An exoplanet is a planet orbiting a star other than the Sun. More than 5,800 have been confirmed since the first around a Sun-like star in 1995, ranging from scorched gas giants to rocky worlds in their stars' habitable zones. Astronomers detect them mostly by the tiny dimming as a planet transits its star, or the star's slight wobble, and increasingly characterize their atmospheres, and even their surfaces, with the James Webb Space Telescope.
Cosmology · Exoplanets · Direct Imaging
Around a bright star in Cygnus, the James Webb Space Telescope blocked the glare of the star itself and captured the faint thermal glow of a world fif...
Cosmology · Exoplanets · Planet Formation
Around a young Sun-like star called WISPIT 2, astronomers have directly imaged a gas giant glowing inside a dark gap in a multi-ringed disk, and then ...
Cosmology · Exoplanets · Rogue Planets
Untethered to any star, rogue worlds may outnumber the suns of the Milky Way. Here is how astronomers find the invisible, and why one of these frozen ...
Cosmology · Exoplanets · Habitability
Proxima Centauri b orbits the closest star to the Sun, inside the zone where liquid water could exist. The problem is the star itself, a red dwarf tha...
Cosmology · Exoplanets · Astrobiology
For the first time, the James Webb Space Telescope has read the bare rock of a world 48.5 light-years away. LHS 3844 b is a dark, hot, airless slab of...
Cosmology · Exoplanets · Astrobiology
TRAPPIST-1 has seven Earth-sized planets at 40 light-years from Earth. Three sit in the habitable zone. JWST has spent two years probing their atmosph...