exoplanets

Astronomers used JWST's MIRI to directly study the surface geology of LHS 3844 b, a super-Earth 48.5 light-years away, revealing a basaltic, atmosphere-free world resembling Mercury — a first for exoplanet science.

A University of Warwick team applied a new machine-learning pipeline called RAVEN to four years of TESS observations, statistically validating 118 short-period planets and surfacing roughly 1,000 candidates not previously catalogued.

A Princeton-led reanalysis of 83.7 million TESS light curves used random forest classifiers to surface 11,554 planet candidates, including one confirmed hot Jupiter, by reaching stars 16 times fainter than prior searches.

The TOI-201 system hosts a super-Earth, a warm Jupiter, and a record-setting brown dwarf whose gravitational interplay drives orbital shifts observable on human timescales — within 200 years its planets will stop transiting.

A new JWST MIRI observation of the 12-light-year-away exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab shows less ammonia than models predict, pointing to thick water-ice cirrus clouds that current atmospheric models omit.

NASA publicly revealed its completed Roman Space Telescope on April 21 at Goddard, setting up a Falcon Heavy launch as early as this fall for a five-year survey of dark energy, exoplanets, and the galactic bulge.

JWST observations of 29 Cygni b point to disk accretion, with carbon- and oxygen-rich signatures and a spin-aligned orbit that argue against star-like collapse.

Webb telescope finds a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a tiny red dwarf has fewer heavy elements in its atmosphere than its own star, defying all existing formation theories.

Using the upgraded GRAVITY+ instrument on the ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer, researchers have directly detected a second protoplanet forming in the disk around the young star WISPIT 2, located 437 light-years from Earth.

Two March discoveries reveal a 10-billion-year-old lava world with a thick atmosphere and a sulfur-dominated planet unlike anything in existing classification systems.

JWST observations of super-Earth L 98-59 d reveal a sulfur-dominated atmosphere sustained by a perpetual magma ocean, a combination that fits no existing planetary category and may define a new class of exoplanet.

A University of Washington team identifies signs of a catastrophic planetary collision around star Gaia20ehk, offering the first real-time analog of the giant impact that created Earth's Moon 4.5 billion years ago.