GW Orionis: A Star System with Titled Rings
29.09.2020

Triple star system GW Orionis appears to demonstrate that planets can form and orbit in multiple planes. In contrast, all the planets and moons in our Solar System orbit in nearly the same plane. The picturesque system has three prominent stars, a warped disk, and inner tilted rings of gas and grit.

Good Morning Planets from Chile
17.06.2022

On June 15, innermost planet Mercury had wandered about as far from the Sun as it ever gets in planet Earth's sky. Near the eastern horizon just before sunrise it stands over distant Andes mountain peaks in this predawn snapshot from the valley of Rio Hurtado in Chile.

The Solar System s Planet Trails
1.07.2022

Stars trail through a clear morning sky in this postcard from a rotating planet. The timelapse image is constructed from consecutive exposures made over nearly three hours with a camera fixed to a tripod beside the Forbidden City in Beijing, China on June 24.

APOD: 2020 August 18 Б TYC 8998 760 1: Multiple Planets around a Sun Like Star
18.08.2020

Do other stars have planets like our Sun? Previous evidence shows that they do, coming mostly from slight shifts in the star's light created by the orbiting planets. Recently, however, and for the first time, a pair of planets has been directly imaged around a Sun-like star.

50 Light years to 51 Pegasi
9.10.2021

It's only 50 light-years to 51 Pegasi. That star's position is indicated in this snapshot from August, taken on a hazy night with mostly brighter stars visible above the dome at Observatoire de Haute-Provence in France.

APOD: 2023 February 1 Б The Seventh World of Trappist 1
1.02.2023

Seven worlds orbit the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1. A mere 40 light-years away, many of the exoplanets were discovered in 2016 using the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) located in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, and later confirmed with telescope including NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

The Kepler 90 Planetary System
28.04.2020

Do other stars have planetary systems like our own? Yes -- one such system is Kepler-90. Cataloged by the Kepler satellite that operated from Earth orbit between 2009 and 2018, eight planets were discovered, giving Kepler-90 the same number of known planets as our Solar System.

APOD: 2023 January 24 Б LHS 475 b: Earth Sized Exoplanet
24.01.2023

If you could stand on exoplanet LHS 475 b, what might you see? No one knows for sure but pictured here is an interesting guess made by an Earth-based artificial intelligence (AI) engine.

PDS 70: Disk, Planets, and Moons
24.08.2021

It's not the big disk that's attracting the most attention. Although the big planet-forming disk around the star PDS 70 is clearly imaged and itself quite interesting. It's also not the planet on the right, just inside the big disk, thatБs being talked about the most.

Goldilocks Zones and Stars
31.01.2020

The Goldilocks zone is the habitable zone around a star where it's not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to exist on the surface of orbiting planets. This intriguing infographic...