July 2021
Arecibo - an astounding legacy
... as 425C at the planet’s surface. The discovery of the first exoplanet was also made in 1992; it was part of a planetary system of at least three Earth-like planets around the millisecond pulsar PSR 1257+12. 1997 marked a second major...
December 2014
MAVEN and the evolution of Mars
... distance and history, planet mass and size, and possibly planetary magnetic field, can greatly alter the fate of a terrestrial planet. The extrasolar planetary systems harbouring terrestrial planets that are now observed in ever greater numbers...
August 2018
Exoplanet census promises radical discoveries
... extends outward. As a result, WFIRST is sensitive to analogues of all the solar system’s planets, except for Mercury, while Kepler has primarily studied planetary systems very different from our own. The sensitivity of the WFIRST microlensing survey...
19 January 2016
Giant double-planet system around an evolved star detected by astronomers
... both of the planets have nearly circular orbits, it is not known if the orbits of the planets are stable. Planetary systems with near circular orbits have better chances of survival because in these configurations, the bodies might interact...
October 2015
Finding Earth-like worlds: the tale of how Kepler-452b was discovered
... how many planets there are, especially planets in these multiple systems. This tells us that nature loves to build planetary systems and that there are processes within these planetary systems that force the planets to migrate inwards. Many of these...
21 June 2017
LISA gets green light from ESA
... in ESA's Cosmic Vision programme and its aim is to find and study a large number of extrasolar planetary systems, in particular those that mirror our own solar system i.e terrestrial-type planets in the habitable zone around solar-like stars.
