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Found 88 results for dwarf planet

Two-faced star seems to have one hydrogen side and one helium side

19 July 2023

A strange star more than 1300 light years away appears to have two sides with completely different compositions, and astronomers aren’t sure how it ended up that way

Distant planet may be the first known to share its orbit with another

19 July 2023

Exoplanet PDS 70b, a gas giant seven times the mass of Jupiter, appears to share an orbit with a ball of dust around the mass of Earth's moon, which could be forming a new planet

Could we put out the sun with a sun-sized orb of water?

18 July 2023

What would happen if we pushed a sun-sized ball of water into our star? The Dead Planets Society podcast dives into the possibilities

Our solar system could be hiding an extra planet the size of Uranus

27 June 2023

Many planets are thought to be flung away from their stars, but it’s possible that some get trapped on the way out – and one could be lurking at the edge of our own solar system

A planet, one side covered in water, the other in ice

Exoplanets with a permanent day side may sometimes flip into night

11 April 2023

Some planets outside our solar system are thought to be tidally locked, with one side always facing their star, creating a world divided into hot and cold. Now, it seems this set-up may not be permanent after all, allowing the two sides to flip

$Trappist-1 is a red-dwarf star, the most common variety, located some 40 light-years away in Aquarius. In 2015, astronomers discovered that Trappist-1 was host to three earth-sized planets. Then it came under the spotlight again in 2017 when NASA scientists found an additional four planets, taking the total up to seven. This is the most terrestrial planets that have ever been found to orbit a single star, including our own Solar System. Trappist-1 is only fractionally larger than Jupiter in diameter. This image shows the star and six of the planets as they would appear from the vantage point of the fifth outermost planet, Trappist-1f. All of the planets and the Sun are to scale. One of the worlds is seen transiting in front of the star.$

JWST finds the planet TRAPPIST-1b may not have an atmosphere

27 March 2023

Many researchers thought the worlds orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 would have thick atmospheres, but new observations of one of them show that it doesn’t

Visualisation of the dwarf planet Quaoar

Dwarf planet Quaoar has a weirdly big ring of debris encircling it

8 February 2023

Quaoar, a dwarf planet in our solar system, has a ring of debris orbiting it that is far further out than we thought the laws of physics allow

‘Forbidden’ planet somehow escaped consumption by its dying host star

26 January 2023

The planet 8 Ursae Minoris b should have been destroyed when its star became a red giant, but it continues to orbit strangely close to it

Two planets orbiting a red-dwarf star (illustration)

Up to 74% of planets in the ‘habitable zone’ may not be good for life

19 January 2023

Many planets that have the right temperatures for liquid water on their surfaces used to be too hot or too cold, which may affect their ability to host life now