A rare exoplanet that should have been stripped down to bare rock by its nearby host star s intense radiation somehow grew a puffy atmosphere instead the latest in a string of discoveries forcing scientists to rethink theories about how planets age and die in extreme environments. Nicknamed Phoenix for its ability to survive its red giant star s radiant energy discovered planet illustrates the vast diversity of solar systems and the complexity of planetary evolution especially at the end of stars lives.
It s never a pretty sight when walking into the bathroom and seeing yellow stains on the toilet seat. While there are many potential causes for these unsightly blemishes, they can be removed.
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VIDEO: A computer simulation of how the distribution of planet sizes changes as planetary systems age. The radius gap is evident at around double Earth s radius though it depends on. view more
Credit: Animation by Erik Petigura (UCLA); Simulation by James Owen (Imperial College London)
There s been a breakthrough in the case of the missing planets.
While planet-hunting missions have discovered thousands of worlds orbiting distant stars, there s a severe scarcity of exoplanets that measure between 1.5 and two times Earth s radius. That s the middle ground between rocky super-Earths and larger, gas-shrouded planets called mini-Neptunes. Since discovering this radius gap in 2017, scientists have been sleuthing out why there are so few midsize heavenly bodies.
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Astronomers have discovered new hints of a giant, scorching-hot planet orbiting Vega, one of the brightest stars in the night sky.
The research, published this month in
The Astronomical Journal, was led by University of Colorado Boulder student Spencer Hurt, an undergraduate in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences.
It focuses on an iconic and relatively young star, Vega, which is part of the constellation Lyra and has a mass twice that of our own sun. This celestial body sits just 25 light-years, or about 150 trillion miles, from Earth pretty close, astronomically speaking.
Scientists can also see Vega with telescopes even when it s light out, which makes it a prime candidate for research, said study coauthor Samuel Quinn.