Harvard University’s Astronomy Department has launched a new SETI initiative called The Galileo Project. But instead of looking to the stars for signs of intelligent life, the project will look for potential extraterrestrial artifacts in our own Solar System—and even in the skies of Earth itself. In 2017 a highlyread more
Astronomers with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have broken new ground in exoplanet research by directly observing a planet in another solar system using a new imaging technique. This new method provided enough detail about the far-flung planet to reveal the presence of a complex, planet-wide storm—and a strange puzzleread more
Astronomers have discovered what is now the smallest known star in the galaxy, in a system roughly 600 light-years from Earth. Part of a trinary star system, the smaller of the pair, EBLM J0555-57Ab, is estimated to only be 8 percent of the mass of our own Sun, in a compact package no bigger than Saturn.
This itty-bitty sun may represent the smallest size that a star can be: to sustain the hydrogen fusion process that provides a star’s energy, the gases within must be brought to a high pressure and temperature, meaning that there needs to be enough mass present in the star to provide these conditions.
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An exoplanet 320 light-years from Earth has been found in a trinary star system, photographed by the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile. Aside from having the distinction of being one of mere handful of exoplanets that have been directly imaged, the planet, labeled as HD 131399Ab, has a year that lasts 550 Earth years, as it orbits the large central star.
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