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Astronomer Jason Wang, with collaborators Matas Kulikauskas and Sarah Blunt, has released an online tool called 'Where Is the Planet' that predicts the current and future positions of directly-imaged exoplanets and brown dwarf companions in their orbits. The tool accepts requests to add new orbits and provides a citation record for researchers who use it in published work.
Planetary scientist Paul Byrne posted a 12-year sequence of real telescope images showing four exoplanets, each more massive than Jupiter, orbiting a star 133 light-years away. The images capture the planets visibly moving along their orbits around their host star over the decade-plus timespan.
A team from Harvard and the University of Oregon report detecting radio emissions directly traced to beta Pictoris b, a gas giant roughly 11 times Jupiter's mass located 64 light-years away, using South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope. In their yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, they describe rapid, recurring, highly circularly polarized bursts and persistent emission between 0.85 and 3.5 GHz, which they attribute to naturally occurring auroras from charged particles along the planet's magnetic field.
NASA is inviting people to sign up online for a personal 'pixel' from the first images captured by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Each participant provides an email address, which is limited to one pixel per address, and later receives a printable certificate showing their assigned pixel number.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off from Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, beginning its mission to investigate dark matter and dark energy. Shortly after launch, the telescope successfully deployed its solar panels and sun shade, with remaining instruments set to activate in coming weeks. First images are expected in early 2027, with the observatory eventually beaming back 1.4 terabytes of data daily.
NASA sent the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into orbit on Sunday, equipping it with a 2.4-meter mirror matching Hubble's but pairing it with a 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument. That camera can capture images at least 100 times larger than Hubble's per shot and scan the sky roughly 1,000 times faster, letting it map billions of stars and galaxies and search for around 100,000 exoplanets.
NASA has named its next major space observatory after Nancy Grace Roman, the agency's first chief astronomer and a key figure behind Hubble. The telescope will offer a field of view at least 100 times wider than Hubble's, allowing it to capture light from potentially a billion galaxies over its operational life.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center on 30 August after completing vibration testing at Goddard Space Flight Center. The telescope's wide field of view and infrared sensitivity are expected to let it survey far more sky in far less time than the Hubble Space Telescope, dramatically expanding the catalog of known exoplanets.
NASA and Caltech researchers are developing a large, flower-shaped spacecraft called a starshade that would fly in formation with a space telescope to block a star's glare. By blotting out starlight, the device would let astronomers directly observe faint, Earth-sized planets orbiting that star.