[Kyushu University] Planetary systems like our solar system are born within a disk of gas and dust (protoplanetary disk) surrounding a newly formed star. Observations with the ALMA telescope have […]
Exoplanets, -moons, -comets
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
Capture of Interstellar Planetesimals in Protoplanetary Discs in Binary Star Systems
[astro-ph.EP] Planet formation requires growth over 12 orders of magnitude in size, from micron-sized dust grains to fully formed planets.
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
Trailblazing Technique Uncovers The Real Shape Of Scorching-hot Exoplanet Atmospheres
[University of Bristol] Until now the alien white-hot worlds of exoplanets have been depicted as circular, but new research has revealed the true shape of their atmospheres to be a […]
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes
ALMA Reveals Planetary Formation Structures In Small Disks
[ALMA] Thanks to the extraordinary sharpness of ALMA’s images, a research team has discovered rings, grooves, and cavities in extremely compact disks surrounding young stars.
Posted inAtmospheres, Climate, Weather
Simulations Of The Evolving Ozone Layer: Implications For The Early Earth, Exoplanets, And The Search For Life
[astro-ph.EP] Over 4 billion years, Earth’s atmosphere has been transformed from a composition devoid of molecular oxygen (O2) to one where O2 is now 21% of our modern atmosphere by […]
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
Ultraviolet Reflected-Light Spectroscopy of Modern Earth Analogs with Starshade Observations
[astro-ph.EP] Characterizing rocky, habitable zone planets in reflected light is a key science objective for future direct imaging missions, and the ultraviolet (UV) is uniquely suited for supporting the characterization […]
![Time evolution of the vertical gradient of AH across different height layers is shown. The black line overlaid indicates the corresponding PWV in mm.-- [astro-ph.IM]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/MidIR.png?resize=1200%2C715&ssl=1)
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
Mid-IR Water-Vapor Seeing: Implications for ELT/METIS High-Contrast Imaging from VLTI Data
[astro-ph.IM] Direct imaging and characterization of rocky exoplanets remains one of the central challenges in exoplanetary science. The mid-infrared (mid-IR) offers a favorable high-contrast imaging (HCI) regime, as the planet-star […]
Posted inEducation and Outreach
NASA Exoplanet Explorers (ExoExplorers) Applications Due on Thursday 15 October
[NASA] The Exoplanet Explorers (ExoExplorers) Science Series, sponsored by the ExoPAG Executive Committee and the NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program, aims to enable the professional development of a cohort of PhD […]
![Set Transformer actor–critic architecture used by the RL policy. The input candidate set 𝑋 ∈ R 𝑁×𝐹 is first projected into a latent 𝑑-dimensional representation and processed by 𝐿 Induced Set Attention Blocks (ISABs). Learned inducing tokens provide the queries in the first attention operation of each ISAB, after which information is redistributed to the candidate tokens. The actor combines each contextualised target representation with the global mission state to produce one logit per available observation. Each logit is then converted into a probability to select a corresponding observation. The critic uses Pooling by Multihead Attention (PMA) to obtain a permutation-invariant summary of the candidate set, which is combined with the same global state to estimate 𝑉 (𝑠). -- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/aRieL-Reinforcement.png?resize=1200%2C715&ssl=1)
Posted inAriel Mission
aRieL – Reinforcement Learning For The Ariel Space Telescope Scheduling
[astro-ph.EP] The Ariel mission will conduct a population level survey of hundreds of exoplanet atmospheres, requiring observations to be scheduled across a large and diverse catalogue of potential targets.
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes
Call For White Papers On Multi-Cycle Treasury Concepts With JWST
[ESA Hubble] STScI has issued a call for White Papers for compelling scientific ideas for Multi-Cycle Treasury (MCT) programmes that require large allocations of JWST time to complete.