exoplanet

The orchestra is playing fortissimo, and someone in the third row is whispering. Hearing that whisper is the challenge astronomers face at the star HR 8799: four bright giant planets drown out the faint light of a possible fifth, hidden very close to the star. The HR 8799 system is a proving ground for direct exoplanet imaging.

The family album of this stellar pair has been filling up for 45 years, but the pictures were blurry and the captions contradictory. Now astronomers have pulled out the old photographs, taken new sharp shots, and put everyone back in their proper places. Gamma Cephei is a bright star visible to the naked eye, and it has an invisible companion that orbits it every 70 years.

Astronomers catch distant planets by the trembling of their stars: an invisible companion tugs the star toward us and away, and its light subtly shifts in color. But that trembling tells only half the truth. If the planet's orbit is tilted to our line of sight, only part of its weight rocks the star, so telescopes reveal not the true mass but its shadow.

The night sky looks serene, but it is actually pierced by an invisible rain of charged particles: cosmic rays. Scientists have long tried to figure out where the most energetic ones are born. Until recently, it was thought that our Galaxy supplies particles up to about 4 EeV, the so-called "ankle" in the spectrum.

Astronomers catch distant planets by the trembling of their stars: an invisible companion tugs the star toward us and away, and its light subtly shifts in color. But that trembling tells only half the truth. If the planet's orbit is tilted to our line of sight, only part of its weight rocks the star, so telescopes reveal not the true mass but its shadow.

On a sunny street, there's a house with a big family: a giant father who always sits by the window and a small child running around the yard. That's the TOI-4468 system: a gas giant hot Jupiter hugs the star, while a bit farther out circles a sub-Neptune — a planet smaller than Neptune but larger than Earth.

On a sunny street, there's a house with a big family: a giant father who always sits by the window and a small child running around the yard. That's the TOI-4468 system: a gas giant hot Jupiter hugs the star, while a bit farther out circles a sub-Neptune — a planet smaller than Neptune but larger than Earth.

A telescope stares at a star for many nights in a row. Somewhere in the stream of light hides a tiny dip in brightness — an Earth-sized planet briefly blocking part of the star. Such a dip lasts a few hours and repeats once a year or less. Catching it is like hearing a single quiet click in a noisy hall.

A thrown stone arcs through the air, but a planet around the Sun follows a closed curve. Why an ellipse, and not a circle or a spiral? Kepler's first law provides the answer, but its usual proof requires heavy computation. This work offers a shorter path — through a single simple ratio of velocities.

The night sky seems unchanging, but galaxies constantly exchange matter. The Milky Way, like a great river, absorbs smaller streams — dwarf galaxies. Along with their stars, planets may also come to us.

The night sky seems unchanging, but galaxies constantly exchange matter. The Milky Way, like a great river, absorbs smaller streams — dwarf galaxies. Along with their stars, planets may also come to us.

A star is not just a distant sun. It's a cradle for planets, and its light carries the birth story of the entire system. The chemical composition of a star is its DNA. Astronomers peer into this DNA to understand why some stars host rocky worlds like Earth, while others host gas giants.

The birth of a moon is a cosmic car crash. Two young planets collide, and a cloud of scorching debris swirls around the surviving world. From this disk, like clay on a potter's wheel, a satellite gradually takes shape. That's probably how our Moon came to be.

The birth of a moon is a cosmic car crash. Two young planets collide, and a cloud of scorching debris swirls around the surviving world. From this disk, like clay on a potter's wheel, a satellite gradually takes shape. That's probably how our Moon came to be.

Photographing an exoplanet orbiting another star is like trying to spot a firefly in front of a spotlight. Earth's atmosphere is constantly churning, which makes stars appear as dancing speckles through a telescope.

A planet in the habitable zone is no guarantee of life. Like a conductor leading an orchestra, a star dictates the tempo and character of planetary atmosphere evolution over billions of years.

A star wrapped in an invisible blanket warms up more than it should. That's exactly how ten red dwarfs look, which astronomers from the Hephaistos project have been monitoring. These stars lie within 300 parsecs (about 1000 light-years) of us and emit far more infrared energy than their modest sizes can explain.

Tabby's Star, a beacon in the cosmic sea, has baffled astronomers since 2015. Its light flickered not in the rhythm of planets, but as if scattered by a storm — deep dips, sharp spikes. But amid this chaos, a smooth, nearly perfect dip was found. The eye of the storm.

Tabby's Star, a beacon in the cosmic sea, has baffled astronomers since 2015. Its light flickered not in the rhythm of planets, but as if scattered by a storm — deep dips, sharp spikes. But amid this chaos, a smooth, nearly perfect dip was found. The eye of the storm.

In a single star system, two teams of planets orbit. Some follow neat paths, like figure skaters on an ice rink, avoiding collisions. Others crowd together, their trajectories cross, and sooner or later a cosmic accident occurs — a giant impact.

Water comes in different varieties. Not just fresh or salty, but also "heavy"—when one of its hydrogen atoms is replaced by deuterium, its heavier cousin. Such water is called HDO, and it's a true cosmic passport: the amount of deuterium in water reveals where and when that water was born.

Every 165 days, the giant planet dives toward its star, nearly grazing its fiery corona, then flies off into the icy void. This is TIC 241249530 b — an exoplanet with a record eccentricity of 0,94.

A pebble on a streambed lies still as sunlight sparkles dance on the water's surface. In astronomy, the contrast is similar: a real exoplanet is the stone, while myriad speckles (patches of scattered starlight) are the ripples trembling in instruments.

Every 165 days, the giant planet dives toward its star, nearly grazing its fiery corona, then flies off into the icy void. This is TIC 241249530 b — an exoplanet with a record eccentricity of 0,94.

Among the scorching exoplanets that circle perilously close to their stars lies the secret of their birth. Nearly three decades ago, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the first such world, and since then astronomers have been tormented by the question: how does a gas giant end up pressed against…

The mystery of the radius valley — a sharp drop in the number of exoplanets with radii ~1.8 Earth — haunts astronomers. JWST, transit surveys like Kepler and TESS draw a clear gap: rocky super-Earths and gaseous sub-Neptunes are separated by almost a chasm.

Modern machine vision systems are gaining autonomy: engineers have managed to implement an image recognition algorithm directly on a miniature chip, freeing the camera from having to send data to a bulky computer.

The light of a distant star carries within it the silent hum of the atmospheres of planets orbiting it. For a long time, capturing it was like trying to make out a whisper over a roaring waterfall. But with the advent of the 39-meter Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) and the ANDES spectrograph with a resolution of 100,000, this task is no longer hopeless.

When a distant planet passes in front of its star, it briefly blocks part of the light. Astronomers call this a transit and judge the planet's size by the depth of the dip. But light has a property: a massive body acts like a lens. Even a giant planet can slightly bend the star's rays, and the dip becomes a bit shallower than you might expect.

A solar sail doesn't move on water but in space, and it's pushed not by wind but by the pressure of sunlight. Such a spacecraft can fly for years without spending a drop of fuel. Steering it is like sailing a yacht across an ocean where the currents are planetary gravity and the gusts of wind are shifting sunlight.

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.

A spotlight blazes straight into your eyes, and a few steps away a tiny firefly flickers. That's roughly what it's like hunting for an Earth-like planet around a neighboring star: the planet is a hundred million to ten billion times fainter than its star, and in the sky they almost merge into a single point.

In the Galactic bulge, where the light of billions of stars merges into a continuous glow, four cold giants passed unnoticed. You can't see them through a telescope — too far, too dim.

The gravitational dances of celestial bodies long remained silent to astronomers. We learned to catch the shadows of planets against stars with the transit method — a breakthrough that delivered thousands of worlds thanks to William Borucki and his Kepler telescope.

Forget the familiar images of planetary cores — a sharp boundary between rock and gas is a thing of the past. The Juno probe, diving into Jupiter’s gravitational field, and Cassini, into the embrace of Saturn, discovered that heavy elements are not gathered at the center but smeared over a vast region, as if someone carelessly shook a cocktail.

Remember the sensational comet 1I/‘Oumuamua — the first object to come to us from another star? Its hyperbolic trajectory left no doubt: it was a wanderer from the interstellar void. But astronomers wondered: could some of these visitors not be strangers at all, but our own, escaped from the Solar System millions of years ago?

The universe teems with the invisible: about 85% of matter neither emits nor absorbs light. This hidden mass, first suspected by Vera Rubin from the anomalously fast rotation of galaxies, we call dark matter.

Every star is a living archive, and its spectrum a multilayered manuscript. Over billions of years, the history of the galaxy is written into it: the galactic chemical evolution of the Milky Way leaves a smooth trace in elemental abundances.

The light of a distant star is no perfect beacon. Passing through the gravitational field of another star, it bends, splits, and magnifies, creating a fleeting Einstein ring in the sky. This is how gravitational microlensing manifests, predicted by Fritz Zwicky back in the 1930s.

In deep space, 95 parsecs from Earth, nature is assembling a planetary clock. The model HD 114082 is a prototype, only 15 million years old. Two massive pendulums — exoplanets b and c — are already swinging with periods of 225 and 314 days, but the whole mechanism is still covered in the construction dust of a debris disk.