, we were able to predict a small change in its orbit," Alvarado-Montes said. "Then we verified it with our theory and with our planet evolution models, and our predictions matched the observations. That's quite exciting."

The matching theoretical estimations and observational evidence suggested that the orbit of TOI-2109b will decay by around 10 seconds over the next three Earth-years. Though this is a tiny change, it proves TOI-2109b is spiraling toward its parent star.

The ultimate fate of TOI-2109b is uncertain, as there are three possible ways that this death spiral could play out.

The first and most dramatic final fate of TOI-2109b would see the ultrahot Jupiter plunge into its parent star. This will occur if the orbital decay of this planet begins to accelerate.

"The star will absorb it and kill it, of course, in the process – completely burn it, and the planet will disappear," Alvarado-Montes said.

This would create a flash of light that is similar to ZTF SLRN-2020, a signal first observed in May 2020 when a gas giant planet plunged into its red giant stellar parent.

The second possible fate of TOI-2109b is slightly less dramatic, but no less catastrophic.

This would happen if the orbital decay of the planet continues unabated and sees the gravity of its parent star generate destructive tidal forces within the planet. These forces would literally rip TOI-2109b apart.

"The gravitational interactions are so strong that the planet starts being distorted," Alvarado-Montes said. "It starts looking more like an elongated doughnut ... the gravity of the planet is no longer able to hold its spherical shape."

There is a third possible fate which would see the planet transformed rather than being destroyed.

In the third possible scenario for TOI-2109b, the intense radiation experienced by the ultrahot Jupiter strips away the planet's gassy outer layers in a process called photoevaporation. This would expose the rocky inner core of TOI-2109b.

"As the planet gets even closer to the star, all of the gas molecules could start being dissociated, and the planet gets smaller and smaller," Alvarado-Montes explained. "And if the planet shrinks quickly enough, then when the planet reaches the position where its Roche limit would have been, it's not going to be five Jupiter masses anymore, but it will be small enough that the Roche limit moves closer to the star, so it could escape destruction."

This could ultimately result in the creation of a rocky "super-Earth" around the size of Uranus or Neptune.

The team will continue to monitor TOI-2109b over the next three to five years, which should reveal the fate that will befall this doomed world.

The investigation of TOI-2109b has implications beyond its own fascinating and fateful situation. It provides astronomers the chance to study how hot Jupiters evolve and what happens when planets migrate toward their host stars.

"This planet and its interesting situation could help us figure out some mysterious astronomical phenomena that so far we really don't have much evidence to explain," Alvarado-Montes concludes. "It could tell us the story of many other solar systems."

The team's research was published July 15 in The Astrophysical Journal.

This article was originally published on Space.com.

As many as 200 worlds beyond our solar system discovered by astronomers may be larger than estimated, which could influence the search for extraterrestrial life.

That's the theory of a team of researchers who looked at hundreds of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, observed by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

TESS hunts exoplanets by catching them as they cross the face of, or "transit," their parent star, which causes a tiny drop in light from that star. The study team discovered that light from stars neighboring the one being transited could "contaminate" TESS' data, making it look like the transiting planet is blocking less light than it actually is. And that would make the planet look smaller than it is.

"We found that hundreds of exoplanets are larger than they appear, and that shifts our understanding of exoplanets on a large scale," University of California, Irvine researcher and team leader Te Han said in a statement. "This means we may have actually found fewer Earth-like planets so far than we thought."

Exoplanets throw shade

Exoplanets are so distant and faint that it is only on rare occasions that astronomers can image them directly.

That means the transit method has become the most successful way of detecting worlds beyond the solar system. It requires the planet and its star to be at the right angle in relation to Earth, and for astronomers to wait for the planet to make two transits to confirm its existence.

The transit method is best at spotting short-period planets orbiting close to their host stars, because they make more frequent transits. The method also favors larger planets, which block more light.

"We're basically measuring the shadow of the planet," said team member and UC Irvine astronomer Paul Robertson.

Related: 12 strange reasons humans haven't found alien life yet

The team gathered hundreds of TESS observations of exoplanets, sorting them by the width of the exoplanets in question.

They then used computer modeling and data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) star-tracking mission Gaia to estimate how much light contamination TESS is experiencing during its observations.

"TESS data are contaminated, which Te's custom model corrects better than anyone else in the field," said Robertson. "What we find in this study is that these planets may systematically be larger than we initially thought. It raises the question: Just how common are Earth-sized planets?"

Move over Earth-like worlds: ocean planets could be more common

Because of the biases of the transit method mentioned above, the number of exoplanets detected with TESS having sizes and compositions similar to those of Earth was already low.

"Of the single-planet systems discovered by TESS so far, only three were thought to be similar to Earth in their composition," Han explained. "With this new finding, all of them are actually bigger than we thought."

The likely outcome of this is that those exoplanets are larger ocean planets or "hycean worlds" covered by a large single ocean. Those worlds could also be gas giants smaller than Jupiter, like Neptune and Uranus.

That impacts the search for life because, though hycean worlds are packed with water, they could be lacking other ingredients needed for life to arise.

"This has important implications for our understanding of exoplanets, including, among other things, prioritization for follow-up observations with the James Webb Space Telescope, and the controversial existence of a galactic population of water worlds," Roberston added.

The next step for Han, Roberston, and colleagues is to re-examine planets previously deemed uninhabitable due to their size, to see if they are larger than previously thought.

In the meantime, the research is a reminder to astronomers to be cautious when assessing TESS data.

The team's research was published July 14 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

This article was originally published on Space.com.

Astronomers have captured the first evidence of a "planet with a death wish" — an alien world that's orbiting so close to its star and so fast that it's causing the star to cook it to death with stellar explosions.

The planet, called HIP 67522 b, is a wispy, Jupiter-size planet bound on a tight, seven-day orbit around its host star, HIP 67522.

But these orbits are disturbing the star's magnetic field, causing enormous stellar eruptions to blow back on the planet and make it shrink. This marks the first time a planet has been observed influencing its host star, the scientists reported in a study published July 2 in the journal Nature.

"The planet seems to be triggering particularly energetic flares," study first-author Ekaterina Ilin, an astrophysicist at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, said in a statement. "The waves it sends along the star's magnetic field lines kick off flares at specific moments. But the energy of the flares is much higher than the energy of the waves. We think that the waves are setting off explosions that are waiting to happen."

Stars are gigantic balls of burning plasma whose charged particles, or ions, swirl over their surfaces to create powerful magnetic fields. Because magnetic-field lines cannot cross each other, sometimes these fields knot before suddenly snapping to launch bursts of radiation called solar flares, which are sometimes accompanied by enormous belches of surface plasma known as coronal mass ejections.

Because many planets, including Earth, have magnetic fields, astronomers have long wondered whether planets with close orbits around their stars could disturb powerful stellar magnetic fields enough to trigger explosions.

Related: James Webb telescope discovers its first planet — a Saturn-size 'shepherd' still glowing red hot from its formation

To investigate this question, the astronomers conducted a broad sweep of stars using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which finds exoplanets by detecting the characteristic dimming of stars' light as planets pass in front of them. After flagging HIP 67522 as worthy of interest, the astronomers used the European Space Agency's (ESA) Characterising Exoplanet Satellite (Cheops) to investigate further.

"We quickly requested observing time with Cheops, which can target individual stars on demand, ultra precisely," Ilin said. "With Cheops we saw more flares, taking the total count to 15, almost all coming in our direction as the planet transited in front of the star as seen from Earth."

A vital piece of evidence was that these flares occurred when the planet passed in front of the star. This suggested that the planet is gathering energy as it orbits and is using it to "whip" the star's magnetic-field lines like a rope. When this shock wave passes down the field to the star's surface, a powerful flare erupts.

These flares are slowly stripping away the planet's diffuse atmosphere, layer by layer. The researchers project that, although HIP 67522 b is as big as Jupiter now, it could shrink to the size of Neptune in the next 100 million years.

To further investigate this first-of-its-kind phenomenon, the researchers plan to take more readings with TESS, Cheops, and other exoplanet telescopes, such as ESA's upcoming Plato space telescope, which is scheduled to launch in 2026.

"I have a million questions because this is a completely new phenomenon, so the details are still not clear," Ilin said. "There are two things that I think are most important to do now. The first is to follow up in different wavelengths (Cheops covers visible to near-infrared wavelengths) to find out what kind of energy is being released in these flares — for example ultraviolet and X-rays are especially bad news for the exoplanet.

"The second is to find and study other similar star-planet systems; by moving from a single case to a group of 10-100 systems, theoretical astronomers will have something to work with," she added.

Astronomers may have uncovered the curious origins of the universe's most curious planets, so-called "double hot Jupiters." The team behind the research hopes their discovery will help find more of these rare planets.

Hot Jupiter extra-solar planets, or "exoplanets," are scorching hot gas giants around the size of Jupiter or above that orbit so closely to their parent stars that one of their years can last less than an Earth day. While hot Jupiters are rare, orbiting just 1% of stars, even more scarce are "double hot Jupiters." These exoplanet pairs are found in binary star systems with one planet orbiting around each of the twin stars.

That's a strange arrangement and one that scientists have been keen to decode as it seems to challenge theories of planet formation. This team of astronomers thinks they may have the key to this puzzle, finding that the normal, long-term evolution of binary systems can naturally lead to the formation of a hot Jupiter around each star.

The process investigated by the team is known as von Zeipel-Lidov-Kozai (ZLK) migration. This posits the idea that over periods of time, planets with unusual orbits or orbital angles can be influenced by the gravity of another object, leading them to become a hot Jupiter close to their parent star.

"The ZLK mechanism is a dance of sorts," team leader and Yale University astronomer Malena Rice said in a statement. "In a binary system, the extra star can shape and warp planets' orbits, causing the planets to migrate inward.

"We show how planets in binary systems can undergo a mirrored migration process, so that both stars end up with hot Jupiters."

Related: Bizarre 'failed star' the size of Jupiter is 2,000 degrees hotter than the sun

To reach their conclusion, Rice and colleagues performed a number of simulations of the evolution of binary stars with two planets using the Grace computing cluster at the Yale Center for Research Computing with data from NASA's Exoplanet Archive and from the European Space Agency (ESA) star-tracking mission Gaia.

"With the right code and enough computing power, we can explore how planets evolve over billions of years — movements that no human could watch in a lifetime, but that still could leave imprints for us to observe," Yale researcher Yurou Liu said.

The unintended consequence of the team's research is that it makes planet-formation models a whole lot more interesting.

"We would expect giant planets to form far away from their host stars," Liu said. "This makes hot Jupiters both accessible and mysterious — and a worthwhile subject to study."

As for the hunt for more double hot Jupiters, the team suggests revisiting binary systems in which one hot Jupiter has already been discovered. The only catch is: these parent stars need to have a separation that is not too close and not too far, but just right.

"Our proposed mechanism works best when the stars are at a moderate separation," explained team member and Yale research Tiger Lu. "They need to be far enough apart that giant planets are still expected to form around each star, but close enough together for the two stars to influence each other during the system lifetime."

Goldilocks binary stars, anyone?

The team's research was published on June 10 in The Astrophysical Journal.

This article was originally published on Space.com.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured its first direct image of a planet in a remote solar system, and it's lighter than any seen before.

The planet, named TWA 7b, is a gas giant with a size comparable to Saturn's. Orbiting a star just over 6 million years old, the planet is still glowing hot from its formation.

The planet is the first observation of hypothesized yet previously unseen "shepherd" planets, which clear gaps of material found inside planetary rings. The researchers behind the discovery published their findings June 25 in the journal Nature.

"It tells us that indeed, planets can form gaps in disks (which was theorised, but not observed) and trojan-like structures can indeed be present in exoplanetary systems," lead study author Anne-Marie Lagrange, an astronomer and research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, told Live Science.

"It is the first time that such a light planet is imaged, ten times lighter than the lightest [previously known] planet," she said. "This is thanks to the extreme sensitivity of JWST in the thermal domain."

Astronomers study exoplanets because they help them to understand how planetary systems, such as our own, form. Yet while thousands have been seen indirectly — through the dimming of host stars as they pass in front of them or the wobble the planets' gravitational tugs give them — the light bouncing off exoplanets is usually drowned out by the light from the star, making them effectively invisible.

Related: 'Eyeball' planet spied by James Webb telescope might be habitable

To peer through this glare, JWST uses a coronagraph attached to its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI); this device blocks out a star's light and makes it easier to spot objects orbiting around it. To further boost the effectiveness of this search, astronomers select young stars whose planetary disks are pole-on to the telescope, enabling them to “look down” over star systems whose satellites are still glowing hot from their formation.

The system containing TWA 7b, called TWA 7, is 110 light-years from Earth and contains three concentric rings of rocky debris and dust, one of which was narrow and flanked by two empty bands of space. Within the heart of this narrow ring, the scientists found a hole containing a source of infrared-radiation.

Follow-up simulations suggested that this radiation source is a planet roughly 30% the size of Jupiter that's orbiting its star at 52 times the distance that Earth orbits the sun. Its presence in a gap inside the planetary ring is also intriguing; while observations of holes in the discs surrounding stars have been made before in other systems, this is the first clear detection of the shepherd planets believed to create them.

To further investigate the new system and others like it, Lagrange said that she and her colleagues will obtain "more data to study TWA7 b atmosphere, to search for other light, cold young planets in imaging" and "to search for cold old massive planets."

Researchers have found alcohol in the orbit of a young star, and it could help them understand the origins of life on Earth.

Methanol (methyl alcohol) and its isotopes (versions of elements) were detected in gases around a star called HD 100453, which is about 330 light-years from Earth. This is the first time researchers have found isotopes of methanol in the disk of a young star like HD 100453, the scientists reported in a study published June 5 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Methanol is a building block for organic compounds such as amino acids, which are needed for life. Researchers had previously detected methanol — but not its far rarer isotopes — in other star-forming disks.

"Finding these isotopes of methanol gives essential insight into the history of ingredients necessary to build life here on Earth," study lead author Alice Booth, a research fellow at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement.

Related: A hidden 'super-Earth' exoplanet is dipping in and out of its habitable zone

Many young stars are surrounded by swirling disks of gas and dust. These protoplanetary disks, also known as planet-forming disks, provide the material for planets, moons and comets to form.

The team made the methanol discovery using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. ALMA maps the chemical composition and distribution of gas in nearby (relatively speaking) protoplanetary disks.

HD 100453 is larger than the sun, with about 1.6 times the sun's mass. This means that methanol and other molecules in its disk exist as a gas farther from their home star than would have been the case when our solar system was young. Smaller stars have cooler disks, so their molecules are normally frozen as ice and undetectable to ALMA, according to the statement.

In HD 100453's disk, the researchers found that the ratio of methanol to other organic molecules was similar to that of comets in our solar system. The findings suggest that ices within protoplanetary disks eventually clump together to form comets loaded with complex organic molecules, which may then be delivered to planets through collisions.

"This research supports the idea that comets may have played a big role in delivering important organic material to the Earth billions of years ago," study co-author Milou Temmink, a doctoral candidate who studies protoplanetary disks at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said in the statement. "They may be the reason why life, including us, was able to form here."

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has notched another milestone, capturing a direct image of a distant, frigid planet in a solar system unlike our own, astronomers announced on June 10.

The exoplanet — named 14 Herculis c, or 14 Her c for short — orbits a sunlike star about 60 light-years from Earth in the constellation Hercules. In the new JWST image, it appears as a faint, fuzzy orange dot, its color a result of heat radiating from its atmosphere translated into visible hues.

Astronomers estimate that 14 Her c formed around 4 billion years ago and has a frigid atmospheric temperature of just 26 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 3 degrees Celsius).

14 Her c orbits its star at a distance of about 1.4 billion miles (2.2 billion kilometers), or roughly 15 times farther from its star than Earth is from the sun. If placed in our solar system, it would sit between Saturn and Uranus.

But, unlike the flat, well-ordered orbits of planets in our solar system, the 14 Herculis system is dramatically misaligned. Its two known planets, including 14 Her c, orbit at angles of about 40 degrees to each other, creating an "X"-like crossing pattern around their star.

This unusual layout may have been caused by the early ejection of a third massive planet from the system, throwing the remaining two into a gravitationally turbulent "planetary tug of war," Balmer said.

"These wobbles appear to be stable over long time scales," he said. "We're trying to understand what kinds of planet-planet scatterings could produce such an exotic configuration of orbits."

Related: A hidden 'super-Earth' exoplanet is dipping in and out of its habitable zone

This instability turned out to be a scientific advantage for Balmer's team. Of the nearly 6,000 known exoplanets, only a small fraction have been directly imaged.

"Doing this is very technically challenging," said Balmer. Planets shine thousands — and, in some cases, even millions or billions — of times fainter than the stars they orbit, so they "are like fireflies next to lighthouses," he said.

Most directly imaged exoplanets are hot, young gas giants that emit enough infrared light to stand out from the intense glare of their host stars. In contrast, colder and older planets like 14 Her c are usually far too dim to detect.

The planet's tilted, off-kilter orbit, however, "is great news for direct imaging," Balmer said. "We could confidently predict that JWST could resolve the outermost planet in the system."

Using the telescope's specialized starlight-blocking device known as a coronagraph, Balmer and his team succeeded in isolating the planet's faint infrared glow.

"We are now able to add to the catalog older exoplanets that are far colder than we've directly seen before Webb," Balmer said in a statement.

Based on 14 Her c's estimated age of around 4 billion years, its mass of about seven times that of Jupiter, and computer models of how planets evolve, the researchers expected the planet to appear brighter — or emit more heat — than it actually does in the JWST image.

"The planet's actually significantly fainter than what we'd expect," said Balmer. "We don't think that this is a problem with the evolutionary models, however."

Probing the world's atmosphere, JWST detected carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide at temperatures where methane would typically be expected, which suggests that strong updrafts carry hot gases from deep within the atmosphere to colder upper layers, Balmer said. These gases, possibly along with thin icy clouds, reduce the heat escaping into space, making the planet appear cooler and fainter than expected.

With 14 Her c, astronomers have broadened the range of exoplanets they can study. By examining planets with diverse masses, temperatures and orbital histories, scientists hope to gain a deeper understanding of how planetary systems, including our own, form and evolve.

"We want to understand how these planets change, because we want to understand how we got here," said Balmer.

This article was originally published on Space.com.

A huge "super-Earth" with an extreme climate that results in it being habitable for only part of its orbit has been discovered orbiting a star 2,472 light years away. And the most remarkable thing is, it was discovered without even being directly detected.

The discovery of the exoplanet, a super-Earth called Kepler-735c, is all down to something called transit timing variations, or TTVs for short.

Let's set the scene. One of the primary ways of discovering exoplanets is by looking for when they transit, or pass in front of, their star. As they do so, they block a small fraction of that star's light, and, based on the size of this dip in stellar brightness, we can determine how large the transiting planet must be. Indeed, this was how the most successful exoplanet hunter so far, NASA's Kepler space telescope, discovered over 3,300 confirmed exoplanets and thousands more candidates.

There are downsides to detecting exoplanets via transits, however. One is that the technique is biased toward planets on short orbits close to their star, which means they transit more often and are easier to see. Transits also require a precise alignment between the orbital plane of a planetary system and our line of sight. Even a small tilt might mean we cannot see planets on wider orbits transiting.

Those unseen planets on wider orbits can still make their presence felt, however, in the form of TTVs. Ordinarily, transits are as regular as clockwork, but in some cases astronomers have noticed that a planet's transit can be delayed, or occur ahead of schedule, and that this is being caused by the gravity of other planets tugging on the transiting world.

Sometimes we can see those other planets transiting as well — the seven-planet TRAPPIST-1 system is a great example. Often, though, we can't see the planet that is causing the variations, but the size and frequency of the TTVs can tell us about the orbital period and mass of these hidden worlds.

Related: James Webb telescope spots 'groundbreaking' molecule in scorching clouds of giant 'hell planet'

One such planet that has been found to experience TTVs is Kepler-725b. It's a gas giant planet orbiting a yellow sun-like star that was discovered by the now-defunct Kepler spacecraft.

"By analyzing the TTV signals of Kepler-725b, a gas giant planet with a 39.64-day period in the same system, the team has successfully inferred the mass and orbital parameters of the hidden planet Kepler-725c," Sun Leilei, of the Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a statement. Sun is the lead author of a new study revealing the existence of this hidden world.

Kepler-725c's mass is quite significant — 10 times greater than the mass of Earth. This places it in the upper echelons of a type of planet called super-Earths — giant, probably rocky worlds. We don't have an example of a super-Earth in our solar system, so we don't really know what such planets are like. Planetary scientists are still grappling with theoretical models that attempt to describe the properties of super-Earth worlds. Would they be wrapped in a dense atmosphere? Could they maintain plate tectonics? How would their higher surface gravity affect the evolution of life? Definitive answers to these questions have not yet been forthcoming.

Meanwhile, the planet's orbit is unusual to say the least. It is highly elliptical, with an eccentricity of 0.44. For comparison, Earth's orbit has an eccentricity of 0.0167 and is therefore close to circular; at the other extreme, an orbital eccentricity of 1 would be parabolic. Kepler-7825c's orbit is oval-shaped, meaning that at some points in its orbit it is much closer to its star than at other times. While overall Kepler-725c receives 1.4 times as much heat from its star as Earth does from the sun, this is just the average over the course of its orbit, and at times it is receiving less.

If Kepler-725c has an atmosphere, then the difference in solar heating at different times in its orbit could wreak havoc on its climate. In fact, the high orbital eccentricity actually means that the exoplanet only spends part of its orbit in the habitable zone, which is a circular zone around the star at a distance where temperatures are suitable for liquid water on a planet's surface.

Does this mean that Kepler-725c is only habitable for part of its 207.5-Earth-day year? What would happen to any life that might exist on the planet during the periods that it is outside of the habitable zone? Again, these are theoretical problems that scientists have been wrestling with, but now the existence of Kepler-725c suddenly makes them very real problems. However, because we do not see Kepler-725c transit, it will not be possible to probe its atmosphere with the James Webb Space Telescope, which uses sunlight filtered through a planet's atmosphere to make deductions about the properties and composition of that atmosphere.

Fortunately, there may be more such worlds out there to study. It is expected that when the European Space Agency's PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) spacecraft launches in 2026 as our most sensitive exoplanet-detecting mission yet, it will be able to find many more worlds through TTVs. And, unlike radial velocity and transit measurements, which tend to be biased toward finding short-period exoplanets, TTVs open a window onto planets on wider orbits that are not seen to transit.

"[Kepler-725c's discovery] demonstrates the potential of the TTV technique to detect low-mass planets in habitable zones of sun-like stars," said Sun.

By doing so, the TTV method will help further the search for life in the universe, if only in providing more statistics as to the numbers of habitable zone planets that are out there.

The discovery of Kepler-725c was reported June 3 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

This article was originally published on Space.com.

Researchers have captured a mesmerizing image of what they believe to be a giant planet forming in the orbit of a young star, according to a new study.

The image, taken with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, shows the star surrounded by an eye-shaped disk of swirling gas and dust. A dark ring within the disk suggests that the gravity of a newborn planet, likely a gas giant, is accumulating material as it carves a path around the star.

"We are talking about a fairly massive planet here, a few times the mass of Jupiter most likely," study lead-author Christian Ginski, a lecturer in the physics unit at the University of Galway in Ireland, told Live Science in an email. "It clears out a gap as it orbits because material falls down onto the planet. One might almost think of the planet like a hoover in that sense sucking up all the dust."

This could be a rare example of a planet detected while still in its infancy. Ginski and his colleagues released a simulation of the potential giant exoplanet within the disk and hope to confirm its presence using the James Webb Space Telescope in the coming months.

The researchers posted their findings Monday (June 9) to the preprint database arXiv, with the paper accepted for future publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Related: Ginormous planet discovered around tiny red star challenges our understanding of solar systems

Ginski and his colleagues are trying to learn more about the diversity of planetary systems and the forces needed to create a solar system similar to our own. They do this by seeking out young stars, which could be actively giving birth to new planets. Ginski noted that while researchers have detected several thousand planets around distant stars, these are all quite old.

"We are basically looking at the meal after it is fully cooked," he said. "Young planets inside their forming disk help us to understand all the ingredients and how they interact with each other. So far we only have 1 confirmed such planet in its infancy and 2-3 more candidates which are not fully conf[i]rmed yet."

The young star at the center of the new image is named 2MASSJ16120668-3010270, or 2MASSJ1612 for short, and is located 430 light-years from our solar system. A 2024 study noted the presence of a gap in the star's disk, so researchers already suspected that there could be a planet forming there.

In the new study, 2MASSJ1612 was viewed in scattered near-infrared light for the first time, revealing previously unseen details, including two spiral arms emanating from the center of its disk. Ginski explained that the arms form because the planet is perturbing, or altering the disk, as it moves, creating what are known as density waves. He likened this effect to the ripples created by throwing a stone in a pond.

"The stone is perturbing the water, sending out waves, somewhat similar to the planet in the disk," Ginski said. "Now think about the stone skipping over the water instead of just plunging into it. Ever more complex wave pattern are the result. In the disk, where the planet circles around the star, this leads eventually to the formation of these spiral patterns."

Ginski noted that he has observed around 100 young star systems and that researchers typically find either the carved-out ring or the spiral structures, but in this case, the images revealed both — as theoretical models of planet formation predict. He said he felt like "a kid on Christmas morning" when he first saw the images.

"Basically it appears we may be looking at an absolute textbook case here," Ginski said. "So that makes us think that we can predict what kind of planet is in this disk, and we think it should be one that we can actually take an image of with the right equipment (which is why we secured follow-up time at the James Webb Space Telescope)."

Astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have identified several surprising molecules in the scorching clouds of a "hellish" alien world. One of the compounds has never been seen in any planetary atmosphere before.

The exoplanet, dubbed WASP-121b, is a gas giant, around 1.2 times more massive than Jupiter and roughly 1.8 times as wide, that was first discovered in 2016. It is located approximately 880 light-years from the solar system and orbits extremely close to its home star, circling the alien sun every 30.5 hours. Its extreme proximity to the star means that it is "tidally locked," similar to how the moon is trapped around Earth, where one side of the planet constantly faces the star while the other is always pointed away. If it were to get any closer to the star, the planet would likely be ripped apart.

The hell planet's eternal "day side" reaches temperatures of around 5,500 degrees Fahrenheit (3,000 degrees Celsius), classifying the exoplanet as "ultra hot," while its dark "night side" is a slightly milder 2,750 F (1,500 C). Recent studies have also revealed that the alien world likely has molten iron rain and extreme hurricanes that make the solar system's biggest storms seem calm in comparison.

Researchers recently turned JWST's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument toward WASP-121b — also known as "Tylos" (meaning Bahrain in ancient Greek), after the Gulf state won the right to name it in 2022 — to get a better look at its superhot atmosphere. The team took observations from across the exoplanet's brief orbit around its sun, allowing them to capture clear pictures of both its day and night sides.

The team's observations, described in two papers published June 2 in the journal Nature Astronomy and The Astronomical Journal, revealed silicon monoxide (SiO) gas in the exoplanet's never-ending day side atmosphere, which has not been detected in the atmospheres of any of the more than 5,000 exoplanets discovered so far.

Related: Did the James Webb telescope really find evidence of alien life? Here's the truth about exoplanet K2-18b.

"Detecting SiO in WASP-121b's atmosphere is groundbreaking," Anjali Piette, an astronomer at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. and co-author of the Nature Astronomy study, said in a statement. "[It is] the first conclusive identification of this molecule in any planetary atmosphere."

SiO is sometimes found in stars, but is fairly rare elsewhere. It can be synthetically produced on Earth and is used to make solar panels, optical devices and some batteries. However, it is always a solid because its gaseous form is too unstable to exist in most planetary atmospheres.

Unlike other first-of-their-kind molecules spotted by JWST, such as the controversial "signature of life" dimethyl sulfide on K2-18b, the presence of SiO on the exoplanet is not an indication of potential extraterrestrial life — even though silicon-based lifeforms may be possible.

Instead, the molecule likely originates from silicate-rich materials, such as quartz, inside asteroids that have burned up in WASP-121b's atmosphere. The compound has remained in a gaseous state due to the incredibly high temperatures on the day side.

The researchers note that the new findings are proof of JWST's extraordinary resolution, which will allow us to learn more about how "hell planets" and other gas giants form.

"Studying the chemistry of ultra hot planets like WASP-121b helps us to understand how gas giant atmospheres work under extreme temperature conditions," Joanna Barstow, a planetary scientist at the Open University in the U.K. who co-authored both new studies, said in a statement.

Scientists have spotted a massive planet where one shouldn't be able to exist, according to leading theories of planet formation.

A team of researchers discovered a giant planet, dubbed TOI-6894b, orbiting a low-mass red dwarf star about 241 light-years away from Earth. The findings, published June 4 in the journal Nature Astronomy, add another example to a growing list of space objects that challenge standard models of planet formation.

"It's an intriguing discovery," study co-author Vincent Van Eylen, an astrophysicist at University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said in a statement. "We don't really understand how a star with so little mass can form such a massive planet! This is one of the goals of the search for more exoplanets."

For years, astronomers thought low-mass stars, less than roughly a third the mass of our sun, would not be able to accumulate enough material to form giant planets. But a few examples that defy these predictions have cropped up, and scientists are looking for others to help revise theories of planet formation.

To seek out these planets, study co-author Edward Bryant, an astronomer at University College London, and colleagues turned to the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a NASA satellite launched in 2018. In a 2023 study, Bryant and colleagues spotted 15 potential giant planets, including TOI-6894b, orbiting low-mass stars. The team homed in on TOI-6894b and its star with additional observations from TESS and several ground-based telescopes.

Combining this data, the researchers found that TOI-6894b has about 17% as much mass as Jupiter, or about 53 times as much mass as Earth. The planet's radius is slightly larger than Saturn's, and it orbits its star — which contains about 20% as much mass as the sun — in just 3 days.

Related: Scientists have discovered a new dwarf planet in our solar system, far beyond the orbit of Neptune

"We did not expect planets like TOI-6894b to be able to form around stars this low-mass," Bryant said in the statement. The red dwarf is the lowest-mass star discovered to host a giant planet so far. "This discovery will be a cornerstone for understanding the extremes of giant planet formation."

Though reports of giant planets orbiting red dwarfs are still rare, the discovery suggests that there could be many more of these behemoths in the Milky Way. "Most stars in our galaxy are actually small stars exactly like this, with low masses and previously thought to not be able to host gas giant planets," study co-author Daniel Bayliss, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick, said in the statement. "So, the fact that this star hosts a giant planet has big implications for the total number of giant planets we estimate exist in our galaxy."

TOI-6894b and other giant planets orbiting low mass stars throw a wrench in the core accretion model, the most common theory of how giant planets form. Typically, a giant planet's core grows until it's massive enough to quickly pull in gas from the surrounding protoplanetary disk. But the protoplanetary disks around low mass stars weren't expected to contain enough material for this to occur.

Instead, TOI-6894b could have slowly accumulated gas over time, or it might have formed from a gravitationally unstable protoplanetary disk that collapsed into a planet. Studying the distribution of material in the planet's atmosphere could offer some clues to how it formed, according to the scientists.

"This system provides a new challenge for models of planet formation, and it offers a very interesting target for follow-up observations to characterize its atmosphere," said study co-author Andrés Jordán, an astrophysicist at Adolfo Ibáñez University. Researchers will use the James Webb Space Telescope to observe the planet's atmosphere within the next year.

E.T., Stitch, Chewbacca, Groot — humans have a lot of ideas about what aliens might look like. But what is the science behind extraterrestrial life? Is it possible that humans will ever experience "first contact" with an alien species?

Many scientists hope so. They're looking for extraterrestrial life on planets with conditions that look like Earth's. A life-friendly planet would probably have water, for example. And for water to be a liquid, the planet must be the perfect distance from its sun for that water not to freeze or turn into a gas.

There's no evidence yet for life on other planets, but as scientists discover more and more planets outside our solar system, they're hopeful that some of these worlds will be "just right" for life to exist or evolve there.

5 fast facts about aliens

• Scientists have been listening for alien signals with special radio receivers since 1992. They haven't picked up any yet!
• Mars might have once hosted life — most likely tiny things like bacteria — but scientists can't say for sure.
• Jupiter's moon Europa has an ocean, and it might have hydrothermal vents, or cracks in the seafloor where hot water seeps through. Scientists think life on Earth may have evolved in hydrothermal vents.
• The "Goldilocks zone" is the space around a star where temperatures allow liquid water to exist. Many scientists think planets in the Goldilocks zone are those most likely to host life.
• The oldest known life on Earth is 4.2 billion years old.

Everything you need to know about aliens

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• What could aliens look like?
• What's the best evidence we've found for alien life?
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In a milestone discovery, astronomers have announced that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected water ice drifting through a dusty ring of debris surrounding a distant, sunlike star.

Astronomers have long suspected that water, especially in its frozen form, might be common in the cold, outer reaches of planetary systems beyond our own. That's because in our own solar system, Saturn's moon Enceladus, Jupiter's Ganymede and Europa, and other icy moons are known to contain vast amounts of frozen water. Some of these moons are even thought to harbor subsurface oceans of liquid water, fueling ongoing discussions about their potential to support life.

Now, with JWST's confirmation last week, scientists say they can begin exploring how water — a key ingredient for life as we know it — is distributed and transported in other planetary systems.

The new discovery centers on a star called HD 181327, located about 155 light-years away, in the constellation Telescopium. At just 23 million years old, HD 181327 is a cosmic infant compared with our 4.6 billion-year-old sun, and it's encircled by a broad, dusty debris disk that is rich in small, early building blocks of planets.

"HD 181327 is a very active system," study co-author Christine Chen, a research scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, said in a NASA statement. Frequent collisions between icy bodies in this disk are constantly stirring up fine particles of dusty water ice, which are "perfectly sized for Webb to detect," Chen said.

The findings, published May 15 in the journal Nature, suggest these "dirty snowballs" of ice and dust could eventually play a key role in delivering water to future rocky planets that may form over the next few hundred million years. As planets take shape within the disk, comets and other icy bodies could collide with the young worlds and shower them with water — a process thought to have helped seed early Earth with the water that sustains life today.

Related: Did the James Webb telescope really find evidence of alien life? Here's the truth about exoplanet K2-18b.

JWST revealed that most of the distant star system's water ice is concentrated in the outer regions of the disk, where temperatures are cold enough for it to remain stable. Closer in, the ice becomes increasingly scarce, likely vaporized by the star's ultraviolet radiation or locked away in larger rocky bodies known as planetesimals, which remain invisible to JWST's infrared instruments.

According to the research team, the debris disk around HD 181327 resembles what the Kuiper Belt — the vast, doughnut-shaped region of icy bodies beyond Neptune — likely looked like billions of years ago during the early stages of our solar system's evolution.

"What's most striking is that this data looks similar to the telescope's other recent observations of Kuiper Belt objects in our own solar system," Chen said in the statement.

Astronomers have captured the sharpest, most detailed images yet of young solar systems where planets are just beginning to take shape.

Exquisite snapshots released on April 28 provide a rare glimpse into the earliest stages of planet formation in more than a dozen star systems, revealing where planets emerge, how quickly they form and what materials they're made from. Scientists say the data could help refine computer models of planetary formation and evolution, as well as shed new light on how these infant systems compare to the myriad of mature exoplanets already discovered.

The high-resolution, science-packed images come thanks to advanced imaging techniques courtesy of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. These techniques reduce distortions and sharpen clarity, boosting astronomers' ability to map out the planet formation process with greater precision by revealing finer structures within the protoplanetary disks — the swirling gas and dust surrounding young stars, according to a statement.

The newly developed techniques "are like switching from reading glasses to high-powered binoculars," Richard Teague of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who serves as the principal investigator of the project, said in the statement. "They reveal a whole new level of detail in these planet-forming systems."

Using ALMA, Teague's team captured images of 15 young star systems sprinkled in space between a few hundred to 1,000 light-years from Earth. Rather than rely on direct detection of a young planet's faint light, Teague's team looked for the subtle clues these infant worlds imprint on their surroundings — such as gaps and rings in dusty disks, swirling gas motions caused by a planet's gravity, and other physical disturbances that hint at a planet's presence. To uncover these signatures, the researchers used ALMA to map the motion of gas within over a dozen protoplanetary disks.

"It's like trying to spot a fish by looking for ripples in a pond, rather than trying to see the fish itself," Christophe Pinte, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Planetary sciences and Astrophysics in France, who was also a principal investigator of the project, said in the statement.

Initial analysis of the images, detailed in 17 newly published papers, clearly shows that these protoplanetary disks with still-forming planets are highly dynamic, chaotic places that already harbor complex structures, the team says.

Among the key findings are fresh insights into how large dust grains are gathered into rings — precursors to planets — and subtle signs of the disks' gravitational influence, providing astronomers with a new way to gauge the mass available for forming planets.

"We're seeing evidence of hugely perturbed and dynamic disks, highly suggestive of young planets shaping the disks they're born in," Teague said.A particularly notable aspect of the project, according to the research team, is that early-career scientists took the lead — authoring 12 of the 17 published papers, with more expected to follow later this year.

Originally posted on Space.com.

Scientists have discovered a planet that is literally falling apart as it orbits its star. Located about 140 light-years from Earth in the Pegasus constellation , this doomed world named BD+05 4868 Ab whips around its star once every 30.5 hours — so close that its surface is being scorched into magma and vaporizing into space.

With each orbit, BD+05 4868 Ab leaves a blazing trail of molten rock behind it like a comet made of lava, offering a rare glimpse of an exoplanet in the final stages of its destruction. What's even more astonishing: with every blistering 30-hour orbit — which heats the planet to close to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,600 degrees Celsius) — the planet sheds as much mass of molten rock as an entire Mount Everest.

"The extent of the tail is gargantuan, stretching up to 9 million kilometers long, or roughly half of the planet's entire orbit," said Marc Hon, a postdoc in MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research in a statement.

This is an epic disintegration unfolding in real time, and the team predicts that it might take 1 to 2 million years for the entire planet to fully disintegrate. "We got lucky with catching it exactly when it's really going away," said Avi Shporer, a collaborator on the discovery who is also at the TESS Science Office. "It's like on its last breath."

Only three other disintegrating worlds have been identified among the more than 6,000 discovered exoplanets — each leaving a distinctive, comet-like tail of debris behind it. But BD+05 4868 Ab stands out: its tail is the longest of them all.

"That implies that its evaporation is the most catastrophic, and it will disappear much faster than the other planets," Hon said.

Because BD+05 4868 Ab orbits so perilously close to its star, its transit — the dip in starlight created as the planet passes in front of its star — appears especially bright and distinct. The planet was discovered with NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) observatory. TESS, which scans nearby stars for periodic dips in brightness, revealed a strange, fluctuating transit that stood out from the usual planetary candidates.

This makes it an ideal target for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, whose sensitive instruments can capture subtle changes in starlight to identify the chemical makeup of the vaporized rock trailing behind the planet. The result is a rare opportunity to watch a planet disintegrate in real time, and to study the composition of a world being stripped down to its core.

Hon says the discovery was a lucky break. "We weren't looking for this kind of planet," he explained. "We were doing the typical planet vetting, and I happened to spot this signal that appeared very unusual."

Though BD+05 4868 Ab's transit appears every 30.5 hours, the star's brightness took much longer than in other instances to return to normal. Even more bizarre was the depth the starlight's dip changed with every transit.

"The shape of the transit is typical of a comet with a long tail," Hon explained. "Except that it's unlikely that this tail contains volatile gases and ice as expected from a real comet — these would not survive long at such close proximity to the host star. Mineral grains evaporated from the planetary surface, however, can linger long enough to present such a distinctive tail."

Shporer explains that the planet is likely falling apart due to its low mass. "This is a very tiny object [between the size of Mercury and the moon], with very weak gravity, so it easily loses a lot of mass, which then further weakens its gravity, so it loses even more mass," Shporer stated. "It's a runaway process, and it's only getting worse and worse for the planet."

The team plans to carry out follow up observations this summer using the JWST. "This will be a unique opportunity to directly measure the interior composition of a rocky planet, which may tell us a lot about the diversity and potential habitability of terrestrial planets outside our solar system," Hon said.

And in the meantime, the researchers said they're looking for more examples in TESS data. "Sometimes with the food comes the appetite, and we are now trying to initiate the search for exactly these kinds of objects," Shporer said. "These are weird objects, and the shape of the signal changes over time, which is something that's difficult for us to find. But it's something we're actively working on."

Originally posted on Space.com.

Chemical fingerprints of life have been found on a distant exoplanet by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It is the "most promising" evidence yet for alien life, scientists say.

These chemicals were detected in the atmosphere of an exoplanet named K2-18b, which is located 124 light-years away from Earth and orbits its star in the habitable zone — the region around a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface — according to a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on April 17.

On Earth, these molecules — dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) — are only produced by life, such as marine algae and other microbes. Before now, DMS and DMDS hadn't been definitively detected in the atmospheres of any other planets or moons. While it is theoretically possible for these chemicals to be created without the presence of life, they are considered potential biosignatures on other worlds.

"Our findings provide new independent evidence for the possibility of a biosphere on K2-18 b" and "present an important step forward in the search for signatures of life on exoplanets," the researchers wrote in the paper.

Related: What could aliens look like?

K2-18b, which is 2.6 times the size of our planet and 8.6 times the mass, is suspected to be a "hycean world," meaning that it potentially has a planet-wide ocean and an atmosphere rich in hydrogen.

In a previous paper published in 2023, the same team of researchers detected methane (CH₄) and carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the planet's atmosphere, marking the first time that carbon-based molecules had been found in the atmosphere of an exoplanet in its star's habitable zone. The scientists also discovered potential signs of DMS. However, the levels of DMS had "low statistical significance," so the researchers couldn't be certain that it was indeed present.

"We didn't know for sure whether the signal we saw last time was due to DMS, but just the hint of it was exciting enough for us to have another look with JWST using a different instrument," Nikku Madhusudhan, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Cambridge and lead author of both studies, said in a statement.

In the latest study, the researchers found that new measurements of the planet's atmosphere taken by JWST's Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) show specific features that can only be explained by the presence of either DMS or DMDS. Due to the similarities of these two molecules, they appear very alike in the measurements that JWST takes from the atmospheres of exoplanets, meaning it is hard to tell which molecule is present in greater quantities.

"This is an independent line of evidence, using a different instrument than we did before and a different wavelength range of light, where there is no overlap with the previous observations," Madhusudhan said. "The signal came through strong and clear."

The researchers noted that levels of DMS and/or DMDS in the atmosphere may be as high as 10 parts per million by volume, which is much higher than the levels seen here on Earth, which are below one part per billion by volume.

The researchers said that these observations have reached a "three-sigma" level of significance. This means there is just a 0.3% probability that they occurred by chance. To confirm a discovery, scientists typically require a five-sigma significance level, where there is below a 0.00006% probability of occurring by chance.

DMS and DMDS are not known to be produced in large quantities through non-biological processes on Earth, meaning that their detection in such large quantities on K2-18b is a major indicator for the potential presence of life.

"Given everything we know about this planet, a Hycean world with an ocean that is teeming with life is the scenario that best fits the data we have," Madhusudhan said.

The researchers said that more measurements need to be taken to achieve five-sigma significance and also differentiate between the presence of DMS and DMDS. They hope to take these measurements soon, whenever they can get the JWST to look at this exoplanet for a few more hours. They also noted that the presence of DMS and/or DMDS could have arisen from as-yet-unknown chemical reactions not involving any life at all, which they hope to test experimentally.

"It's important that we're deeply sceptical of our own results, because it's only by testing and testing again that we will be able to reach the point where we're confident in them," Madhusudhan said. "That's how science has to work."

Extraterrestrials quiz: Are you an alien expert, or has your brain been abducted?

Hycean worlds, which are a possible kind of exoplanet with deep oceans surrounded by a thick envelope of hydrogen, could provide the best chance for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to detect biosignatures, according to a new study.

Those potential signs of life are a group of chemicals called methyl halides, which on Earth are produced by some bacteria and ocean algae.

"Unlike an Earth-like planet, where atmospheric noise and telescope limitations make it difficult to detect biosignatures, hycean planets offer a much clearer signal," said Eddie Schwieterman, who is an astrobiologist at the University of California, Riverside, in a statement.

For now, the existence of hycean planets remains hypothetical. Their name is a portmanteau of "hydrogen" and "ocean," first coined in 2021 by planetary scientist Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge.

Related: 'Hycean' exoplanets may not be able to support life after all

Hycean planets are expected to orbit red dwarf stars, and the best candidate for a hycean world is the planet K2-18b. This exoplanet, which is categorized as a "sub-Neptune" world, orbits in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star 124 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Leo, the Lion.

The Hubble Space Telescope discovered water vapor in K2-18b's atmosphere in 2019, and JWST has detected the presence of carbon dioxide and methane in the planet's atmosphere, along with a lack of carbon monoxide and ammonia — exactly as predicted by the hycean planet hypothesis. There's also tentative evidence that a compound called dimethyl sulfide, which on Earth is only produced by ocean plankton, also exists in K2-18b's atmosphere, but this evidence continues to prove contentious.

Now a team of researchers at the University of California, Riverside and ETH Zurich in Switzerland have gone a step further. They propose that another family of compounds called methyl halides, generated by microbial ocean life on Earth, could produce a biosignature — that is, a chemical signature of biological life — in the atmosphere of a hycean world that's more easily detectable than the signature of oxygen is on an Earth-like planet.

"Oxygen is currently difficult or impossible to detect on an Earth-like planet," said Michaela Leung of the University of California, Riverside, the first author of a new paper describing the research. "However, methyl halides on hycean worlds offer a unique opportunity for detection with existing technology."

Methyl halides are molecules that incorporate carbon atoms and three hydrogen atoms attached to a halogen atom such as bromine, chlorine or fluorine. (Halogens are group of reactive, non-metallic elements.) On Earth, methyl halides are produced by life, but they are far from abundant in our planet's atmosphere.

On hycean worlds, however, things could be different. Leung's team suspect that the conditions on such worlds, should they exist, would allow methyl halides to accumulate in large quantities in the atmosphere. Furthermore, methyl halides would have strong absorption features in infrared light, at the same wavelengths that the JWST is designed to observe.

"One of the great benefits of looking for methyl halides is, you could potentially find them in as few as 13 hours with James Webb. That is similar or lower, by a lot, to how much telescope time you'd need to find gases like oxygen or methane," said Leung. "Less time with the telescope means it's less expensive."

Related: The search for alien life

There are two caveats to what Leung's team propose. One is that we don't yet know whether hycean worlds actually exist. They were proposed as a possibility to explain certain properties of some warm sub-Neptune-type planets that have average densities that imply a thick hydrogen atmosphere and a deep ocean of liquid water. However, directly observing an ocean beneath such a world's hydrogen envelope is not currently feasible.

The second issue is that we don't know if such oceans could be habitable. A hycean world would be hot, and although the extreme conditions beneath the hydrogen envelope would prevent the ocean from evaporating, it is uncertain whether it would be too hot for life as we know it. However, a positive detection of methyl halides in the atmosphere of a candidate hycean world would be a strong indication that life could exist there in a deep ocean.

If life does exist on such a world, it would have to breathe hydrogen, not oxygen.

"These microbes, if we found them, would be anaerobic," said Schwieterman. "They'd be adapted to a very different type of environment, and we can't really conceive of what that looks like, except to say that these gases are a plausible output from their metabolism."

Anaerobic life — i.e., lifeforms making do without oxygen — exist on Earth, so it wouldn't be truly alien to life on our planet, even if the environment that it would live in is. Earth-like worlds orbiting red dwarfs could be in short supply, since red dwarfs are fierce little beasts, prone to unleashing bursts of harsh radiation that can strip away the atmosphere of an Earth-like planet. However, hycean worlds protected by their thick hydrogen atmospheres might be less vulnerable to attack from their star.

It could therefore be that hycean worlds are where life resides in red dwarf systems, and since red dwarfs make up about three-quarters of all stars in our Milky Way galaxy, there could be many more habitable hycean worlds in the cosmos than Earth-like worlds.

The research by Leung's team was published on March 11 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Originally posted on Space.com.

The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in northern Chile, will give us a better view of the Milky Way than any ground-based telescope before it.

It's difficult to overstate how transformative it will be. The ELT's primary mirror array will have an effective diameter of 39 meters. It will gather more light than previous telescopes by an order of magnitude, and it will give us images 16 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope. It's scheduled to come online in 2028, and the results could start flooding in literally overnight, as a recent study shows.

One of the most powerful features of the ELT will be to capture faint atmospheric spectra from the atmospheres of exoplanets. This is usually done as a planet passes in front of its star from our vantage point. A small bit of starlight passes through a planet's atmosphere to reach us, and by analyzing the absorption spectra we can determine the molecules contained in the planet's atmosphere, such as water, carbon dioxide, and oxygen. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has gathered data on several exoplanet atmospheres, for example.

But sometimes the transit data we can gather is inconclusive. For example, when JWST looked for atmospheres on the planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system, it seemed that the planets b and c were airless, but the data isn't strong enough to rule out the presence of atmospheres. There might be thin atmospheres with spectral lines too faint for JWST to observe. The ELT's greater sensitivity should be able to settle the question.

Related: James Webb telescope spots 'rogue' planet with a cake-like atmosphere barrelling through space without a star

What's even more exciting is that the ELT should be able to gather spectra not just on exoplanets that transit their star, but also from non-transiting exoplanets via reflected starlight.

To determine just how powerful the ELT will be, this new study simulated results for several scenarios. They focused on planets orbiting nearby red dwarf stars, since those are the most common types of exoplanets, and looked at four test cases: a non-industrial Earth rich in water and photosynthesizing plants, an early Archean Earth where life is just starting to thrive, an Earth-like world where oceans have evaporated, similar to Mars or Venus, and a pre-biotic Earth capable of life but where there is none. For comparison, the team also considered Neptune-sized worlds, which should have significantly thicker atmospheres.

The idea was to see if the ELT could distinguish between the different Earth-like worlds, and more importantly, whether the data could trick us into a false positive or negative. That is, whether a lifeless world would appear to have life or a living world would appear barren.

Based on their simulations, the authors found that we should be able to make clear and accurate distinctions for nearby star systems. For the closest star, Proxima Centauri, we could detect life on an Earth-like world with only ten hours of observation. For a Neptune-sized world, the ELT could capture planetary spectra in about an hour.

So it seems that if life exists in a nearby star system, the ELT should be able to detect it. The answer to perhaps the greatest question in human history could be found in just a few years.

The original version of this article was published on Universe Today.

A quartet of Earth-like worlds, each about 20% to 30% the size of our planet, circle one of our closest stellar neighbors, a new study reveals. The rocky alien worlds are close enough that future generations of humans may be able to visit them with futuristic rocket propulsion technology. However, it is unlikely that we will find any life there.

Astronomers have long suspected that there was at least one exoplanet orbiting Barnard's Star — a red dwarf with a mass around one-sixth that of the sun. At 5.97 light-years from Earth, it is the fourth-closest star to our solar system, after the three interconnected stars of the Alpha Centauri system. (Five potential planets have also been detected around the stars of Alpha Centauri, though not all of them have been confirmed yet.)

In the past, researchers assumed that Barnard's Star was circled by a gas giant exoplanet similar to Jupiter, because the star frequently wobbles closer to and then farther from Earth. This suggests that something is gravitationally tugging on the star, similar to how the moon pulls on our planet and causes Earth's tides. However, proving the existence of such a planet has remained elusive.

But in a new study, published March 11 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers say they have discovered that this wobbling is not caused by the pull of one gas giant but instead by the combined force exerted by four smaller, rocky worlds, each around four times more massive than Mercury.

"It's a really exciting find," study lead author Ritvik Basant, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, said in a statement. "Barnard's Star is our cosmic neighbor, and yet we know so little about it."

Related: 32 alien planets that really exist

The newly detected worlds, which have not been officially named yet, are "so close to their home star that they zip around the entire star in a matter of days," the researchers wrote. "That probably means they are too hot to be habitable."

The new findings also likely rule out the possibility that any other exoplanets circle within the habitable zone of Barnard's Star, they added.

But that doesn't mean this system will remain uninhabited forever. Although Barnard's Star is currently out of reach for humans using current rocket propulsion technology, future human generations might be able to travel to and colonize these newly discovered planets using new forms of rocket propulsion, such as nuclear fusion engines or light sails.

Finding hidden planets

Most exoplanets are discovered when they pass in front of their home star and block out some of the light shining toward Earth. However, in this case, researchers think we are looking at Barnard's Star from above, meaning its planets do not pass in between it and us. As a result, scientists often refer to our stellar neighbor as "great white whale" of planet hunting, researchers wrote.

To get around this problem, the study team turned to MAROON-X, an instrument attached to the Gemini North telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano. Over 112 nights during a three-year period, the telescope detected subtle shifts in the movement of Barnard's Star in order to "tease apart the number and masses of the planets that must be circling the star to have this effect," the researchers wrote.

Initially, MAROON-X identified only three planets. However, in another study, published in October 2024, researchers identified another planet using a similar device, dubbed ESPRESSO, at the Very Large Telescope in Chile. By combining these data with their own, the researchers could see this fourth planet for themselves.

Using data from both MAROON-X and ESPRESSO also challenges the idea that the researchers are being misled by anomalies in either data set, making them more confident in their results.

Red dwarfs are the most common star type in the universe, but most are too far from Earth for researchers to easily spot planets around them. However, the new results hint that small, rocky planets could be abundant around these miniature stars.

But for the study team, the most exciting thing about the new research was finding worlds that are so close to Earth.

"We found something that humanity will hopefully know forever," Jacob Bean, an astronomer at the University of Chicago who specializes in exoplanet systems, said in the statement. "That sense of discovery is incredible."

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers have generated the first-ever weather report of a rogue exoplanet-like object — and it shows patches of clouds and carbon chemicals, along with high-altitude auroras.

The findings, published March 3 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, also revealed that the celestial object possesses a complex, layered atmosphere.

Earth's atmosphere is a blanket of gases, primarily nitrogen and oxygen. But other planets in the solar system have very different atmospheres. For example, Venus' air is much thicker than Earth's and is vitriolic: it's made of sulfuric acid. This diversity of atmospheres has also been observed in planets beyond our cosmic neighborhood: Some exoplanets have water vapor-soaked atmospheres, while others host superheated clouds of sand.

Now, researchers have pointed JWST at a mysterious object called SIMP 0136+0933 to learn more about its atmosphere. This object's identity is still nebulous, said study lead author Allison McCarthy, a graduate student in Boston University's astronomy department.

"[I]t's not a planet in the traditional sense — since it doesn't orbit a star," she told Live Science in an email. However, "it also has a lower mass than a typical brown dwarf [a so-called 'failed star']," she added.

Related: 32 alien planets that really exist

SIMP 0136+0933 has a 2.4-hour-long day and is located in the Carina Nebula 20 light-years away. Because it is the brightest free-floating planetary-mass object in the Northern Hemisphere and is far from stars that could obfuscate observations, it has been directly photographed by telescopes like NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. These observations revealed that SIMP 0136+0933 has an unusually variable atmosphere, with fluctuations in the electromagnetic spectrum's infrared region (which humans would perceive as heat). But the physical phenomena causing this variability were still unknown.

To unravel these processes, McCarthy and colleagues used JWST's Near-Infrared Spectrograph to measure the intensity of the short-wave radiation SIMP 0136+0933 emitted. They collected about 6,000 such datasets over nearly three hours on July 23, 2023, sampling data from the whole object. Then, over the next three hours, they repeated the process for longer wavelengths, using the space telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument.

The researchers then created light curves to show how the infrared radiation's "brightness" (or intensity) changed over time. These curves revealed that different wavelengths behaved differently. At any one point, some brightened, others dimmed and others didn't change. Despite this, the researchers found the light curves formed three clusters, each with a specific — albeit somewhat variable — shape.

The similar light-curve shapes suggested that similar atmospheric mechanisms were causing them. To determine these, the researchers built models of SIMP 0136+0933's atmosphere. This enabled them to infer that the first wavelength cluster originated from a low-lying layer of iron clouds, with the second cluster coming from higher-lying clouds of forsterite, a magnesium mineral. The cloud layers were also probably patchy, which could have caused some of the variability in the wavelength clusters' curves.

But clouds couldn't explain the third wavelength cluster, which seemed to originate high above them. Instead, the researchers believe this radiation came from "hotspots," or hot pockets of the atmosphere that may originate from radio auroras. These radio auroras resemble Earth's northern lights, but they're in the radio-wavelength range.

Yet even these models couldn't explain all of the observations, like why the first cluster's curves had such diverse shapes. The researchers proposed that clumps of carbon-based chemicals, such as carbon monoxide, in the atmosphere may have been responsible, absorbing radiation at some wavelengths at certain times.

"While these variability mechanisms had been hypothesized, this was the first time we observed them directly in SIMP 0136's atmosphere," McCarthy said. But a few hours of observations aren't enough to understand SIMP 0136+0933's atmosphere in the long term. For that, the researchers will need to study the object over several days, possibly with NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is expected to launch in 2027.

Astronomers have directly observed two worlds beyond our solar system shedding their outer layers into space for the first time. The new observations offer an unprecedented glimpse into the interiors of planets — a view that has long remained elusive, even for Earth.

The first "disintegrating" exoplanet is a Neptune-size rocky world called K2-22b, which zips around its star so closely that it completes an orbit in just nine hours. Scientists say the star's heat literally roasts the planet: K2-22b's surface reaches temperatures of more than 3,320 degrees Fahrenheit (1,826 degrees Celsius), which is hot enough not just to melt rock, but to vaporize it. Recent observations of K2-22b using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed that the evaporated rock has been sculpted into an extended, comet-like tail.

"It's a remarkable and fortuitous opportunity to understand terrestrial planet interiors," study co-author Jason Wright, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, said in a statement.

But this isn't the only evaporating planet spotted recently. Another disintegrating exoplanet circling a different star was discovered by a separate team using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). This roasted world, named BD+054868Ab, is the closest evaporating exoplanet to Earth discovered so far.

TESS data show that BD+054868Ab sports not one, but two massive tails: a leading tail of larger, sand-size particles; and a trailing tail with smaller, soot-size grains. Together, the tails span a whopping 5.6 million miles (9 million kilometers) and occupy roughly half the planet's orbit.

"These planets are literally spilling their guts into space for us," Nick Tusay, a graduate student in the Penn State Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics who led the JWST study, said in the statement. "With JWST, we finally have the means to study their composition and see what planets orbiting other stars are really made of."

Papers detailing the findings about both exoplanets have been uploaded as preprints and are still undergoing peer review.

"Who ordered that?"

The findings come after TESS and JWST observed thousands of stars, searching for subtle-yet-periodic dips of light that occur when a planet crosses in front of its star. These dips, known as transits, reveal spectral fingerprints of the planets' chemical compositions, which allow astronomers to reverse engineer what the interiors of the crumbling planets may have once looked like.

While studying K2-22b, for instance, JWST detected gases like carbon dioxide and nitric oxide. This is unusual because these gases are typically associated with icy bodies, not with mantles of terrestrial planets, and they should have evaporated into space long ago.

"It was actually sort of a 'Who ordered that?' moment," Tusay said in the statement.

Tusay and his colleague speculate that K2-22b may have originally formed farther from its star and migrated inward by gravitational perturbations, which should not be uncommon, considering the planet's host star shares its cosmic residence with another star.

Meanwhile, BD+054868Ab is likely losing about a moon's worth of material every million years. By current estimates, astronomers expect it will cease to exist in about 1 million to 2 million years — a blink of an eye in the typical lifespan of planets in less extreme environments, which exist for billions of years.

"The rate at which the planet is evaporating is utterly cataclysmic, and we are incredibly lucky to be witnessing the final hours of this dying planet," Marc Hon, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT who led the discovery of BD+054868Ab, said in the statement.

James Webb Space Telescope quiz: How well do you know the world's most powerful telescope?

WASP-121 b is the definition of an "extreme" exoplanet — it's so hot that it rains droplets of liquid iron. Now, astronomers have discovered that this planet, located around 900 light-years away from us, is also ravaged by unexpectedly powerful winds.

This represents the first time astronomers have been able to study the atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system in such intricate depth and detail.

The WASP-121 b winds, discovered by a team of astronomers using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) located in the Atacama Desert region of northern Chile, carry elements like iron and titanium around the planet, therefore creating intricate weather patterns.

"This planet’s atmosphere behaves in ways that challenge our understanding of how weather works — not just on Earth, but on all planets," team leader and Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur researcher Julia Victoria Seidel said in a statement. "It feels like something out of science fiction."

An extreme world

Many of the extraordinary features of WASP-121 b arise from the fact that it is an ultra-hot Jupiter, a gas giant planet with around 1.2 times the mass of its solar system namesake. WASP-121 b actually orbits so close to its star that a year there lasts just 30 Earth hours.

This proximity also means that WASP-121 b is "tidally locked," meaning one side of the world permanently faces its star (its scorching hot dayside) while the other (the nightside) is cooler because it faces out to space in perpetuity.

Iron and other metals are vaporized on the scorching hot dayside and are blown across the planet to its nightside, where they condense and fall as liquid metal rains.

Related: Surprise discovery in alien planet's atmosphere could upend decades of planet formation theory

Delving deep into the atmosphere of WASP-121 b and creating a 3D map of its atmosphere, researchers found different kinds of winds in different layers of the world; they also observed a jet stream spanning half of the planet.

As this jet stream gains speed, it appears to violently churn WASP-121 b's atmosphere high up in the sky as it crosses the line between the planet's nightside and dayside, moving toward the hotter half.

"What we found was surprising: a jet stream rotates material around the planet's equator, while a separate flow at lower levels of the atmosphere moves gas from the hot side to the cooler side," Seidel said. "This kind of climate has never been seen before on any planet.

"Even the strongest hurricanes in the solar system seem calm in comparison."

This complex mapping of WASP-121 b's atmosphere was possible thanks to the VLT instrument ESPRESSO (Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations).

The VLT combines light from different telescopes; it analyzes four times as much light as is available to a single instrument, and this allows it to obtain much fainter details of a planet's atmosphere.

The team trained ESPRESSO on WASP-121 b for one full passage in front of its star's face, or one full "transit." This let the researchers detect the signature of multiple chemicals in the atmosphere of the ultra-hot Jupiter across different atmospheric layers.

"The VLT enabled us to probe three different layers of the exoplanet's atmosphere in one fell swoop," Leonardo A. dos Santos, team member and a researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said in the statement.

The researchers tracked the movement of iron, sodium and hydrogen, using these elements to track winds in the deep, middle and shallow layers of WASP-121 b's atmosphere.

"It's the kind of observation that is very challenging to do with space telescopes, highlighting the importance of ground-based observations of exoplanets," dos Santos said.

One surprise this investigation delivered was the discovery of titanium lurking just below the jet stream. Previous observations of WASP-121 b have shown this element to be absent. The discrepancy could be because the titanium content was hidden deep in the ultra-hot Jupiter's atmosphere.

"It's truly mind-blowing that we're able to study details like the chemical makeup and weather patterns of a planet at such a vast distance," Bibiana Prinoth, a researcher at Lund University researcher and author of a companion paper detailing the titanium discovery, said in the statement.

The team's research was published Feb. 18 in the journal Nature.

Originally posted on Space.com.

Planets are born in swirling disks of gas and dust around young stars. Astronomers are keenly interested in the planet formation process, and understanding that process is one of the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) main science goals. PDS 70 is a nearby star with two nascent planets forming in its disk, two of the very few exoplanets that astronomers have directly imaged.

Researchers developed a new, innovative approach to observing PDS 70 with the JWST and uncovered more details about the system, including the possible presence of a third planet.

PDS 70 is an orange dwarf star about 370 light-years away and hosts two young, growing planets: PDS 70b and PDS 70c. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) imaged both of the planets directly, and PDS 70b has the distinction of being the very first protoplanet ever imaged directly. The VLT accomplished the feat in 2018 with its groundbreaking SPHERE instrument.

The SPHERE observations, along with other observations, allowed astronomers to get a much more detailed look at the planets' atmospheres, masses, and temperatures.

Now, the JWST has taken another look at the pair of young planets. The results are in a new paper in The Astronomical Journal. It's titled "The James Webb Interferometer: Space-based Interferometric Detections of PDS 70 b and c at 4.8 um," and the lead author is Dori Blakely. Blakely is a grad student in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada.

The JWST's Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) has a feature called Aperture Masking Interferometry (AMI), which allows it to function as an interferometer. It uses a special mask with tiny holes over the telescope's primary mirror. The interferogram it creates has a much higher resolution because the effective size of the telescope becomes much larger.

"In this work, we present James Webb Interferometer observations of PDS 70 with the NIRISS F480M filter, the first space-based interferometric observations of this system," the authors write. They found evidence of material surrounding PDS 70 b and c, which strengthens the idea that the planets are still forming.

"This is like seeing a family photo of our solar system when it was just a toddler. It's incredible to think about how much we can learn from one system," lead author Blakely said in a press release.

Related: Newly discovered super-Earth orbits in and out of its star's habitable zone. Could life survive its extreme climate?

Previous observations of the PDS 70 planets were made at shorter wavelengths, which were best explained by models for low-mass stars and brown dwarfs. But the JWST observed them at longer wavelengths, the longest they'd ever been observed with. These observations detected more light than previous observations, and the low-mass/brown dwarf models couldn't account for the light.

The JWST observations hint at the presence of warm material around both planets, which is interpreted as material accreting from a circumplanetary disk. "Our photometry of both PDS 70 b and c provides tentative evidence of mid-IR circumplanetary disk emission through fitting spectral energy distribution models to these new measurements and those found in the literature," the authors write.

The results indicate that PDS 70 and its planets are vying for the same material needed to grow larger. The star is a T-Tauri star that's only about 5.4 million years old. It won't reach the Main Sequence for tens of millions more years and is still actively accreting material.

"These observations give us an incredible opportunity to witness planet formation as it happens," said co-author Doug Johnstone from the Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre. "Seeing planets in the act of accreting material helps us answer long-standing questions about how planetary systems form and evolve. It's like watching a solar system being built before our very eyes."

The new research also presents additional evidence supporting a third planet around the stars, putatively named PDS 70d.

A 2024 paper presented hints of a third planet. However, there was much uncertainty. The authors of that paper wrote that they may have found another exoplanet, but it could also be a dust clump or an inner spiral of material. "Follow-up studies of d are therefore especially exciting," the authors wrote.

While this new research isn't solely a follow-up study on the potential exoplanet, it has constrained some of the object's properties, whatever it may be.

If there is a third planet, it is significantly different from the other two. "… if the previously observed emission at shorter wavelengths is due to a planet, this putative planet has a different atmospheric composition than PDS 70 b or c," the authors explain.

"Follow-up observations will be needed to determine the nature of this emission."

The original version of this article was published on Universe Today.

A super-Earth planet that dips in and out of its star's habitable zone has been discovered just 19.7 light-years away.

The planet, known as HD 20794d, gets farther out from its star than Mars is from the sun and, on the other end of its orbit, as close as Venus. Each orbit the planet begins out beyond the habitable zone, where it is too cold for liquid water, before passing right through the habitable zone to its inner edge where temperatures rise for a short period, before the planet moves back out again.

The planet provides a brilliant target for the next generation of telescopes to probe its atmosphere, and for scientists to test the extreme limits of planetary habitability. "Its luminosity and proximity make it an ideal candidate for future telescopes whose mission will be to observe the atmospheres of exoplanets directly," said Xavier Dumusque of the University of Geneva in a statement. Dumusque is a member of the team that discovered and characterized the new planet.

HD 20794d has a mass 6.6 times greater than Earth and was found by astronomers using the ESPRESSO and HARPS spectrographs on the European Southern Observatory's telescopes in Chile. These instruments measure what's termed 'radial velocity' — the amount by which a star wobbles around the center of mass that it shares with its planets. In general, the larger the wobble, the greater the mass of the planet. It's the wobbling star that has betrayed the existence of HD 20794d — astronomers have not directly observed HD 20794d, nor taken a picture of it or even seen it in transit yet.

The star in question, HD 20794 — also known as 82 Eridani — is a yellow G6-type star that's slightly dimmer and less massive than our own sun. It's also relatively bright in our night sky, shining at magnitude 4.3, which is bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye in the constellation of Eridanus, the River. In contrast, many of the stars hosting exoplanets are too faint to be seen with the naked eye, which marks out HD 20794 as something special.

Because of how close the HD 20794 system is to us, it has been well observed over the past 20 years and has a somewhat mixed history when it comes to exoplanets. HD 20794d orbits its star with two other super-Earth planets, designated b and c, which orbit their star every 18.3 and 89.6 days, respectively. These were discovered in 2011 by a team of Geneva astronomers including Dumusque. At the same time, the team found evidence for a third planet, with an orbital period of 40 days, but this was later shown to be false. Only now has the real third planet become apparent in the data.

"We analyzed the data for years, carefully eliminating sources of contamination," said Michael Cretignier of the University of Oxford. Cretignier was previously at Geneva, where he developed an algorithm called YARARA to carefully search the data and pick out an exoplanet's faint radial velocity signal from the background noise. YARARA proved vital in the effort to confirm HD 20974d as being real.

What's most remarkable about this new planet, however, is its orbit. While Johannes Kepler taught us that no planetary orbit is perfectly circular, most adhere to an orbit that is pretty close to being a circle. Some worlds, however, have more elongated orbits. The degree of elongation, known as eccentricity, is measured on a scale of 0 (for a perfect circle) to 1 (a hyperbola). Earth's orbital eccentricity is 0.017; Mars' is 0.055, and Mercury's is 0.206.

HD 20794d's orbit is more elongated than any planet in our solar system, with an eccentricity of 0.4. Its 647-day-long orbit is 40 days shorter than Mars, giving you an idea of where it is located in its planetary system. However, the large eccentricity means its orbit ranges from as far as 2 astronomical units (300 million km/186 million miles — i.e. twice the Earth–sun distance) from its star to as close as 0.75 AU (112 million km/69.7 million miles).

In the context of our solar system, Mars — on the outer edge of our habitable zone — orbits our sun at an average distance of 1.5 astronomical units (228 million km/141 million miles), while Venus, on the inner edge of the habitable zone, orbits at 0.72 astronomical units (108 million km/67 million miles) from our sun.

The climate on such a world must be beyond bizarre. Winters would be long and hard, and life might struggle to survive on a planet that spends most of its time frozen. Then spring would come, melting the ice, followed by a brief but intense summer when oceans might even begin to evaporate, only to precipitate back out as rain in autumn and snow in winter. Whether life could survive on such an extreme world is unknown.

On Earth, our seasons are driven by our planet's 23.4-degree tilt; for instance, northern summer occurs when our planet's northern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun. No matter the tilt of HD 20794d, its seasons are instead determined by how far it has progressed along its eccentric orbit. It is a remarkable planet.

The origins of such a large degree of eccentricity lie in the HD 20794d's distant past, Dumusque tells Space.com. "The eccentricity of planets are a remnant of planet–planet interactions during the early days of a planetary system," he says. Although the other two planets, b and c, do not have eccentric orbits, something may have perturbed the orbit of HD 20794d not long after it formed.

"For example, there could have been another giant planet in the early phase of formation," said Dumusque. "The giant planet could have influenced the orbit of planet d, and then that giant planet was ejected outside of the system."

The discovery of this exciting new world is detailed in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Originally posted on Space.com.

Astronomers have spotted a "supersonic jetstream" on a nearby alien world, with winds reaching 20,500 mph (33,000 km/h) — the fastest planetary gusts detected anywhere in the cosmos.

The record-breaking weather is raging on WASP-127b, a "puffy" gas giant around 500 light-years from Earth that is slightly larger than Jupiter but has a fraction of the mass. The exoplanet, discovered in 2016, has a large band of strong winds, or jetstream, circling its equator — similar to the winds that cause the stripes seen on the solar system's gas giants. However, the speed of this jetstream had remained a mystery until now.

But in a new study, published Jan. 21 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, researchers finally determined the jetstream's speed by measuring it against the rest of the exoplanet's spinning atmosphere, using data collected by the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.

"Part of the atmosphere of this planet is moving towards us at a high velocity while another part is moving away from us at the same speed," study lead author Lisa Nortmann, an astrophysicist at the University of Göttingen in Germany, said in a statement. "This signal shows us that there is a very fast, supersonic, jet wind around the planet’s equator."

Related: 7 solar system worlds where the weather is crazy

The winds on WASP-127b are traveling at 5.6 miles per second (9 kilometers per second), which is around 130 times faster than the threshold for a Category 5 hurricane or roughly 15 times faster than a speeding bullet.

It is also around 18 times faster than the winds in Neptune's largest jetstream, which can hit 1,100 mph (1,800 km/h) — the fastest gusts recorded in the solar system, according to NASA.

WASP-127b's jetstream is traveling roughly six times faster than the exoplanet spins. "This is something we haven't seen before," Nortmann said.

Complex weather

Researchers determined the composition of WASP-127b's clouds by analyzing the light that passed through the puffy planet's atmosphere. This showed that water vapor and carbon dioxide are both present in the spinning clouds. However, while these compounds are both associated with life on Earth, they can also be explained by abiotic processes so are not proof of extraterrestrial life.

Temperature data collected by the VLT showed that WASP-127b's polar regions are colder than the rest of the planet, and that there are slight temperature variations between the day and night sides of the planet. "This shows that the planet has complex weather patterns just like Earth and other planets of our own [solar] system," study co-author Fei Yan, an astronomer at the University of Science and Technology of China, said in the statement.

At the moment, only ground-based telescopes like the VLT can measure distant planetary winds because orbiting observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, do not have the "necessary velocity precision," the researchers wrote.

New ground-based telescopes currently under construction, such as ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, will "likely resolve even finer details of the wind patterns [on gas giants] and expand this research to smaller, rocky planets," Nortmann said.

Tucked away in the constellation Coma Berenices just 105 light-years from Earth, the star HD 110067 is a hidden gem of the Milky Way. This parent star has guided its litter of six exoplanets to orbit in a cosmic waltz, locked in rhythmic timing by gravitational forces. Synchronicity like this takes practice — but new research suggests that the star's elegant sextuplet system might be billions of years younger than previously thought. If so, it might dwindle down the candidates for life-supporting planets in this anomalous system.

Previous studies that used the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram — a tried-and-true chart that traces a star's age through its luminosity and temperature — placed the star at about 8 billion years old. But for stars less massive than the sun, this method may falter, according to Klaus-Peter Schröder, an astronomer at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico.

So Schröder and his colleagues set out to reappraise the star's age by examining other characteristics: its activity levels and rotation rate. Their new study puts HD 110067 at a relatively spry 2.5 billion years old — roughly 5.5 billion years younger than initially estimated. The team's research was published Nov. 22 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Dating with the stars

The team first gauged the star's activity by analyzing wavelengths of ionized calcium, an element telescopes can easily spot in hot stellar atmospheres. As a star's magnetic fields generate energy and heat its outer layers, calcium atoms become excited and emit a distinct color of light. The younger the star, the stronger of an emission researchers will detect.

"A star like our sun that's halfway through its life cycle is moderately active," Schröder said. "But this star is a lot more active than that."

Related: 'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien technology

Next, the team analyzed the star's "spin-down" — a gradual braking of rotation that all stars experience. HD 110067 takes about 20 Earth days to complete one spin, placing it in the earlier stages of its deceleration. (For comparison, the older and slower sun takes at least 27 days to rotate once on its axis, according to NASA.) With this information, the researchers looked for analogue stars — such as the stellar doppelgänger Sigma Draconis in the northern constellation Draco — to zero in on HD 110067's epoch in life.

"Because these stars have similar evolution tracks and rotation rates, we can understand what point the star is at in its lifetime," said lead study author Maddie Loupien, an astronomy master’s student at Sorbonne University in Paris. The calcium lines and spin rate led the team to calculate an age of about 2.5 billion years for HD 110067 — give or take 800 million years.

Even if this measurement could be more precise, it still paints a far more lifelike portrait of the star's age than the figure derived from the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, according to Adam Burgasser, an exoplanet host star researcher at the University of California, San Diego who was not involved in the research.

"This team really did their due diligence to double-check the star's age with robust methods," Burgasser said. This truer estimate should also help astronomers understand how the star's surrounding exoplanets have evolved, he added.

Possibilities of life?

The perfect clockwork of HD 110067's planets doesn't necessarily require long-term parenting from a middle-aged star. Rather, according to Schröder, it may have taken as little as 1 billion years for some of the inner planets to begin rehearsing their careful dance through a gravitational phenomenon called tidal locking — meaning one side of a planet perpetually faces its host star, much like the fixed face of Earth's moon.

HD 110067's unexpected youth may also shine a new light on exoplanet environments. So far, all six known planets in the system orbit close to their parent star, where conditions are too scorching for life to arise. But current exoplanet detection methods favor planets with smaller orbits. More planets may yet revolve farther from HD 110067 in its habitable zone and accordingly have milder climates, Schröder said.

But temperature is just one factor; younger stars also spew lethal doses of X-rays and gamma rays. In turn, HD 110067's newly refined age may limit the possibility of life on these unseen alien worlds.

Scientists' best theories on how planets form could be wrong, new research suggests. Astronomers studying a still-forming planet beyond our solar system have found that its chemical makeup doesn't fully match the swirling gas and dust disk from which it formed. The finding challenges standard models of planet formation and implies they may be overly simplistic, the researchers say.

The budding planet, called PDS 70b, is a world nearly thrice as big as Jupiter and resides about 400 light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. It is part of a two-planet system — one of the few known where planets are still coalescing, providing a valuable environment for astronomers to examine the link between newborn planets and their natal disk. PDS 70b circles its host star at a distance similar to Uranus' orbit around the sun, and previous observations have hinted that it could be nearing the end of its newborn era after accumulating mass for about 5 million years.

In May, astronomers used Hawaii's Keck II telescope to study the chemical makeup of PDS 70b, specifically looking at the abundance of carbon monoxide and water. The team used this information to infer how much carbon and oxygen is present in the planet's atmosphere — two of the most common elements in our universe after hydrogen and helium and thus key traces of planet formation.

By comparing these observations with archival data on the gases in the system's protoplanetary disk, the researchers found that the planet's atmosphere contains much less carbon and oxygen than expected. They described their findings in a paper published Wednesday (Dec. 18) in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"That was a bit surprising, and it shows that our widely accepted picture of planet formation was too simplified," study lead author Chih-Chun Hsu, an observational astrophysicist who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University in Illinois, said in a statement.

The puzzling rise of planets

Scientists believe that planets, including those in our solar system, form when particles in the protoplanetary disk collide and stick together, eventually forming larger bodies through accretion. If this is indeed a universal process, planets should have similar chemical compositions to their disks.

Related: Scientists followed a mysterious signal — and found 2 black holes gorging on something like never before

The researchers propose two scenarios that could explain the observed discrepancy. First, PDS 70b could have incorporated the majority of its carbon and oxygen not directly from the gas in the protoplanetary disk but from solid material like ice and dust, which would have contained trapped carbon and oxygen.

Recent James Webb Space Telescope observations of other planetary systems suggest such a process is possible and can hold sway over the chemical makeup of fledgling planets. If PDS 70b followed the same route, "that ice and dust would have evaporated before going into the planet," study co-author Jason Wang, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University, said in the statement. "So, it might be telling us that we can't just compare gas versus gas — the solid components might be making a big difference in the carbon to oxygen ratio."

Alternatively, the protoplanetary disk may have become enriched in carbon relatively recently, as other models of planet formation predict. Existing data about the system is not sufficient to distinguish between these two possibilities, but forthcoming observations of the second planet, PDS 70c, may provide the necessary insights for more detailed modeling of the system, the researchers said.

"By studying these two planets together, we can understand the system's formation history even better," Hsu said. "But this is just one system. Ideally, we need to identify more of them to better understand how planets form."

There are estimated to be trillions and trillions of planets orbiting the stars beyond our solar system. These alien worlds are called exoplanets, and Live Science is as curious as you are about what might be on them.

That's why our expert writers and editors track interstellar research, whether it's the discovery of a new class of exoplanet, a mirror-like exoplanet that "shouldn't exist," or the possibility of the first exoplanet outside the Milky Way. So whether it’s extreme exoplanets or just memorable facts, get the latest exoplanet news, features and articles here.

Discover more about exoplanets

—Exoplanets: Alien worlds beyond our solar system

—How the Nobel Prize-winning exoplanet was found