First ‘glory’ on hellish distant world?
For the first time, potential signs of the rainbow-like ‘glory effect’ have been detected on a planet outside our Solar System. Glory are colourful concentric rings of light that occur only under peculiar conditions.
Data from ESA’s sensitive Characterising ExOplanet Satellite, Cheops, along with several other ESA and NASA missions, suggest this delicate phenomenon is beaming straight at Earth from the hellish atmosphere of ultra-hot gas giant WASP-76b, 637 light-years away.
Seen often on Earth, the effect has only been found once on another planet, Venus. If confirmed, this first extrasolar glory will reveal more about the nature of this puzzling exoplanet, with exciting lessons for how to better understand strange, distant worlds.
Ten Camera Flight Models ready for integration: names unveiled
How many earth-like planets orbit the habitable zone of solar-like stars? How planets form and evolve in their planetary systems? What about the interaction with their stars? These are among the questions the ESA PLATO mission is called to answer, through exquisite...
Groundbreaking survey reveals secrets of planet birth around dozens of stars
In a series of studies, a team of astronomers has shed new light on the fascinating and complex process of planet formation. The stunning images, captured using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile, represent one of the...
MeerKAT+: the MeerKAT Extension
The handover of the first dish of the MeerKAT extension signals an important milestone for the SKA-MID construction
ESA’s Cheops helps unlock rare six-planet system
A rare star system with six exoplanets has been unlocked with the help of ESA’s Cheops mission. The discovery is particularly valuable because the planets’ orbital configuration shows that the system is largely unchanged since its formation more than a billion years ago.
PLATO Science in Italy: ready to data exploitation?
From 25 to 27 September, the INAF-Astrophysical Observatory of Catania will host a workshop dedicated to PLATO, the 3rd mission of class M in the ESA Cosmic Vision program. Its main goal is detecting terrestrial planets in the habitable zone of solar type stars. With...
Solar Orbiter closes in on the solution to a 65-year-old solar mystery
A cosmic alignment and a little bit of spacecraft gymnastics has provided a ground-breaking measurement that is helping solve the 65-year-old cosmic mystery of why the Sun’s atmosphere is so hot.
The densest Neptunian ever observed
Its name is Toi-1853b and it is extremely peculiar: every 30 hours it completes one complete revolution around its star (the Earth takes a year to complete one complete revolution around the Sun), it has a radius comparable to Neptune’s (3.5 Earth radii, hence...