K2-18b is warm, has an atmosphere, and has water vapor. But it’s no Earth 2.0.
exoplanets
Posted inNews
Nearest Star System May Have a Second Planet
The exoplanet candidate, tentatively named Proxima c, would be a frozen snowball.
Posted inNews
Ultrahot Exoplanet Bleeds Heavy Metals into Space
The planet is also shaped like a football (the American kind).
Posted inNews
Giant Planets and Brown Dwarfs Form in Different Ways
Once thought to be part of the same population, planets larger than Jupiter and “failed stars” likely grow via different mechanisms, the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey has shown.
Posted inNews
Chemical Patterns May Predict Stars That Host Giant Planets
Stars with giant planets tend to have a few key elements in abundance. A new algorithm used these patterns to predict hundreds of stars that will likely have exoplanets if we go looking for them.
Posted inNews
Modeling the Climates of Worlds Beyond Earth
Scientists are applying climate models to distant planets to determine their habitability.
Posted inNews
NASA Space Telescope Spots Its Third Planet
A planet 3 times as large as the Earth was detected by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite in a relatively leisurely orbit—the longest yet detected by this telescope—of 36 days.
Posted inNews
One-Pixel Views of Earth Reveal Seasonal Changes
By averaging satellite images of the Earth down to a single pixel, researchers trace how the planet’s mean color varies over time, results that inform observations of distant exoplanets.
Posted inNews
Exoplanet Strategy Promotes Big Missions, Individual Science
Collaborative and interdisciplinary research will be key to realizing the missions’ full potential, according to the exoplanet strategy report.
Posted inNews
Large Exomoon Likely Orbits a Faraway World
This Neptune-sized object would be the first moon discovered to orbit a planet outside the solar system, provided that additional observations continue to support the claim.