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A New Type of Ocean World Discovered!
Discovering a planet is a feat on its own that not too many people can boast. Now imagine discovering a new type of planet, one that has high chances of harboring life to boot. Dr. …
Exoplanets
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Astronomers Verify Proxima Centauri Hosts Earth-Sized Planet
Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our own Sun, and for the last 4 years there have been several hints pointing to an exoplanet orbiting it. Not just any planet, an Earth like planet. …
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Astronomy PhD Student Discovers 17 New Worlds
Michelle Kunimoto is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Together with her supervisor Jaymie Matthews, she combs through millions of observations made by the Kepler satellite in search of new …
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TESS Telescope Finds Its First Habitable Planet Around Red Dwarf
Are we alone? This is a question that we have asked ourselves ever since we started studying space. At first there were our 7 heavenly neighbors in our solar system, and later hundreds of new …
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Milestone Reached With 4,000 Exoplanets Discovered
In June, exoplanet science reached a milestone with an astounding 4,000 planets discovered beyond our solar system. That’s a big leap forward considering the first confirmed detection of a world beyond our own star system …
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Exoplanet Observed Using Light From Optical Telescopes
For the first time in history an exoplanet has been observed using optical interferometry. The process involved combining the light from multiple individual telescopes to reveal a single target in greater detail than any single …
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Barnard’s Star Hosts a Frozen Super-Earth
The image above shows an artists’ impression of what the surface of the super-Earth orbiting Barnard’s Star might look like. However, given that the planet receives only about 2% of the light Earth receives from …
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Is Kepler-1625b The First Exoplanet With A Moon To Be Discovered?
The image above shows an artists’ impression of the star Kepler- 1265, with the bigger of the black dots representing its associated gas planet, designated Kepler- 1265b, while the smaller dot represents the planet’s putative …
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Why We May Not Want To Visit Some Exoplanets
The image above shows an artists’ impression of the exoplanet Kepler-452b, the first exoplanet that was found to orbit a Sun-like star. Dubbed a super-Earth, the planet is about 60% bigger than Earth, which is …
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Bad News for Life on Exoplanets
It is known that red dwarf stars account for about 75% of all the stars in the Milky Way, and astronomers generally agree that red dwarfs are likely to occur in similar numbers in most …