Space Station Threshold

Planets approximately the size of Jupiter orbiting close to their star in other systems are often referred to as "Hot Jupiters." It would appear that a new classification is required: Very Hot and Very Fast Jupiters. WASP-12b is an exoplanet, about 50% more massive than Jupiter, orbiting a star (imaginatively called WASP-12) over 800 ...

Astronomers are looking for planets around other stars, but they're also looking for the conditions where planets might be forming right now. Inside the disks of material that surround newly forming planets, they could be planets clearing paths through all the gas and dust. A team of Japanese astronomers have found the most lightweight ...

As you gaze up at the familiar Pleiades star cluster, here's something new you can think about. Planets recently collided around two of the stars in the cluster, kicking up vast clouds of dust. New worlds are being formed, and destroyed, right before our very eyes. At least, if you've got the help from some [...]

Astronomers have found a burned out white dwarf star with the remants of an Earthlike planet orbiting it. This chemical fingerprint gives hope that terrestrial planets, like the ones in our Solar System, could be common across the Universe. Now we just need to find some that havn't been pulverized into planet powder.

It’s been a week of planetary discoveries. Here’s another. This latest find announced by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is the most massive planet ever discovered. This gas giant, named HAT-P-2b, weighs in at 8 times the mass of Jupiter. HAT-P-2b was discovered using the transit method. In other words, it was ...

If you’re a newly forming star system, there’s no better place to be than a stellar nursery. All those raw elements make the perfect building blocks of stars and planets. The problem is that super hot giant stars can release great torrents of radiation, blasting away newly forming planets. In a new study gathered using NASA’s ...