News by Subject Space & Planetary

A team of astronomers led by Anne-Marie Lagrange, a CNRS researcher, has discovered a second giant planet in orbit around β Pictoris, a star that is relatively young (23 million years old) and close (63.4 light years), and surrounded by a disk of dust. The β Pictoris system has fascinated astronomers for the last 30 years since it enables them to observe a planetary system in the process of forming around its star.

If our eyes could see gamma rays, the Moon would appear brighter than the Sun! That's how NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has seen our neighbor in space for the past decade.

A new study provides the most accurate estimate of the frequency that planets that are similar to Earth in size and in distance from their host star occur around stars similar to our Sun.

In a new study, Yale postdoctoral associate Nir Mandelker and professor Frank C. van den Bosch report on the most detailed simulation ever of a large patch of the intergalactic medium (IGM). For the first time, they were able to see how cold, dense gas clouds in the IGM organize themselves and react within much larger 'sheets' or 'pancakes' of matter in the vastness of space.

Observations of the near-Earth asteroid 2006 QV89 made on Aug. 11, 2019 with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) have ruled out any potential future impact threat to the Earth by this asteroid for the next century.

By creating millions of virtual universes and comparing them to observations of actual galaxies, a University of Arizona-led research team has made discoveries that present a powerful new approach for studying galaxy formation.

NASA's MMS mission just made the first high-resolution measurements of an interplanetary shockwave launched from the sun.