June 4, 2021
Here’s what the biggest giant planet in our solar system, Jupiter, looks like. The Juno spacecraft captured this image during its 31st close flyby of Jupiter on December 30, 2020. The storm known as the Great Red Spot is visible on the horizon, nearly rotated out of view. Citizen scientist Tanya Oleksuik created this color-enhanced image using data from the JunoCam camera. Image via NASA.
Our solar system is normal
In late May 2021, astronomers released new results in a 30-year census of planetary systems beyond our own. The results show that most are arranged much like
our solar system. That is, most giant exoplanets aren’t close to their parent stars, but instead live in the suburbs of their systems. That’s contrary to what astronomers thought when first discovering giant exoplanets in the 1990s. For awhile, they thought hot Jupiters – giant planets close to their stars – might be the norm. Now the California Legacy Survey, which began in the 1990s, has
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Giant Planets Found in Stellar Suburbs
In the neighborhood that makes up our solar system, the giant planets-Jupiter and Saturn-reside in the chilly outer regions, while smaller planets tend to orbit closer to the sun. Our planet Earth lives in an intermediate tropical zone well-suited to life. Planet hunters have long wondered: Is this same type of planetary configuration common around other stars throughout our galaxy or are we unique?
The best way to find out is to do a census of the planetary denizens of the galaxy. Astronomers began such a census, called the California Legacy Survey, over three decades ago, and are now releasing a new batch of results. One pattern to emerge from the data is that giant planets tend to reside about 1 to 10 astronomical units (AU) from their host stars, a mostly icy region located beyond the temperate zone of a star. An AU is defined as the distance from Earth to our sun, or about 93 million miles.
A Tale of Planetary Resurrection January 11, 2021 Years after its detection, astronomers have learned that a planet called KOI-5Ab orbits in a triple-star system with a skewed configuration.
Shortly after NASA s Kepler mission began operations back in 2009, it identified what was thought to be a planet about the size of Neptune. Called KOI-5Ab, the planet, which was the second new planet candidate to be found by the mission, was ultimately forgotten as Kepler racked up more and more planet discoveries. By the end of its mission in 2018, Kepler had discovered a whopping 2,394 exoplanets, or planets orbiting stars beyond our sun, and an additional 2,366 exoplanet candidates, including KOI-5Ab.