Space Station Threshold

Have the floodgates opened for imaging exoplanets?! A team of French astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope have discovered an object located very close to the star Beta Pictoris. This object lies only 8 times the Earth-Sun distance, and it's likely a giant planet that astronomers suspected was there from the peculiar shape of the ...

Persistence has paid off for astronomer Paul Kalas. After eight years and taking repeated photographs with the Hubble Space Telescope of a nearby star, he finally has what he and many astronomers have been striving for: the first visible-light snapshot of a planet outside our solar system. This coincides with the [...]

Here's what we've all been waiting for: for the first time, astronomers have taken pictures of a multi-planet solar system, much like ours, orbiting another star. This coincides with announcement of the first visible light image of an extrasolar planet. This new solar system orbits a dusty young star named HR8799, [...]

Back in 2000, astronomers discovered a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting the nearby star Epsilon Eridani. Since that star system is listed in some Star Trek lore as the location of the fabled planet Vulcan, astronomers joked they had found Spock's homeworld. But enticing new discoveries of the Epsilon Eridani system implies it could be [...]

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 ...

The current exoplanet count — the number of planets astronomers have found orbiting other stars –stands at 312. That's a lot of planets. But not a single one of them can be classified as Earth-like. We just don't have the ability to detect planets that small yet. But it might help [...]

The powerful opening scene of the movie "Contact" portrays radio and television signals from Earth heading out into space. Then later in the film, shockingly, one of those signals — a televised speech by Adolf Hitler — is beamed back as a reply. Could that really happen? Could an alien civilization "find" us [...]

Last May, the COROT satellite discovered another exoplanet to add to the stack of 228 confirmed exoplanets. Follow-up investigations of the object, named Corot-exo-3b, have revealed it to be quite a curiosity as far as exoplanets are concerned, and some of its characteristics – such as its density of twice that of lead – may [...]

What astronomers had expected to be a run-of-the-mill protoplanetary disk turned out to be evidence of a much more intriguing story. While observing the sun-like star BD 20 307, a team of astronomers noticed a large disk of dust surrounding the star. Usually, this is evidence of planetary formation around younger stars. The 8 planets [...]

Astronomers have unveiled what is likely the first picture of a planet around a normal star similar to the Sun. Using the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, astronomers from the University of Toronto imaged the young star 1RXS J160929.1-210524, which lies about 500 light-years from Earth and a candidate companion [...]