Named Beta Pictoris d, the newly-discovered world is 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b -- the first planet discovered around the A5-type star Beta Pictoris -- and is among the lightest exoplanets ever to be imaged from the ground.
The post Astronomers Discover and Directly Image Third Planet in Beta Pictoris System appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Using the upgraded GRAVITY+ instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), astronomers have measured the ratio of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere of the young exoplanet Beta Pictoris, offering new insights into how giant planets form.
The post Astronomers Probe Chemistry of Giant Exoplanet Beta Pictoris b appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Researchers have discovered a potentially habitable exoplanet just 25 light-years from Earth—but is its precarious location on the cosmic shore too dangerous to make it a home for extraterrestrial life?
In a recent paper in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, revealed their discovery of GJ 3378b, an exoplanet that resides in the habitable zone, sometimes referred to as the “Goldilocks zone,” a distance from the host star ideal for liquid surface water.
The habitable zone is a key focus in the search for extraterrestrial life, as planets any closer would have their atmospheres and surface waters burned off, while those any further from their host star would be completely frozen.
“This one’s exciting,” said lead author Paul Robertson, a UC Irvine assistant professor of astronomy and lead author of the new study. “It’s one of our closest cosmic neighbors. 25 light-years sounds like a long way, but the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across, so in that respect it’s our next-door neighbor.”
Robertson led the team in the exoplanet discovery, using the Habitable-zone Planet Finder on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas, and the NEID Spectrometer on the WIYN Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.
GJ 3378b is about twice the size of Earth, making it what astronomers call a “super-Earth” for its increased size. Additionally, this potentially habitable exoplanet likely receives a comparable amount of stellar radiation to our planet.
“This super-Earth gets about 90 percent of the radiation from its host star as Earth gets from its sun, so it’s right in the sweet spot,” said Robertson.
While GJ 3378b resides within its star’s habitable zone, it does so only barely. This fringe area astronomers refer to as “the cosmic shoreline,” a distance just outside of which the stellar radiation would become so intense that its atmosphere would be ripped away, and any potential surface water along with it.
Straddling this shoreline, researchers are uncertain whether GJ 3378b has an atmosphere or is still a victim of excessive stellar radiation, as its larger size relative to Earth may make it more susceptible.
Our own solar system also offers an excellent example of this: the planet Mars, which researchers suspect once had an Earth-like atmosphere, and potentially even life. However, intense solar radiation bombardment destroyed that atmosphere, taking the surface water with it, leaving a desolate wasteland.
“If you scale the Earth down to the size of an apple, its atmosphere would be about as thick as the skin of the apple,” said Robertson. “That’s just enough to maintain the kinds of surface pressures where you can have liquid water. It’s enough that there’ll be breathable air, and it provides maybe a little bit of protection from the harsh radiation environment of space.”
Although GJ 3377b is relatively close to Earth on a cosmic scale, current equipment cannot determine whether the planet harbors an atmosphere. To do so, advanced future observation platforms will be required, and just such work is on the horizon.
“If a planet in the habitable zone has a proper atmosphere, we can justify further research looking for biosignatures, liquid water, or other signs of life that require both an atmosphere and the right amount of heating from the host star,” said co-author Gogod James, a UC Irvine student in Robertson’s group who worked to characterize the size of GJ 3378b.
NASA plans to take a closer look at these potentially habitable worlds in about two decades with its upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). Launching in the 2020s, HWO will be a large infrared/optical/ultraviolet space telescope designed to confirm whether exoplanets have atmospheres, and then seek biosignatures within those atmospheres, which could indicate the presence of extraterrestrial life.
The paper, “A Revised Mass and Period for the Habitable Zone Super-Earth GJ 3378 b: A Planet Straddling the Cosmic Shoreline,” appeared in The Astrophysical Journal on June 30, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations have revealed that the fate of planets after the death of their host star may be surprisingly warm, according to new research from the University of St Andrews.
The JWST observations offer a possible glimpse into what our solar system will be like billions of years from now, particularly for gas giants like Jupiter. In a recent paper published in Nature, the St Andrew researchers describe JWST observations of WD 1856 b, a Jupiter-sized exoplanet much warmer than would be expected for orbiting a dead white dwarf star.
A collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, the JWST has provided an unprecedented view of the distant edges of the universe, revealing many unexpected finds. Among these surprises was WD 1856 b, whose mass, temperature, and atmosphere readings reveal a surprisingly intact planet after the death of its star.
Our own Sun is projected to exhaust its supply of hydrogen in roughly five billion years, after which it will expand into a red giant star about 100 times larger than it is today, before shedding mass in its final transformation into a white dwarf star.
In the distant future, the Sun’s transformations will likely someday obliterate Mercury, Venus, and even Earth, yet scientists have remained uncertain about how more distant planets will fare. Only by observing real-world examples of planets orbiting dead stars can scientists gather more data on how these scenarios play out for the remaining planets, as with JWST’s observations of WD 1856 b.
Discovered in 2020 by the TESS survey and the Spitzer space telescope, WD 1856 b orbits the white dwarf star WD 1856+534 at a distance of around 80 light-years from Earth.
“The planet is quite the oddball. It’s about the size of Jupiter, but the white dwarf it orbits is the size of Earth, so the planet is seven times larger than its star,” said lead author Dr. Ryan MacDonald from the University of St Andrews.
Perhaps the most confounding element of this system is how close the exoplanet is to its host star. At a distance of 50 times closer than the Earth is to the Sun, the planet is at a distance at which the star’s red giant phase should have destroyed it. How the planet managed to escape the destruction while ultimately ending up so close to its star intrigued the St. Andrews team.
As WD 1856 b performed a grazing transit, where just its top edge passed in front of the host star, JWST observations allowed the researchers to crucially measure mass and temperature data, allowing them to estimate its mass at between four and eleven times that of Jupiter.
“We’re used to looking back in time when we use telescopes, but this is the first time we have been able to look forward to what might happen to the outer planets around the remnant of a Sun-like star,” MacDonald said, adding that “it’s like using a time machine to peer into the distant future of our Solar System.”
Infrared light emitted by the planet’s own heat showed a surprising temperature of 126°C, which is 240°C hotter than it would be from the white dwarf’s heat alone.
As the team worked on the problem, the temperature mystery proved to be the answer to the distance issue.
“The big question is how WD 1856 b ended up where it is today, and there are two theories. One is that the planet was swallowed by the host star as it was dying, and managed to survive on the inside,” said Dr. Christopher O’Connor of Northwestern University. “The other is that the migration took place due to the gravitational effect of other objects in the system. The white dwarf is part of a triple star system, and the outer companion stars could have influenced WD 1856 b’s orbit.”
Since no present source of energy should be capable of generating this much heat on the exoplanet, the researchers suggest that it represents heat left over from being engulfed by the red giant or possibly through an inward migration. Cooling models the team analyzed indicated that the planet likely first captured heat about 3 to 3.5 billion years ago, then cooled to its present temperature and migrated closer to its host star.
“This is just the beginning of our exploration of planets orbiting dead stars with Webb, and the search for further planets orbiting white dwarfs is ongoing,” Dr. MacDonald concluded. “Our results show that stellar death is not the end – some planets experience a vibrant and lively future after the death of their star.”
The paper, “Aerosol and Hydrocarbons in the Atmosphere of a White Dwarf Planet,” appeared in Nature on July 1, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
An exoplanet is exerting a magnetic influence on its host star in a manner opposite to what astronomers normally observe, according to researchers at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC).
In a recent paper published in Science, IAA-CSIC researchers revealed how the exoplanet GJ 436 b is affecting its host star’s behavior in a never-before-seen way. In their work, the team developed a novel method to estimate an exoplanet‘s magnetic field strength, an important factor in determining habitability.
“Until recently it was thought that it was mainly the star that influenced the planet,” said Rafael Luque, an IAA-CSIC researcher and one of the new study’s co-authors.
Luque adds that his team’s results now offer “the clearest evidence to date of something that had already been suspected: that the opposite can also happen and that a nearby planet can alter the environment of its star.”
While the most obvious ingredients for a habitable planet are water and a breathable atmosphere, other elements are less apparent to us based on our human experience. Our planet’s invisible magnetic field protects us from the solar wind and holds the atmosphere together.
While Earth’s magnetic field guided the evolution of its atmosphere, Mars provides an example of what the loss of a magnetic field can do to an otherwise potentially habitable planet. When the Martian magnetic field disappeared four billion years ago as the planet’s core rapidly cooled, the atmosphere dissipated, followed by the loss of surface water.
As shown by the fates of two cosmic neighbors like Earth and Mars, a stable magnetic field is a key element of habitability.
Detecting magnetic fields on distant exoplanets has proven more challenging for astronomers than other observations, such as atmospheric composition. In their new paper, the IAA-CSIC team provides the first conclusive evidence of an exoplanet’s magnetic field, observed through its impact on the host star.
“In particular, we have observed that GJ 436 b, an exoplanet similar to Neptune that orbits very close to its star, causes regular changes in the brightness and energy emitted by the star at certain wavelengths,” explained lead author Daniel Revilla, an IAA-CSIC researcher who led the study as part of his doctoral thesis.
GJ 436 b provided the team with measurable signals that allowed them to infer that the exoplanet had a magnetic field and estimate its strength. The IAA-CSIC team analyzed sixteen years of spectroscopic observations of the GJ-436 system for their research, collected by the CARMENES instrument at the Calar Alto Observatory.
“Despite its smaller size, GJ 436 b would have a magnetic field between 2.33 and 27 times more intense than that of Jupiter,” said co-author Pedro J. Beloved, a researcher at the IAA-CSIC.
In the paper, the researchers demonstrate how, in a very close orbit, a planet can flip the normal planet-star relationship, with the planet controlling the influence of gravity, radiation, and magnetic fields between the two. As the exoplanet interacts with its host star, it injects energy into the star’s chromosphere to produce a phenomenon like a stellar aurora.
This strange interaction has only been measured periodically, occurring in eight-year cycles, with observations in 2008, 2016, and 2024. Intriguingly, these years correlate to phases of the host star’s magnetic cycle, which the researchers believe affects the intensity.
“Until now, measuring the magnetic field of an exoplanet was extremely difficult,” Devilla concluded. “This property is key to knowing if a planet can protect its atmosphere and, ultimately, if it could harbor life.”
The paper, “Constraining an Exoplanet’s Magnetic Field Using Star-Planet Interactions,” appeared in Science on June 25, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
A tiny green dot appearing in an image taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captures a historic tale of Red Planet exploration by one of its first Earthling visitors.
That visitor—a robotic rover named Perseverance—has been conducting investigations on Mars since February 18, 2021, and the new aerial images reveal its current location in an area that mission specialists have dubbed “Arbot.”
While Perseverance’s latest appearance reveals little more than a greenish spec on the planet’s rust-colored surface, also visible in the new images are the long path its formidable tires have left in the Martian soil as the robotic explorer has trekked west of its initial landing site.
The new images, captured on June 13, 2026, were taken just one day before Perseverance broke the previous distance record held by a robotic explorer on Mars: NASA’s Opportunity rover.
However, Perseverance completed this phase of its journey in record time compared to its predecessor, which took more than 11 years to traverse a similar distance. Perseverance, by contrast, covered the same distance in less than half that time, with just five years and four months of travel now behind it.
The images were made possible by the MROs’ High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, which also captured surface features in the Arbot area that include ridges and windswept areas along Mars’ rugged exterior.
Built and operated by the University of Arizona, HiRISE captures images with resolutions as fine as about 25 centimeters (10 inches) per pixel, allowing researchers to distinguish features roughly the size of a kitchen table from orbit. The camera has returned hundreds of thousands of detailed images since the MRO arrived at Mars two decades ago, contributing to a growing data set that has transformed scientists’ understanding of the Red Planet.
Documenting everything from active dust avalanches and shifting dunes to fresh impact craters, the unprecedented resolution its imagery provides has made HiRISE one of the most powerful planetary imaging instruments ever deployed.
Last year, the MRO’s HiRISE camera also successfully captured images of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it made its way past Mars during its trip through our Solar System. Although the HiRISE images weren’t the clearest images of the interstellar visitor obtained during its visit, they did help demonstrate just how formidable NASA’s MRO and its suite of instruments are.
Additional details about Perseverance and its mission can be found at NASA’s official web page, and information about the MRO can be found here.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
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