There’s a hard physical limit on spotting a planet next to its blinding star. However, it turns out today’s telescopes aren’t hitting it. New work maps out exactly how close in we could still detect the faint, Earth-like worlds we want to find the most.
If our familiar red neighbor were a stranger light-years away, would we even know what we were looking at?
Whether you are already a fan of Greek mythology or someone who only vaguely remembers Icarus from a long-forgotten school lesson, today’s Astrobite will show you that flying too close to the Sun (and its consequences) is more than a myth when it comes to extremely hot exoplanets.
We cannot travel back in time, but we can still try to reconstruct how planets evolved from the clues they leave behind today. In this Astrobite, we explore how L 98-59 d’s atmosphere and interior models reveal a molten world still being reshaped by its host star.
The geologic carbon cycle has been an important tool for balancing carbon dioxide and stabilizing the climate of Earth over billions of years. The authors of today’s bite explore why dry planets may be missing this critical climate-stabilizing thermostat.
Stars have spots that can mess with our planetary atmosphere observations. Using JWST, today’s authors take advantage of the unique TOI-3884 system to directly probe one of these regions.