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...

Early next week I’ll be discussing the winning entry in Project Hyperion’s design contest to build a generation ship. But I want to sneak in the just announced planet candidate at Alpha Centauri A today, a good fit with the Hyperion work given that the winning entry at Hyperion is designed around a crewed expedition to nearby Proxima Centauri. Any news we get about this triple star system rises immediately to the top, given that it’s almost certainly going to be the first destination to which we dispatch instrumented unmanned probes. And one day, perhaps, manned ships, if designs like Hyperion’s ‘Chrysalis’ come to fruition. More on that soon, but for today, be aware that the James Webb Space Telescope is now giving us evidence for a gas giant orbiting Centauri A, the G-class star intriguingly similar to the Sun, which is part of the close binary that includes Centauri B, both orbited by the far more distant Proxima. Image: This artist’s concept shows what the gas giant orbiting...

Science fiction has always provoked interesting research. After all, many of the scientists I’ve spoken with over the years have been science fiction readers, some of whom trace their career choices to specific novels (Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero is frequently mentioned, but so is Frank Herbert’s Dune, and there are many others). This makes sense because there is a natural tension in exoplanet studies growing out of the fact that in most cases, we can’t even see our targets. Instead, we detect them through non-visual methods. True, we can analyze planetary atmospheres for some gas giant planets, but we’re only beginning to drill down to the kind of biosignature searches that may eventually flag the presence of life. But fiction can paint a planet’s physics and visually explore its surface, modeling worlds in vast variety and sometimes spurring directions of thought that would otherwise remain unexplored. Consider Hal Clement, whose forays into planet-building included the remarkable...