There Are Diamonds Raining on Neptune
Deep inside Neptune, extreme pressure crushes carbon into crystal. Explore the ice giant’s interior with interactive simulations of diamond rain.
Journal
Journal
TOI-5205 b: The Planet Science Cannot Explain
Image: Katherine Cain / Carnegie Institution for Science Picture the system to scale. The host star, TOI-5205, has a radius just 39 percent of the Sun’s:...
Carbon in the Atmosphere of a Super-Jupiter Rewrites the Planet Formation Story
JWST directly imaged CO₂ in a super-Jupiter 133 light-years away. Its carbon ratio reveals how it formed — and blurs the line between planet and...
The Planetary System That Cannot Hold Still
Image: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Orbital mechanics is supposed to be the steadiest thing in the universe. Planets settle into their paths over millions of...
Some Planets Don't Orbit a Star — They Drift Between Them
Trillions of planets drift between stars with no sun, no orbit, no seasons. JWST found hundreds in the Orion Nebula. Some may harbor life.
We've Found Six Thousand Worlds We Never Knew About
From pulsars to hot Jupiters to Earth-sized worlds in habitable zones — how we discovered 6,000+ exoplanets and what their atmospheres reveal.
James Webb Is Sniffing the Atmospheres of Worlds We'll Never Reach
Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI) The James Webb Space Telescope was not designed to find life. It was designed to see light, specifically...
A New Telescope Will Find 100,000 Planets We Didn't Know Existed
NASA's Roman Space Telescope will find 100,000 exoplanets using gravitational microlensing. A census of worlds we never knew existed.