13 articles
When a planet crosses its star, a sliver of light filters through its atmosphere and certain colors vanish - the fingerprints of its gases. That faint signal is how the search for life beyond Earth actually works, and why a promising result is never proof.
For at least one full 33-day orbit, the VLA and MeerKAT swept the famous exoplanet across radio frequencies sensitive enough to catch a trillion-watt beacon. A SETI team found no artificial signal - though they are careful about what that silence proves.
Using a telescope in Chile, scientists detected helium escaping from LHS 1140 b - a super-Earth sitting exactly where liquid water could exist on a rocky surface. It is the first rocky habitable-zone world confirmed to hold any atmosphere at all.
A lithium spike in the spectrum of a subgiant star 1,300 light-years away is consistent with planetary ingestion - and its close brown-dwarf companion may have pushed the planet inward.
NASA's TESS mission has confirmed two Jupiter-sized planets orbiting a star 1,110 light-years away that are so diffuse they are lighter than cotton candy, setting a new density record for gas giants.
The Euclid space telescope published its first high-resolution survey of the Milky Way's central bulge on June 24, 2026, providing the resolution needed to confirm candidate exoplanets flagged by ground-based surveys over the last two decades.
The nearly 18,000-pound observatory completed its barge journey from Maryland to Florida on June 21, beginning weeks of fuelling, solar panel tests, and clean-room checks before its August 30 target launch.
For the first time, astronomers have found that salt clouds are essential to explaining a planet's atmosphere. James Webb's two-hour study of GJ 504b could reshape how scientists model cold giant worlds.
A new arXiv paper and Keck Institute study argue that the five-spacecraft LIFE mission has cleared its core engineering hurdles - raising the first plausible technical pathway to directly sampling the atmospheres of Earth-like exoplanets for chemical signs of life.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has recorded the sharpest view yet of HD 80606 b - a gas giant 217 light-years away whose temperature rockets by 1,100°F as it sweeps past its host star, revealing methane and carbon dioxide in its rapidly shifting atmosphere.
A team led by CNRS researchers used ESO's VLT/SPHERE instrument over four years to directly map the rotation of the protoplanetary disk around AB Aurigae - the first such observation - revealing accretion zones that indicate giant planets are actively forming inside it.
NASA confirmed August 30, 2026 as the launch date for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope - eight months early. The wide-field infrared observatory will survey 100 million stars and is expected to catalogue approximately 2,500 new exoplanets.
A Nature Astronomy study published June 2, 2026 found that slow atmospheric winds on seven ultra-hot Jupiters carry the signature of magnetic fields comparable in strength to those in our own solar system - the first such measurement ever made.
