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32 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: October 9, 2026.
A Jupiter-sized world circling HS 0209+0832 carries a chemical fingerprint, including niobium at over 1,000 times solar levels, that no ordinary first-generation planet should have.
South Africa's MeerKAT telescope traced repeating radio bursts to the giant planet Beta Pictoris b, 64 light-years away. The signal shows its magnetic field is at least 1,250 gauss, far stronger than Jupiter's.
TOI-1355 b gave itself away when its secondary eclipse arrived early, a sign the orbit is not circular. The University of Tokyo team says the planet was probably flung inward by other giants and is now being slowly reeled into a circle by its star's tides. They are already writing a JWST proposal.
Elias 2-24 b beat the previous record for the youngest known planet by more than 4 million years. It was found in decade-old Keck archive images, in exactly the gap in the star's disk that ALMA spotted a decade ago.
A UC Irvine–led team detected a planet about twice the size of Earth orbiting a nearby red dwarf, receiving almost exactly as much starlight as Earth gets from the sun.
Using a ground-based telescope in Chile, scientists spotted helium streaming off the exoplanet LHS 1140 b, the first time an atmosphere has been confirmed around a rocky world in the life-friendly zone of another star.
A telltale surge of lithium in the star TOI-5882, some 1,300 light-years away, points to a planet consumed whole — possibly nudged to its doom by a hidden brown-dwarf companion.
A rare joint campaign by the VLA and MeerKAT scanned the ocean-world exoplanet for artificial signals, finding millions of candidates but no sign of a civilization.
The newly identified world, Beta Pictoris d, makes the young nearby system only the second ever found to host at least three directly imaged planets.
New modeling of tidally locked worlds like LHS 3844b suggests heat can circulate in a stable loop, making the twilight 'terminator zone' between scorching day and frozen night more hospitable than thought.
New measurements slashed Gliese 3378b's estimated mass, tipping it from a likely gas world into a rocky planet sitting squarely in its star's habitable zone.
After a decade hidden in its star's glare, the giant world GJ 504 b gave up its secrets to Webb in just two hours — revealing water, methane, ammonia and, for the first time, clouds made of salt.
Astronomers detected sharply different conditions at the dawn and dusk edges of an ultra-hot gas giant, a feat made possible only by the space telescope’s sensitivity.
For the first time, astronomers measured the chemistry of a moon-forming disc circling the exoplanet CT Cha b, finding it rich in carbon-bearing molecules like benzene and acetylene.
On the scorching exoplanet WASP-94A b, the James Webb Space Telescope found thick clouds of vaporized rock at dawn that vanish by sunset — a finding that may upend a decade of exoplanet measurements.
The newly characterized world, more than six times Earth's mass, orbits the red dwarf Ross 318 where liquid water could exist — making it one of the most promising nearby targets in the search for habitable planets.
The giant exoplanet WASP-94A b has a bizarre daily weather cycle where mineral clouds appear every morning and disappear by evening, giving scientists unprecedented insights into alien atmospheres.
Penn State astronomers used a seven-hour transit and 20 hours of baseline observations with the Webb telescope to detect methane at an unprecedented 11-sigma confidence level, with hints of ammonia and carbon dioxide, opening the first clean window into a planet class that fills the gap between hot Jupiters and our own solar system.
A six-Earth-mass exoplanet found by Italian and Brazilian astronomers using HARPS-N data orbits one of the calmest M-dwarf stars within 30 light-years, making it a prime atmospheric-spectroscopy target for the James Webb Space Telescope.
Using JWST's mid-infrared spectrograph, an MPIA-led team found the tidally locked exoplanet has no air, a 1,000-Kelvin dayside and a dark basaltic crust closer to Mercury than to Earth.
Seventeen transits of rocky world K2-18c revealed atmospheric water, carbon dioxide, and a tentative signal of dimethyl sulfide — a molecule produced almost exclusively by biological processes on Earth.
Johns Hopkins astronomers used JWST to detect 150 Earth masses of heavy elements in the 15-Jupiter-mass exoplanet's atmosphere — a chemical signature of disk accretion that definitively separates it from brown dwarfs formed by stellar collapse.
GJ 887 d orbits one of the quietest red dwarf stars in the solar neighborhood, making it a compelling target for atmospheric analysis by next-generation telescopes.
TOI-5205 b — a Jupiter-sized world orbiting a tiny red dwarf — has an atmosphere poorer in heavy elements than even its own star, with its bulk interior locking away 100 times more metals than reach the observable atmosphere.
Webb's spectroscopic observations of PSR J2322-2650b revealed helium mixed with carbon molecules including C2 and C3 — the same clusters that form diamond precursors — in an atmosphere unlike anything previously observed.
An ancient super-Earth so hot its surface is molten rock turned out to be 1,700°F cooler than expected — evidence of a thick volatile-rich atmosphere defying everything scientists thought they knew about planet evolution.
Astronomers using Chilean telescopes found at least four planets around GJ 887, with the outermost sitting in the habitable zone — only the second such world known within 10 light-years of Earth.
GJ 887 d orbits one of the calmest red dwarf stars known, making it only the second potentially habitable planet within ten light-years of our solar system.
Using gravitational microlensing and the retired ESA Gaia observatory's parallax data, scientists pinned down the mass and distance of a free-floating world drifting 9,800 light-years from Earth.
TOI-561 b was expected to be a bare, airless rock baked by its star — but temperature measurements reveal it is cooler than it should be, pointing to an atmosphere that may be continuously replenished by volcanic outgassing on the 10-billion-year-old world.
Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope identified L 98-59 d, 35 light-years away, as the first confirmed member of a new planetary class — a 'magma world' with a sulfur-rich atmosphere and a globe-spanning molten rock interior that has never stopped burning.
A University of Arizona team led by Sukrit Ranjan observed faint methane signatures across four transits of TRAPPIST-1e using Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph — results that, if confirmed, would mark the first-ever detection of an atmosphere on a potentially habitable world beyond our solar system.