I jump at the chance to see actual images – as opposed to light curves – of exoplanets. Thus recent news of a Tatooine-style planetary orbit around twin stars, and what is as far as I know the first actually imaged planet in this orbital configuration. I’m reminded not for the first time of the virtues of the Gemini Planet Imager, so deft at masking starlight to catch a few photons from a young planet. Youth is always a virtue when it comes to this kind of thing, because young planets are still hot and hence more visible in the infrared. The Gemini instrument is a multitasker, using adaptive optics as well as a coronagraph to work this magic. The new image comes out of an interesting exercise, which is to revisit older GPI data (2016-2019) at a time when the instrument is being upgraded and in the process of being moved to Hawaii from Chile, for installation on the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea. This reconsideration picked out something that had been missed. Cross-referencing...

Let’s have a look at recent work on TRAPPIST-1. The system, tiny but rich in planets (seven transits!) continues to draw new work, and it’s easy to see why. Found in Aquarius some 40 light years from Earth, a star not much larger than Jupiter is close enough for the James Webb Space Telescope to probe the system for planetary atmospheres. Or so an international team working on the problem believes, with interesting but frustratingly inconclusive results. As we’ll see, though, that’s the nature of this work, and in general of investigations of terrestrial-class planet atmospheres. I begin with news of TRAPPIST-1’s flare activity. One of the reasons to question the likelihood of life around small red stars is that they are prone to violent flares, particularly in their youth. Planets in the habitable zone, and there are three here, would be bathed in radiation early on, conceivably stripping their atmospheres entirely, and certainly raising doubts about potential life on the surface....

I’ve been thinking about how useful objects in our own Solar System are when we compare them to other stellar systems. Our situation has its idiosyncrasies and certainly does not represent a standard way for planetary systems to form. But we can learn a lot about what is happening at places like Beta Pictoris by studying what we can work out about the Sun’s protoplanetary disk and the factors that shaped it. Illumination can come about in both directions. Think about that famous Voyager photograph of Earth, now the subject of an interesting new book by Jon Willis called The Pale Blue Data Point (Princeton, 2025). I’m working on this one and am not yet ready to review it, but when I do I’ll surely be discussing how the best we can do at studying a living terrestrial planet at a considerable distance is our own planet from 6 billion kilometers. We’ll use studies of the pale blue dot to inform our work with new instrumentation as we begin to resolve planets of the terrestrial kind. But...

I have a number of things to say about Teegarden’s Star and its three interesting planets, but I want to start with the discovery of the star itself. Here we have a case of a star just 0.08 percent as massive as the Sun, an object which is all but in brown dwarf range and thus housing temperatures low enough to explain why, despite its proximity, it took until 2003 to find it. Moreover, conventional telescopes were not the tools of discovery but archival data. Bonnard Teegarden (NASA GSFC) dug into archival data from the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program, surmising that there ought to be more small stars near us than we were currently seeing. The data mining paid off, and then paid off again when the team looked at the Palomar Sky Survey of 1951. This was a team working without professional astronomers and telescopes. Image: Teegarden's Star was subsequently identified in astronomical images taken more than 50 years ago. Credit: Palomar Sky Survey / SolStation.com. That it took...

How exoplanets emerge from circumstellar disks has always intrigued me, and many open questions remain, including the precise mechanisms behind the fast growth of gas giants. When the topic swings to so-called ‘rogue’ planets, formation issues seem to be the same, since we've assumed most such worlds have been ejected from a host system through gravitational interactions. But is there another formation path? We are learning that rogue planets are capable of feats not seen in conventional star/planet systems. Research out of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Italy is provocative. Using data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) as well as the James Webb Space Telescope, Víctor Almendros-Abad (Astronomical Observatory of Palermo) and an international team of astronomers have found a large rogue planet (five to ten times as massive as Jupiter) that continues to form, accreting gas and dust from a surrounding cloud. No circumstellar disk...

I wasn’t surprised to learn that the number of confirmed exoplanets had finally topped 6,000, a fact recently announced by NASA. After all, new worlds keep being added to NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech on a steady basis, all of them fodder for a site like this. But I have to admit to being startled by the fact that fully 8000 candidate planets are in queue. Remember that it usually takes a second detection method finding the candidate world for it to move into the confirmed ranks. That 8000 figure shows how much the velocity of discovery continues to increase. The common theme behind much of the research is often cited as the need to find out if we are alone in the universe. Thus NASA’s Dawn Gelino, head of the agency’s Exoplanet Exploration Program (ExEP) at JPL: “Each of the different types of planets we discover gives us information about the conditions under which planets can form and, ultimately, how common planets like Earth might be, and where we should be...