News by Subject Space & Planetary

Hubble and other space and ground-based telescopes, astronomers have assembled one of the most comprehensive portraits yet of the universe's evolutionary history.

The Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) in Spain, the Laboratory for Space Research (LSR) of the University of Hong Kong (HKU), and an International team comprising scientists from Argentina, Mexico and Germany have discovered the unusual evolution of the central star of a planetary nebula in our Milky Way. This extraordinary discovery sheds light on the future evolution, and more importantly, the ultimate fate of the sun.

Astronomers have identified some of the earliest galaxies in the universe. The team from the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has found evidence that the faintest satellite galaxies orbiting our own Milky Way galaxy are amongst the very first galaxies that formed in our universe.

Exoplanets can orbit close to their host star. When the host star is much hotter than our sun, then the exoplanet becomes as hot as a star. The hottest 'ultra-hot' planet was discovered last year. Today, a team led by UNIGE discovered the presence of iron and titanium vapors in the atmosphere of this planet. This detection was made possible by the surface temperature of this planet, which reaches more than 4,000 degrees.

A new study led by Tel Aviv University and MIT suggests that some properties of neutron stars may be influenced not only by their multitude of densely packed neutrons, but also by a substantially smaller fraction of protons. The finding may lead to a new understanding of how neutron stars behave.

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's unique expertise in sun-viewing telescopes will be an integral part of the historic NASA Parker Solar Probe mission scheduled to launch Aug. 11, 2018 to better understand how the Sun affects our solar system.

An unusual kind of star-planet hybrid atmosphere is emerging from studies of ultrahot planets orbiting close to other stars.