#Exoplanets

[spaceexp]

Over 800 terrestrial exoplanets visualized and arranged according to their equilibrium temperature and size.

chart by u/mVargic

[nasa]

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Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[mindblowingscience]

Astronomers have discovered a new planetary oddball beyond the solar system that is as fluffy and light as cotton candy.  The extrasolar planet or "exoplanet" named WASP-193 b is around 1.5 times the width of Jupiter but has just over a tenth of the solar system gas giant's mass. This makes it the second-lightest planet in the exoplanet catalog, which contains over 5,400 entries. Only the Neptune-like world, Kepler 51 d, is lighter than WASP-193 b. Located around 1,200 light-years from Earth, WASP-193 b orbits its star at a distance of around 6.3 million miles, which is about 0.07 times the distance between Earth and the sun. That means it completes an orbit of its sun-like star, WASP-193, in just 6.2 Earth days.

Continue Reading.

[itscolossal]

A Pair of Staggering Infographics Organizes 1,600 Planets Beyond Our Solar System by Color

[theofficialastronomy101]

[tanadrin]

This is a fun paper on the arXiv: Towards the Minimum Inner Edge Distance of the Habitable Zone. In other words, given a Sunlike star, how close can we possibly get a habitable planet while gerrymandering all the other variables in our favor? The answer is about 0.4 AU, which corresponds to around 600% the insolation that the Earth receives. Toasty! You need a very dry planet, though, not only to prevent water vapor acting as a greenhouse gas, but to prevent a runaway moist greenhouse scenario. They even explore very hot atmospheres (with high pressure, to keep what water there is liquid), but note that DNA and amino acids become unstable above about 500 K.

I would have thought you would need a very thin atmosphere to reduce heat retention, but apparently if the atmosphere is too thin (<0.1 bar), the planet loses all its water in about a billion years. If pressure is too high, on the other hand, you don't get a proper water cycle (heat is too evenly distributed for precipitation to occur). But the dominant variable affecting where the inner edge of the CHZ is is really the amount of water in the atmosphere. Humidity would have to be around 1% (Earth averages 70% at sea level), and the albedo would still have to be decently high so that a good portion of solar energy was reflected back out into space. Clouds would help with that--but by the time you got enough moisture in the atmosphere to form clouds, you'd be getting enough to significantly heat the planet from water vapor acting as a greenhouse gas.

They only look at the inner edge of the CHZ because, as they point out in the introduction, in principle the outer edge can extend to infinity--a planet with sufficient internal heating from, say, the decay of radioactive elements, or tidal heating from a gas giant primary, could remain habitable even in deep space, if it had a sufficiently thick hydrogen envelope. You don't get hydrogen atmospheres around Sunlike stars because near a star solar radiation is enough to cause hydrogen to escape the upper atmosphere--which is obviously not an issue for a rogue planet.

I think in practice the hard limit for smaller stars would be further out than this, because of the tidal locking issue--slow rotators seem to be a bad fit for this kind of extremal climate. Maybe if it was a really small star, so the inner edge of the CHZ had one of those single-digit-day orbits? I kind of like that mental image: an enormous blood red sun that occupies like six and a half degrees of sky, thirteen times the size of the Sun in our own. A totally cloudless atmosphere, water confined to small patches here and there, and mostly near the poles. Because there's not enough water to properly hydrate the upper mantle, you have drip-and-plume tectonics with enormous mountainous uplands surrounded by flat sandy plains. Or even massive Mars-like uplands and huge shield volcanoes, heavily weathered by the thicker atmosphere, but still towering over the landscape. Eventually the interior of the planet may get so cold the carbon-silicate cycle stops and the atmosphere slowly leaks away, driven by the stellar wind of the close parent star.

But there are other issues with the habitability of red dwarf systems, so maybe not.

[cosmicfunnies]

Back and better than the ever! Here’s a comic in the cold exoplanet, OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb!

https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2006/news-2006-06.html

https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/exoplanet-catalog/6081/ogle-2005-blg-390l-b/

[celestialdaily]

The celestial object of the day is TOI-1338b, unofficially known as Wolftopia!

This planet orbits around two stars, causing irregularities in its orbit, making it vary between 95 and 93 days. Although its orbit will keep being stable for another ten million years, its angle towards us will change, meaning that we can't see another transit until 2031.

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

An Exoplanet With Earth-Like Temperatures

Although researchers have identified thousands of exoplanets in the last 25 years, most of them are far larger and far hotter than Earth. But a team recently announced the discovery of a temperate neighbor, Gliese 12 b, some 40 light years away.  (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt; research credit: S. Dholakia et al.; via Gizmodo) Read the full article

[twotales]

Can't stop reading about planets and exoplanets.

Nasa has such an amazing site. You can pick a planet and spin it around, check the (solar) star system, ser the other planets in it, look at the moons, and get up close with the star, and even see the whole galaxy and more!

Have fun

[neddea]

Hey guys, I’m cooking something… A very slow cooked meal. In the meantime, welcome to Noman’s Land/Gunsmoke! Some months ago I made a post about possible exoplanets orbiting two stars that could support life, and which ones would be a good fit for Noman’s Land, and the overall take was that most planets are gas giants and therefore can’t be lived in, but their moons could! So, with that in mind, I’ve been exploring this topic quite obsessively over the past few months and painted some concept art for this lunar iteration of Trigun’s world 🌙✨

The post I’m writing explaining all of this is VERY LONG and it’s taking quite some time, so until that one is done, here is an entire day on the least inhabited face of Noman’s Land:

So basically if you lived here you would experience two “night times” in one day, since the planet would eclipse the suns during noon (this moon is tidally locked because I say so). I’ll explain everything in detail on that long ass post!

Edit: I’ve made another post with the details on Kepler-47c and my No Man’s Land!

[spaceexp]

Number of Exoplanets discovered from 2010-2023.

(chart by insane_ravager/dataisbeautiful)

[nasa]

Hot New Planetary System Just Dropped.

We hope you like your planetary systems extra spicy. 🔥

A new system of seven sizzling planets has been discovered using data from our retired Kepler space telescope.

Named Kepler-385, it’s part of a new catalog of planet candidates and multi-planet systems discovered using Kepler.

The discovery helps illustrate that multi-planetary systems have more circular orbits around the host star than systems with only one or two planets.

Our Kepler mission is responsible for the discovery of the most known exoplanets to date. The space telescope’s observations ended in 2018, but its data continues to paint a more detailed picture of our galaxy today.

Here are a few more things to know about Kepler-385:

All seven planets are between the size of Earth and Neptune.

Its star is 10% larger and 5% hotter than our Sun.

This system is one of over 700 that Kepler’s data has revealed.

The planets’ orbits have been represented in sound.

Now that you’ve heard a little about this planetary system, get acquainted with more exoplanets and why we want to explore them.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[mindblowingscience]

A planet relatively close to Earth could be the first ever detected with a potentially life-sustaining liquid ocean outside our Solar System, according to scientists using the James Webb space telescope. More than 5,000 planets have been discovered outside of the Solar System so far, but only a handful are in what is called the "Goldilocks zone" -- neither too hot or too cold -- that could host liquid water, a key ingredient for life. The exoplanet LHS 1140 b is one of the few in this habitable zone, and has been thoroughly scrutinized since it was first discovered in 2017.

Continue Reading.

[lesbicosmos]

i love when space headlines sound really stupid when you first read them <333

[theofficialastronomy101]

Jones-Emberson 1 (PK164+31.1)