Enlarge / Image of the AB Aurigae system, with details of the object shown at the right. (credit: NASA, ESA, Thayne Currie) On some levels, forming stars and planets is simple: They form where there’s more stuff. So, while the raw material for a star may be a diffuse cloud of gas, the distribution of […]
Enlarge / This artist’s impression shows a close-up view of Proxima d, a planet candidate recently found orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. (credit: ESO/L. Calçada) We’ve now cataloged thousands of planets that orbit distant stars. For most of them, our knowledge is limited to basic statistics: […]
Enlarge / The TESS planet-finding observatory. (credit: NASA) For centuries, scientists only had a limited number of examples to look at when it came to understanding the formation of planets. As we’ve discovered ever-increasing numbers of worlds, however, we’ve found many that look like nothing what we have in our Solar System: hot gas giants, […]
Enlarge / The site of the X-ray source in the Whirlpool Galaxy. (credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/R. DiStefano, et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/Grendler ) It’s become clear that the Milky Way is full of planets. And the Milky Way is unremarkable compared to many other galaxies, which, in all likelihood, are also rich with exoplanets. But there’s a big […]
Enlarge / This artist’s impression shows L 98-59b, one of the planets in the L 98-59 system 35 light-years away. (credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser) Most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered have been identified by large surveys like the Kepler mission or the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). While these projects are great at spotting stars that […]
Enlarge / This is what Earth looks like from within the Solar System. Imaging it from a different system entirely poses some challenges. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute) The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has primarily involved looking outward and searching nearby stars for signals that can’t be explained by known natural processes. But there has […]