All posts tagged: Astronomers

Astronomers Found the First Atmosphere on a Planet in Another Star’s Habitable Zone

Astronomers Found the First Atmosphere on a Planet in Another Star’s Habitable Zone

Published by Miika Tikkanen

The search for life beyond Earth has borne little fruit. That remains true, but scientists have some renewed hope. For the first time, astronomers discovered an atmosphere surrounding an exoplanet within the habitable zone of its host star.  Say hello to LHS 1140b, an Earth-like rocky planet that lives approximately 48 light-years away from us. For reference, Voyager 1 is rapidly approaching its first light day after nearly 50 years in flight. LHS 1140b sits in the “Goldilocks” zone for its star, which means it’s far enough away to not get roasted like Mercury, but close enough that it gets warm enough to support liquid water.  According to a new study published in Science, the “special” part of this discovery is not just the habitable zone around a star. It’s that it seems to meet extra criteria that scientists care about — i.e., it’s rocky, not a gas giant, and can still hold onto an atmosphere despite harsh conditions. An atmosphere is what helps stabilize surface temperatures, which is essential for life to exist.  “It’s …

Astronomers just found the most pristine star of all-time

Astronomers just found the most pristine star of all-time

Published by Jenni Sidey

Long ago, far beyond our deepest views of the cosmos, star formed in the Universe for the very first time. It’s not a complete surprise that we haven’t spotted them yet; made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium alone, they were extremely massive and short-lived compared to the stars we see today. However, once those first stars die, their ejecta — depending on your perspective — either “enrich” or “pollute” the interstellar medium around them, meaning that the next generation of stars to form, and all generations thereafter, will be substantially different from that first generation. However, unlike the first generation of stars, all subsequent generations should have the capability of producing small, red, low-mass stars that burn through their fuel quite slowly: so slowly that even a star formed back at the beginning of the Universe should still be alive today. Of course, galaxies are messy places, and a far greater number of stars have formed since those early times, making the task of finding such a relic more challenging than even the classic …

A ‘forbidden planet’ the size of Jupiter has astronomers stumped

A ‘forbidden planet’ the size of Jupiter has astronomers stumped

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. There’s a “forbidden” oddball planet about 282 light-years away from Earth. The Jupiter-esque planet known as TOI-5205 b is the first exoplanet of its kind with an atmosphere containing far fewer heavy elements than similarly sized objects, as well as its own red dwarf star. According to an international team writing in The Astronomical Journal, this forbidden planet challenges common assumptions about cosmic evolution.  TOI-5205 b was discovered in 2023 using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Since then, astronomers around the world have been studying the planet’s composition through a range of techniques including spectrography. Whenever a planet travels in front of its host star—a process known as transit—it blocks around six percent of overall light. With space telescope spectrography, researchers can break down the remaining wavelengths into specific color bands, each corresponding with the elements in its atmosphere. After three transits, astronomers determined TOI-5205 b possesses an atmosphere with compounds like methane and hydrogen sulphide. However, they …

Astronomers identify 45 Earth-like planets in habitable zones

Astronomers identify 45 Earth-like planets in habitable zones

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Astronomers have narrowed the search for extraterrestrial life by identifying a focused group of Earth-like planets that may offer the most favourable conditions for habitability. Drawing on updated stellar data and planetary records, researchers have compiled a catalogue of rocky exoplanets located within habitable zones – regions around stars where liquid water could potentially exist. The study highlights 45 planets as the strongest candidates for supporting life, out of more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets discovered to date. A further subset of 24 planets falls within a more restrictive definition of habitability, offering a refined framework for future observation and analysis. Defining the habitable zone The concept of the habitable zone remains central to the search for life beyond Earth. It refers to the orbital region around a star where temperatures are neither too extreme for liquid water to persist on a planet’s surface. Water, widely considered essential for life as we know it, makes this zone a primary target for astronomers. Using updated measurements from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission alongside data from the …

For the first time, astronomers witnessed the birth of a ‘magnetar’

For the first time, astronomers witnessed the birth of a ‘magnetar’

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In December 2024, astronomers watched a star around 25 times the mass of our sun die in a blaze of glory. Located one billion light-years from Earth, SN 2024afav was a prime example of a superluminous supernova—an event that’s at least 10 times brighter than a large star’s explosion. Researchers around the world used the Las Cumbres Observatory’s global network of 27 telescopes to document the spectacle for more than 200 days. While the supernova’s brightness peaked at around Day 50, astronomers noticed something strange. Instead of slowly fading as expected, the luminosity oscillated downward while the time between each fluctuation shortened. Past examples of superluminous supernovae exhibited one or two bumps, but SN 2024afav displayed four of them. After months of calculations—as well as some help from Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity—researchers believe they have an explanation. For the first time ever, astronomers witnessed the birth of a magnetar—a fast spinning, immensely magnetized neutron star. The ramifications, …

JWST finds nine category-defying objects. Have astronomers found their “platypus?”

JWST finds nine category-defying objects. Have astronomers found their “platypus?”

Published by Jenni Sidey

Sign up for the Starts With a Bang newsletter Travel the universe with Dr. Ethan Siegel as he answers the biggest questions of all. In the animal kingdom, one of the most bizarre discoveries of all-time was the platypus. When reports of the platypus reached the western hemisphere, most leading naturalists at the time assumed it was a hoax, including the first European scientists to examine a specimen in 1799. It was an animal that laid eggs, yet it was a mammal. It had the bill of a duck, but the tail of a beaver. It had (at least, the males do) venomous spurs on their hind legs, but also the ability to locate other creatures in the water through a specialized sense known as electroreception, common in sharks but very rare among mammals. And yet, the platypus exists with all of these properties, even if it would take decades (or more than a century) before we understood how such a creature could come to exist. Astronomers have just encountered a very similar situation by …

Astronomers Intrigued By Impossible Structure Around Dead Star

Astronomers Intrigued By Impossible Structure Around Dead Star

Published by José Betancourt

ESO/K. Iłkiewicz and S. Scaringi et al. Background: PanSTARRS A dead star 730 light years away appears to be forming a powerful structure around itself — and despite their best efforts, astronomers aren’t sure how. The cosmic corpse, designated RXJ0528+2838, is an incredibly dense stellar remnant known as a white dwarf, with a Sun-like star orbiting around it. This binary arrangement isn’t uncommon throughout the universe, but what is strange is the structure surrounding the former body: a highly energetic and luminescent cloud known as a nebula, even though there doesn’t appear to be anything that could be forming it. “Our observations reveal a powerful outflow that, according to our current understanding, shouldn’t be there,” said Krystian Iłkiewicz, a researcher at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center in Warsaw, Poland, and co-lead author of a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, in a statement. White dwarfs are what’s left over when stars of moderate mass like our Sun exhaust all their fuel, shed their outer layers, and expose a dense core. In many cases …