Failed Star Shakes Up a Phosphine Cocktail
Brown dwarfs are objects that sit between planets and stars: they are more massive than planets but not heavy enough to sustain stable fusion in their cores.
A Warm Belt Around Red Dwarfs
Two new planets are circling dim red stars. One is nearly the size of Earth, the other is three and a half times larger. Both lie in what astronomers call the warm zone: a region where starlight doesn't scorch the surface but also doesn't leave it in perpetual cold.
The host stars are red dwarfs, the most common stars in the galaxy.
Cold Water Trail in the Red Dots of Space
A distant red object usually means one thing: we're seeing a dust veil over a scorching disk falling into a black hole. But when the James Webb split its light into shades, a shadow appeared inside — just like steam from boiling water intercepts rays.
Thousands of Dim Stars Found by the Crowd
There are faint points in the sky that slowly crawl among the stars. They are cooler than embers in a fireplace and smaller than the Sun: these are brown dwarfs. There are so many of them that astronomers can't keep up with reviewing all the images. That's when volunteers stepped in: ordinary people examined pictures from the telescope and flagged moving objects.
The Gravitational Conductor: How a Distant Companion Creates Hot Jupiters
A quarter-century ago, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the first hot Jupiter, and shattered all the rules of planet formation. A gas giant on a days-long orbit couldn't have formed next to the star: it's far too hot and lacks building material. So, it must have been born far away and then migrated.