Category Archives: Exoplanets

The Drake Equation

The idea of life on other planets has always been a hot topic. An entire genre has been developed to showcase aliens stemming from human imagination. This is usually pseudoscience, but it does beg the question: are aliens real? While we have never contacted or found evidence of other civilizations, there is a way to […] Continue reading

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Naming Extrasolar Planets

Ever since we learned about the naming themes with the Jovian planets’ moons in class two weeks ago, I have been interested about how astronomers have managed to not run out of naming themes for the vast universe as they discover more worlds. I thought that the Jovian planets took up most of the cooler […] Continue reading

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It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s… Super Earth???

Image by NASA https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/eyes-on-exoplanets/#/planet/GJ_15_A_b/ Within our solar system, there are three main classes of planets: terrestrials, gas giants, and ice giants. These planet types are reflected throughout the universe, with NASA categorizing these similar planets as gas giants (or Jupiter-analogues), Neptune-likes, and terrestrials (or Earth-analogues). However, within the universe, NASA also recognizes and classifies exoplanets […] Continue reading

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Exoplanets!

Over the past several decades, the study of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, has been one of the most rapidly advancing fields of astronomy and even science in general. With huge leaps forward that have been made in both technology and methodology, the number of exoplanets astronomers have been able to directly observe has exploded, with […] Continue reading

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Exoplanet – VHS 1256b

There have been over 5,000 exoplanets discovered to this day. Amongst those 5,000 is exoplanet VHS 1256b. This exoplanet is about 40 light years away from Earth. It was discovered fairly recently with the James Webb Telescope, and it is especially interesting because of its relatively young astronomical age. This exoplanet was formed only about […] Continue reading

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A World Where It Rains Glass

Image Source This planet, HD 189733b, is the first exoplanet to have its color confirmed. We now know it is a deep, dark blue from a technique called secondary eclipse that scientists used to determine its albedo. As the planet was just about to finish transiting its host star relative to us, scientists measured light […] Continue reading

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Waterworlds Make Earth Look Dry

Image Source In a system 218 light years from Earth, scientists have discovered two planets, Kepler-138 c and Kepler-138 d, which make Earth look like a desert in comparison. Both planets were initially thought by scientists to be rocky super-Earths. However, after closer examination by the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists were able to determine that […] Continue reading

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Super Earths, what’s beyond the solar system?

Super Earth  CoRoT-7b next to Earth and Neptune for comparison, Source: Science News, Wikipedia The planets of the solar system, and the categories they fall into is basically common knowledge in this day and age. There are the rocky and dwarf worlds with a mass and size comparable or less than that of Earths. These […] Continue reading

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Ocean Worlds of Supercritical Fluid

In class, we learned about various categories of exoplanets, including Super-Earths, terrestrials, ice giants, gas giants, and hot Jupiters. One other category that was mentioned was “water worlds,” an ill-defined and not entirely proven category of planets. This category would describe planets that are on the border between terrestrials and ice giants, or terrestrial worlds […] Continue reading

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Earth-like Exoplanet

The super cool story of a discovery of an exoplanet! It’s so cool that an exoplanet look like this! There has been an incredibly interesting and exciting discovery made recently! The James Webb telescope has discovered and photographed an exoplanet and collected data to validate its existence as an exoplanet. An exoplanet is an astronomical […] Continue reading

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