A new study has found that the seven planets orbiting the nearby ultra-cool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 are all made mostly of rock, and some could potentially hold more water than Earth. The planets’ densities, now known much more precisely than before, suggest that some of them could have up to 5 percent of their mass […]
Astronomers have found a system of seven Earth-sized planets just 40 light-years away. Using ground and space telescopes, including ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the planets were all detected as they passed in front of their parent star, the ultracool dwarf star known as TRAPPIST-1. According to the paper appearing today in the journal Nature, […]
Astronomers usually spend their time contemplating the heavens above. But one group of dedicated stargazers has challenged the community to look instead to the future, envisioning the tools for generating more celestial discoveries. On July 6, a team of astronomers proposed a new type of mission to crack some of the universe’s most intriguing mysteries […]
To find life in the universe, it helps to know what it might look like. If there are organisms on other planets that do not rely wholly on photosynthesis — as some on Earth do not — how might those worlds appear from light-years away? That’s among the questions University of Washington doctoral student Edward […]