Extrasolar Planets News

September 18, 2025

Top Headlines

NASA Spacecraft Detect a Mysterious Force Shaping the Solar Wind

Sep. 11, 2025 — NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission has uncovered surprising behavior of pickup ions drifting through the solar wind near Earth. These particles, once thought to be minor players, appear capable of generating waves and influencing how the ...

A Star Torn Apart by a Black Hole Lit Up the Universe Twice

Aug. 22, 2025 — Astronomers using AI have captured a once-in-a-lifetime cosmic event: a massive star’s violent death triggered by its black hole companion. The explosion, known as SN 2023zkd, not only produced a brilliant supernova but also shocked scientists by ...

Mojave Lichen Defies Death Rays—could Life Thrive on Distant Exoplanets?

June 24, 2025 — Lichen from the Mojave Desert has stunned scientists by surviving months of lethal UVC radiation, suggesting life could exist on distant planets orbiting volatile stars. The secret? A microscopic “sunscreen” layer that protects their vital ...

Millions of New Solar System Objects to Be Found and 'Filmed in Technicolor' -- Studies Predict

June 3, 2025 — Astronomers have revealed new research showing that millions of new solar system objects are likely to be detected by a brand-new facility, which is expected to come online later this ...

Particles Energized by Magnetic Reconnection in the Nascent Solar Wind

June 3, 2025 — Scientists have identified a new source of energetic particles near the Sun. These definitive observations were made by instruments aboard NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which detected the powerful phenomena as the spacecraft dipped in and out of the ...

Webb Reveals the Surprising Origin of Ultra-hot Exoplanet WASP-121b

June 2, 2025 — WASP-121b may have been born in a frozen zone and later migrated into its current inferno-like orbit. A surprise discovery of methane in the wrong place suggests intense vertical winds are reshaping how we understand planetary ...

Scientists Discover New Evidence of Intermediate-mass Black Holes

May 30, 2025 — A series of studies sheds light on the origins and characteristics of intermediate-mass black ...

'Raindrops in the Sun's Corona': New Adaptive Optics Shows Stunning Details of Our Star's Atmosphere

May 27, 2025 — Scientists have produced the finest images of the Sun's corona to date. To make these high-resolution images and movies, the team developed a new 'coronal adaptive optics' system that removes blur ...

Why Are Some Rocks on the Moon Highly Magnetic?

May 23, 2025 — Scientists may have solved the mystery of why the moon shows ancient signs of magnetism although it has no magnetic field today. An impact, such as from a large asteroid, could have generated a cloud of ionized particles that briefly enveloped the ...

Unveiling the Secrets of Planet Formation in Environments of High UV Radiation

May 21, 2025 — Even under intense ultraviolet radiation from giant stars, the raw ingredients for planets can endure. Using Webb s powerful infrared eyes, astronomers examined a young star in the Lobster Nebula and ...

Not One, but Two Massive Black Holes Are Eating Away at This Galaxy

May 19, 2025 — Astronomers searching for massive black holes shredding stars found one in an unusual place -- 2,600 light years from the core of a galaxy. The roque black hole may be from an earlier merger with another galaxy, or have been tossed out of the core ...

Ultraviolet Data from NASA's Europa Clipper Mission

May 16, 2025 — The Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) aboard NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft has successfully completed its initial commissioning following the October 14, 2024, launch. Scheduled to arrive in the Jovian system in 2030, the spacecraft will orbit ...

Latest Headlines

updated 10:57am EDT

White Dwarf Caught Devouring a Frozen Pluto-Like World

Sep. 18, 2025 — Astronomers have detected the chemical fingerprint of a frozen, water-rich planetary fragment being devoured by a white dwarf star, offering the clearest evidence yet that icy, life-delivering ...

The Violent Collisions That Made Earth Habitable

Sep. 17, 2025 — Late-stage planetary collisions reshaped Earth and its neighboring planets, delivering water, altering their atmospheres, and influencing their tectonics. New findings suggest these violent impacts ...

Scientists Crack a 50-Year Solar Mystery With a Scorching Discovery

Sep. 17, 2025 — Scientists from the University of St Andrews have discovered that ions in solar flares can reach scorching temperatures more than 60 million degrees—6.5 times hotter than previously believed. This ...

Strange Steam Worlds Could Rewrite the Search for Life

Sep. 15, 2025 — Scientists are unraveling the mysteries of "steam worlds"—exoplanets known as sub-Neptunes that are rich in water but orbit so close to their stars that their surfaces are shrouded in thick ...

NASA's Webb Space Telescope Just Found Strange Red Dots That Shouldn’t Exist

Sep. 14, 2025 — Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have uncovered mysterious “little red dots” that may not be galaxies at all, but a whole new ...

Black Holes Just Proved Stephen Hawking Right With the Clearest Signal Yet

Sep. 12, 2025 — Gravitational-wave astronomy has exploded since 2015, capturing hundreds of black hole and neutron star collisions. With ever-clearer signals, researchers are testing Einstein’s relativity and ...

This Rare White Dwarf Looks Normal, Until Hubble Shows Its Explosive Secret

Sep. 10, 2025 — Hubble has uncovered a rare ultra-massive white dwarf created in a violent star merger. Once thought to be ordinary, the star’s ultraviolet signature revealed its explosive history and hinted that ...

NASA’s Celestial “Accident” Unlocks Secrets of Jupiter and Saturn

Sep. 10, 2025 — Astronomers studying an oddball brown dwarf called “The Accident” have finally spotted silane, a long-predicted silicon molecule missing from Jupiter and Saturn’s skies. Its ancient, ...

Planet Birth Photographed for the First Time

Sep. 9, 2025 — Astronomers have directly spotted a rare young planet, WISPIT 2b, still forming within the gap of a dusty ringed disk around a star like our sun—something long theorized but never observed until ...

Astronomers Uncover a Hidden World on the Solar System’s Edge

Sep. 6, 2025 — Astronomers have uncovered a massive new trans-Neptunian object, 2017 OF201, lurking at the edge of our solar system. With an orbit stretching 25,000 years and a size that may qualify it as a dwarf ...

The Sun’s Hidden Particle Engines Finally Exposed

Sep. 3, 2025 — Solar Orbiter has identified the Sun’s dual “engines” for superfast electrons: explosive flares and sweeping coronal mass ejections. By catching over 300 events close to their origin, the ...

A Weirdly Shaped Telescope Could Finally Find Earth 2. 0

Sep. 3, 2025 — Spotting Earth-like planets is nearly impossible with conventional telescopes, but researchers propose a bold fix: a rectangular design that can separate a planet’s faint glow from its blinding ...

Astronomers Stunned as James Webb Finds a Planet Nursery Flooded With Carbon Dioxide

Aug. 31, 2025 — Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have uncovered a planet-forming disk shockingly rich in carbon dioxide but nearly devoid of water, upending traditional theories of planetary ...

Warped Planet Nurseries Rewrite the Rules of How Worlds Are Born

Sep. 2, 2025 — Astronomers using ALMA have discovered that planet-forming discs are not flat and serene but subtly warped, reshaping our understanding of how planets form. These slight tilts, similar to those seen ...

Butterfly Nebula Reveals Sparkling Gems, Fiery Dust, and the Ingredients of Life

Aug. 28, 2025 — James Webb has revealed that the Butterfly Nebula hides a complex mix of gemstone-like crystals, fiery dust, and unexpected carbon molecules. The discovery may rewrite how we understand the chemistry ...

Astronomers Capture Breathtaking First Look at a Planet Being Born

Aug. 27, 2025 — WISPIT 2b, a gas giant forming around a young Sun-like star, has been directly imaged for the first time inside a spectacular multi-ringed disk. Still glowing and actively accreting gas, the planet ...

Distant Suns Covered in Dark Spots Could Shape the Search for Life

Sep. 2, 2025 — A new model called StarryStarryProcess lets scientists map star spots with precision, improving how exoplanets are studied. By factoring in both transits and stellar rotation, it provides richer ...

Stunning New Images: The Sun’s Smallest Loops Ever Seen

Aug. 26, 2025 — Astronomers using the Inouye Solar Telescope have captured the sharpest-ever images of a solar flare, revealing coronal loops as thin as 21 km wide. These threadlike plasma structures, imaged during ...

Dark Matter Could Be Turning Giant Planets Into Black Holes

Sep. 1, 2025 — Astronomers have found over 5,000 exoplanets, and now scientists think these distant worlds could unlock one of the universe’s greatest mysteries: dark matter. A new study suggests that ...

Are We Accidentally Broadcasting Our Location to Alien Civilizations?

Aug. 23, 2025 — Earth may already be broadcasting its presence to alien civilizations without realizing it. A new study shows that our deep-space transmissions, especially those aimed at Mars and interplanetary ...

Jupiter’s Core Isn’t What We Thought

Aug. 24, 2025 — For years, scientists thought Jupiter’s strange interior was the result of a massive collision in its youth. But new research suggests that the planet’s diffuse, “fuzzy” core wasn’t born ...

These Asteroids Share a Strange Fingerprint from Billions of Years Ago

Aug. 23, 2025 — Scientists studying asteroids found that two seemingly unrelated types share a strange dusty coating of troilite. By using polarization of light instead of traditional spectra, they uncovered ...

Astronomers Uncover Enormous Bubble Bigger Than Our Solar System

Aug. 21, 2025 — A giant bubble of gas and dust surrounds the red supergiant DFK 52, likely created in a powerful outburst 4,000 years ago. Astronomers are baffled at how the star survived without going supernova, ...

Astronomers Stunned by the Strangest Supernova Ever Seen

Aug. 21, 2025 — Scientists have identified a never-before-seen supernova, SN2021yfj, which exploded after losing nearly all of its outer layers. Instead of light elements, it revealed silicon and sulfur from deep ...

After 70 Years, the Sun’s Explosive Mystery Is Finally Solved

Aug. 20, 2025 — NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has directly observed magnetic reconnection in the Sun’s atmosphere for the first time, confirming decades-old theories about solar explosions. This discovery bridges ...

The Disappearing Planet Next Door Has Astronomers Intrigued

Aug. 14, 2025 — NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected strong evidence for a giant planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A, the nearest Sun-like star to Earth. Located just 4 light-years away, this possible ...

Scientists Stunned by the Universe’s First Known Black Hole

Aug. 31, 2025 — Just 500 million years after the Big Bang, a colossal black hole, 300 million times the mass of the Sun, was already blazing at the heart of a tiny, brilliant galaxy. Found with JWST, this discovery ...

Hubble Just Exposed a Rare and Violent Star Collision

Aug. 7, 2025 — Hubble has helped uncover a white dwarf that’s likely the result of two stars crashing together. Carbon traces in its atmosphere tell a story of a cosmic merger, a rare phenomenon previously ...

Voyager Missed It, but Now We Know Uranus Has a Fiery Secret

Aug. 13, 2025 — For decades, scientists puzzled over why Uranus seemed colder than expected. Now, an international research team led by the University of Houston has solved the mystery: Uranus emits more heat than ...

Astronomers Detect Life’s Building Blocks Around a Young Star

Aug. 2, 2025 — Astronomers using ALMA have discovered complex organic molecules, including potential precursors to life's building blocks, in the protoplanetary disc of a young star, V883 Orionis. This finding ...