NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the first clear evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system. This observation of a gas giant planet orbiting a Sun-like star 700 light-years away provides important insights into the composition and formation of the planet. The finding, accepted for publication in Nature, offers evidence that in ...

As astronomers are looking for a hypothetical “Planet Nine” in our solar system, an exoplanet 336 light years from Earth is looking more like the Planet Nine of its star system. Planet Nine, potentially 10 times the size of Earth and orbiting far beyond Neptune in a highly eccentric orbit around the sun, was proposed in 2012 to explain perturbations ...

Japanese astronomer team led by Teruyuki Hirano of Tokyo Institute of Technology has validated 15 exoplanets orbiting red dwarf systems and found one of them highly akin to Earth and habitable. It could be of particular interest as researchers describe it as a ‘super-Earth’, which could harbour liquid water, and potential alien life. One of them, K2-155 located around 200 light years ...