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28 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: November 11, 2026.
A Caltech and Northwestern team built a physics-based model of Webb's camera that boosts planet-detection sensitivity two to 15 times and uncovered a world sitting unnoticed in archived data.
A University of Washington model reproduces 19 planetary properties without biology, giving astronomers a baseline for judging alien atmospheres.
Heriot-Watt's photonic chip replaced bulky mirrors and lenses at the CHARA Array in California, and picked up stars fainter than the system it replaced.
A new analysis finds all eight suspiciously dense super-heavy planets orbit magnetically active stars, with odds of that happening by chance near 1% for the four rocky ones.
A search with two ground telescopes rules out Jupiter-sized worlds and blames an old planet-like wobble on the stars themselves.
HD 3167 b circles its star once a day, 154 light-years away, and is cooler on its day side than bare rock should be. That points to an atmosphere, and maybe a glimpse of what the newborn Earth looked like.
David Kipping's search of LP 890-9c is by far the most sensitive exomoon hunt ever done. It rules out anything the size of Europa, Rhea or Umbriel, and it shows JWST has no noise floor stopping it from finding moons that small.
Twin stars form from the same cloud and should match chemically. HD 129171 does not — and the element that proves it is one stars cannot make themselves.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off on a Falcon Heavy at 7:26 a.m. on August 30. Its 300-megapixel infrared camera surveys the sky about 1,000 times faster than Hubble.
Cambridge scientists find the planets circling our closest single-star neighbor are smaller than Earth, larger than Mars, laced with a rare deep-mantle mineral, and locked so close to their star that any atmosphere would be stripped away.
A chemical analysis of Barnard's Star suggests its four sub-Earth planets are packed with a rare deep-Earth mineral, stripped of atmospheres and locked in eternal day and night — utterly hostile to life just six light-years away.
The rare 'super-puff' worlds TOI-791 b and c are roughly Jupiter's size but a tiny fraction of its mass, ranking among the lowest-density planets ever detected.
A large survey of alien-world rotation rates shows mass alone does not set how fast a world spins, pointing to magnetic fields and formation as the deciding factors.
Set to launch this fall, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will use gravitational microlensing to find planets, rogue worlds, black holes and neutron stars across the Milky Way's crowded core.
By clocking the winds of seven scorching 'hot Jupiters,' researchers inferred planet-wide magnetic fields up to four times stronger than Saturn's.
By clocking iron-laced winds screaming across seven ultra-hot gas giants, astronomers found a pattern that ordinary weather physics can't explain — but magnetism can.
The mission will explore largely uncharted regions of the Milky Way, potentially revealing more alien worlds than all previous missions combined.
James Webb Space Telescope provides unprecedented view of atmospheric conditions on distant exoplanet.
Accelerated timeline brings infrared observatory ahead of original May 2027 deadline to explore dark energy, dark matter, and exoplanets.
The 400-billion-mile planet-forming disk around the young star IRAS 23077+6707, 1,000 light-years from Earth, is roughly 40 times wider than our solar system and unexpectedly turbulent.
The University of Warwick's Rapid Automated Vetting of Exoplanet Candidate Networks confirmed 31 brand-new worlds and flagged 2,000 more, slashing planet-vetting time from months to ninety seconds.
Direct imaging by the James Webb Space Telescope of a 7.6-Jupiter-mass world 12 light-years away revealed thick patchy clouds of water ice and far less ammonia than predicted, forcing astronomers to revisit decades-old atmospheric models.
University of Warwick researchers confirm 31 new planets and identify thousands more candidates using machine learning analysis of NASA TESS data.
The RAVEN system confirmed 31 brand-new planets and identified thousands of candidates, including ultra-short-period worlds and mysterious 'Neptunian desert' inhabitants.
Unexpected water-ice clouds found on Jupiter-like exoplanet challenge atmospheric models and reveal new complexity in giant planet weather systems.
Advanced computer simulations reveal carbon and hydrogen could form exotic "superionic" structures in ice giant interiors, reshaping planetary science understanding.
By combining ground-based telescopes with ESA's Gaia spacecraft, an international team led by Peking University's Subo Dong directly measured a free-floating planet's mass 9,800 light-years away — a scientific first.
The star system WISPIT 2, just 5 million years old, becomes only the second known system where multiple planets have been directly observed forming simultaneously — offering an unprecedented planetary science laboratory.