Category Archives: Planets

Far from the warmth and light of any star, there are still planets…depending on what you call them. There is no doubt that objects the size of planets have been found floating in space by themselves. There are several in … Continue reading →

Under extremely high pressures, matter stops behaving normally. The atoms get squashed in weird ways and turn into a state called degenerate matter. Planets about as massive as Jupiter and larger are big enough to contain degenerate matter. This leads … Continue reading →

Astronomers have discovered a handful of planets orbiting the collapsed stars known as pulsars. Almost all of these confirmed or purported pulsar planets are small, only a few times the mass of Earth, and are thought to have formed out … Continue reading →

It was easy to detect planets around pulsars because of their incredibly steady rotation period, but that didn’t work for normal stars, like the Sun, and the astrometric method of watching a star’s position on the sky was not sensitive … Continue reading →

At this writing, 838 planets outside our Solar System—exoplanets—have been discovered, with thousands more possible planets waiting to be investigated. Yet the study of exoplanets is one of the youngest fields in astronomy and in all of science. In fact, … Continue reading →