New sub-Saturn-mass exoplanet discovered

Using the microlensing technique, an international team of astronomers has detected a new distant alien world. The newly found exoplanet, designated OGLE-2018-BLG-0799Lb, is about five times less massive than Jupiter and ...

Rogue planets could outnumber the stars

An upcoming NASA mission could find that there are more rogue planets—planets that float in space without orbiting a sun—than there are stars in the Milky Way, a new study theorizes.

Planet hunters discover new 'one in a million' Super-Earth

Astronomers at the University of Canterbury (UC) have found an incredibly rare new Super-Earth planet towards the centre of the galaxy. The planet is one of only a handful that have been discovered with both size and orbit ...

Warped space-time to help WFIRST find exoplanets

NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will search for planets outside our solar system toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy, where most stars are. Studying the properties of exoplanet worlds will help ...

Free-floating stars in the Milky Way's bulge

The path of a light beam is bent by the presence of mass, as explained by General Relativity. A massive body can therefore act like a lens—a so called "gravitational lens"—to distort the image of an object seen behind ...

Global Gaia campaign reveals secrets of stellar pair

A 500-day global observation campaign spearheaded more than three years ago by ESA's galaxy-mapping powerhouse Gaia has provided unprecedented insights into the binary system of stars that caused an unusual brightening of ...

Jupiter-sized exoplanet discovered through microlensing

The path of a light beam is bent by the presence of mass, and a massive body can therefore act like a lens (a "gravitational lens") to distort the image of an object seen behind it. Scientists first confirmed Einstein's prediction ...

Worldwide observations confirm nearby 'lensing' exoplanet

Researchers using telescopes around the world confirmed and characterized an exoplanet orbiting a nearby star through a rare phenomenon known as gravitational microlensing. The exoplanet has a mass similar to Neptune, but ...

Discovering a brown dwarf binary star with microlensing

Brown dwarfs are stars less massive than the sun and unable to burn hydrogen. They comprise (at least in mass) a bridge between planets and stars, and astronomers think that they form and evolve in ways different from either ...

New NASA mission could find more than 1,000 planets

A NASA telescope that will give humans the largest, deepest, clearest picture of the universe since the Hubble Space Telescope could find as many as 1,400 new planets outside Earth's solar system, new research suggests.

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