#Exoplanets

[nature-godsgardenofeden]

♥

12 Great Gifts from Astronomy

This is a season where our thoughts turn to others and many exchange gifts with friends and family. For astronomers, our universe is the gift that keeps on giving. We’ve learned so much about it, but every question we answer leads to new things we want to know. Stars, galaxies, planets, black holes … there are endless wonders to study.

In honor of this time of year, let’s count our way through some of our favorite gifts from astronomy.

Our first astronomical gift is … one planet Earth

So far, there is only one planet that we’ve found that has everything needed to support life as we know it — Earth. Even though we’ve discovered over 5,200 planets outside our solar system, none are quite like home. But the search continues with the help of missions like our Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). And even you (yes, you!) can help in the search with citizen science programs like Planet Hunters TESS and Backyard Worlds.

Our second astronomical gift is … two giant bubbles

Astronomers found out that our Milky Way galaxy is blowing bubbles — two of them! Each bubble is about 25,000 light-years tall and glows in gamma rays. Scientists using data from our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope discovered these structures in 2010, and we're still learning about them.

Our third astronomical gift is … three types of black holes

Most black holes fit into two size categories: stellar-mass goes up to hundreds of Suns, and supermassive starts at hundreds of thousands of Suns. But what happens between those two? Where are the midsize ones? With the help of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, scientists found the best evidence yet for that third, in between type that we call intermediate-mass black holes. The masses of these black holes should range from around a hundred to hundreds of thousands of times the Sun’s mass. The hunt continues for these elusive black holes.

Our fourth and fifth astronomical gifts are … Stephan’s Quintet

When looking at this stunning image of Stephan’s Quintet from our James Webb Space Telescope, it seems like five galaxies are hanging around one another — but did you know that one of the galaxies is much closer than the others? Four of the five galaxies are hanging out together about 290 million light-years away, but the fifth and leftmost galaxy in the image below — called NGC 7320 — is actually closer to Earth at just 40 million light-years away.

Our sixth astronomical gift is … an eclipsing six-star system

Astronomers found a six-star system where all of the stars undergo eclipses, using data from our TESS mission, a supercomputer, and automated eclipse-identifying software. The system, called TYC 7037-89-1, is located 1,900 light-years away in the constellation Eridanus and the first of its kind we’ve found.

Our seventh astronomical gift is … seven Earth-sized planets

In 2017, our now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope helped find seven Earth-size planets around TRAPPIST-1. It remains the largest batch of Earth-size worlds found around a single star and the most rocky planets found in one star’s habitable zone, the range of distances where conditions may be just right to allow the presence of liquid water on a planet’s surface.

Further research has helped us understand the planets’ densities, atmospheres, and more!

Our eighth astronomical gift is … an (almost) eight-foot mirror

The primary mirror on our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is approximately eight feet in diameter, similar to our Hubble Space Telescope. But Roman can survey large regions of the sky over 1,000 times faster, allowing it to hunt for thousands of exoplanets and measure light from a billion galaxies.

Our ninth astronomical gift is … a kilonova nine days later

In 2017, the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and European Gravitational Observatory’s Virgo detected gravitational waves from a pair of colliding neutron stars. Less than two seconds later, our telescopes detected a burst of gamma rays from the same event. It was the first time light and gravitational waves were seen from the same cosmic source. But then nine days later, astronomers saw X-ray light produced in jets in the collision’s aftermath. This later emission is called a kilonova, and it helped astronomers understand what the slower-moving material is made of.

Our tenth astronomical gift is … NuSTAR’s ten-meter-long mast

Our NuSTAR X-ray observatory is the first space telescope able to focus on high-energy X-rays. Its ten-meter-long (33 foot) mast, which deployed shortly after launch, puts NuSTAR’s detectors at the perfect distance from its reflective optics to focus X-rays. NuSTAR recently celebrated 10 years since its launch in 2012.

Our eleventh astronomical gift is … eleven days of observations

How long did our Hubble Space Telescope stare at a seemingly empty patch of sky to discover it was full of thousands of faint galaxies? More than 11 days of observations came together to capture this amazing image — that’s about 1 million seconds spread over 400 orbits around Earth!

Our twelfth astronomical gift is … a twelve-kilometer radius

Pulsars are collapsed stellar cores that pack the mass of our Sun into a whirling city-sized ball, compressing matter to its limits. Our NICER telescope aboard the International Space Station helped us precisely measure one called J0030 and found it had a radius of about twelve kilometers — roughly the size of Chicago! This discovery has expanded our understanding of pulsars with the most precise and reliable size measurements of any to date.

Stay tuned to NASA Universe on Twitter and Facebook to keep up with what’s going on in the cosmos every day. You can learn more about the universe here.

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

[spaceexp]

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

chart by u/mVargic

[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

[spacetelescopescience]

Over the last several months, engineers have been at work in the clean room at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, putting together the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

The Coronagraph Instrument—a technology demonstration designed to image exoplanets—and Optical Telescope Assembly—which includes the primary mirror and nine additional mirrors—are now attached to the Instrument Carrier.

With those components in place, the team then added Roman’s primary instrument, the Wide Field Instrument. This 300-megapixel infrared camera will give Roman a deep, panoramic view of the universe.

The observatory is on track for completion by fall 2026 and launch no later than May 2027.

Credit: NASA, Chris Gunn, and Sydney Rohde.

[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

[nasa]

Black Hole Friday Deals!

Get these deals before they are sucked into a black hole and gone forever! This “Black Hole Friday,” we have some cosmic savings that are sure to be out of this world.

Your classic black holes — the ultimate storage solution.

Galactic 5-for-1 special! Learn more about Stephan’s Quintet.

Limited-time offer game DLC! Try your hand at the Roman Space Observer Video Game, Black Hole edition, available this weekend only.

Standard candles: Exploding stars that are reliably bright. Multi-functional — can be used to measure distances in space!

Feed the black hole in your stomach. Spaghettification’s on the menu.

Act quickly before the stars in this widow system are gone!

Add some planets to your solar system! Grab our Exoplanet Bundle.

Get ready to ride this (gravitational) wave before this Black Hole Merger ends!

Be the center of attention in this stylish accretion disk skirt. Made of 100% recycled cosmic material.

Should you ever travel to a black hole? No. But if you do, here’s a free guide to make your trip as safe* as possible. *Note: black holes are never safe. 

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

[spaceexp]

Number of Exoplanets discovered from 2010-2023.

(chart by insane_ravager/dataisbeautiful)

[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.

[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!

[lesbicosmos]

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