Gas Giants Archives

Time-lapse footage of a newly discovered exoplanet as it makes its slow journey around two stars. To obtain the image of the planet, astronomers needed to remove the stars' glare. Two star icons mark the locations of where the stars would be in relation to their planet. Credit Jason Wang/Northwestern University

Astronomy & Telescopes, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Gas Giants, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Press Release, Science Fiction

Rare Image Of Tatooine-like Planet Is Closest To Its Twin Stars Yet

by Keith CowingDecember 14, 2025December 14, 2025

In a discovery that’s fit for a movie, Northwestern University astronomers have directly imaged a Tatooine-like exoplanet, orbiting two suns.

Normalized torques as a function of planetary mass and semimajor axis, assuming circular and coplanar orbits. The different migration regimes are indicated, separating inward from outward migration. The mass required to open a gap in the disk (dashed white line), the planet-to-star mass ratio (q) of 0.002, and the gas depth criterion K = 104 are over-plotted (dashed black lines). -- astro-ph.EP

Astrogeology, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Gas Giants, Status Report

Formation Of Cold Giant Planets Around Late M Dwarfs Via Core Accretion And The Fate Of Inner Rocky Worlds

by Keith CowingDecember 11, 2025December 10, 2025

Modeling the formation of cold giant planets around M dwarfs is difficult because their disks may not contain enough solids to form massive cores and because forming giants are expected […]

Image of HIP 71618 B (indicated by the arrow) taken by the Subaru Telescope. The planet’s host star has been blocked in this image. The star’s position is indicated by the star mark. The high resolution image and the image without text are available from the links. (Credit: T. Currie/Subaru Telescope, UTSA)

AI - Data - Apps - Cybernetics, Astronomy & Telescopes, Brown Dwarfs, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Gas Giants, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Press Release

First Results From The Subaru Telescope’s OASIS Survey: Direct Imaging Of New Worlds Around Unexplored Stars

by Keith CowingDecember 7, 2025December 7, 2025

The discovery of two remarkable substellar companions orbiting distant stars has been announced by an international team of astronomers using the Subaru Telescope’s sharp adaptive-optics imaging together with precision stellar […]

Top: Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) model and 2σ credible regions from ExoTR retrievals on the fiducial reduction, overlaid with data binned at ∆λ = 0.05 µm. Also shown are the contributions from each molecule and clouds to the transmission spectrum. Bottom: 1D histograms of the posterior distributions from the retrieval results, including the median and ±1σ uncertainties (i.e. 16th and 84th percentiles).-- astro-ph.EP

Atmospheres, Climate, Weather, Biosignatures & Paleobiology, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Gas Giants, Status Report

Methane On The Temperate Exo-Saturn TOI-199b

by Keith CowingNovember 28, 2025November 28, 2025

Temperate (Teq<400 K) gas giants represent an unexplored frontier in exoplanet atmospheric spectroscopy. Orbiting a G-type star every ~100 days, the Saturn-mass exoplanet TOI-199 b (Teq=350 K) is one of […]

The three-layer diagram of the outcome of our model.

Atmospheres, Climate, Weather, Brown Dwarfs, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Gas Giants, Press Release

Efficiency of Hydrodynamic Atmospheric Escape in Hot Jupiters and Super Earths

by Keith CowingNovember 27, 2025November 27, 2025

We develop a flexible one-dimensional code to model the escape of hydrogen and helium from a hot Jupiter as a result of photoionization from extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) radiation.

Astronomy & Telescopes, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Gas Giants, Ice Giant, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Status Report

A JWST Transit Of A Jupiter Analog: II. A Search For Exomoons

by Keith CowingNovember 22, 2025June 10, 2026

We present a search for exomoons around the Jupiter-like exoplanet Kepler-167e using a NIRSpec JWST transit.

Azimuthally averaged gas density (left) and gas radial velocity relative to the planet (right) for our FARGO3D disk model containing a Jupiter mass planet at 75 au. The CO sublimation surface at 30 K recovered from our RADMC-3D model is indicated in both panels by the red dashed line. The region near the embedded planet is heated from a combination of accretion heating onto the planet, disk viscous heating, and radiative heating from the star, resulting in higher temperatures at the midplane in the gap. Gas advection relative to the local sound speed is also indicated by white arrows. Gas advection is primarily outward along the midplane near the planet, with significant vertical flows away from the midplane at the gap edge and in the pressure bump at 100 au. -- astro-ph.EP

Astrochemistry, Astrogeology, Atmospheres, Climate, Weather, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Gas Giants, Ice Giant, Icy Worlds, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Interstellar, Status Report

Dust Recycling and Icy Volatile Delivery (DRIVE): A Novel Method of Volatile Enrichment in Cold Giant Planets

by Keith CowingNovember 13, 2025November 13, 2025

Giant planet atmospheres are thought to reflect the gas phase composition of the disk when and where they formed.

Model spectra (top) and Kp-voffset maps for the combination of all nights (bottom) of H2O, H2S, and CH4 for KELT-11 b. The grey shaded areas show the wavelength regions of the spectral orders used for the analysis. The dotted lines indicate the expected location of the planetary signal. -- astro-ph.EP

Astrochemistry, Atmospheres, Climate, Weather, Biogeochemical Cycles & Geobiology, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Gas Giants, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Status Report

Upper Limits On Atmospheric Abundances Of KELT-11b And WASP-69b From A Retrieval Approach

by Keith CowingNovember 11, 2025November 11, 2025

WASP-69b and KELT-11b are two low-density hot Jupiters, which are expected to show strong atmospheric features in their transmission spectra.

Self-consistent obliquity and spin rate evolution for several realizations of exoplanet Kepler-79 d. Trajectories go from right to left. The planet is initalized with a spin rate of 7.5 hours (i.e. ω/np ≈ 170) and different obliquities equispaced in cos θ. A moon with mass mm/mp = 10−6 is initialized at a distance am = 4 Rp. Integrations are stopped when the moon’s pericenter goes below the Roche limit. The three largest resonances reacheable by Kepler-79 d appear in red, blue, and green. The hatched blue zone is the E1 region. For definitiveness, the resonances and E1 region in the background are drawn assuming that the moon is on a circular orbit at am = 4 Rp; for moons that do not cross the E1 region, this remains approximatively true during the whole simulation. -- astro-ph.EP

Astrogeology, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Gas Giants, Ice Giant, Status Report, Stellar Cartography

The Coupled Tidal Evolution of the Moons and Spins of Warm Exoplanets

by Keith CowingNovember 10, 2025

Context: The Solar System giant planets harbour a wide variety of moons. Moons around exoplanets are plausibly similarly abundant, even though most of them are likely too small to be […]

Top: Blended MIRI LRS variability map of WISE J1049 AB: wavelength (x-axis) vs. time (y-axis) and normalized flux (amplitude; colorbar). There are two distinct lightcurve behaviors present, allowing for the construction of two unique lightcurves distinguished by the change in behavior at 8.5 µm (center dashed line). Bottom: Lightcurves 1 (red) and 2 (blue) constructed from the above data and outlined with an ∼ 11.77 min running median. -- astro-ph.EP

Astronomy & Telescopes, Brown Dwarfs, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Gas Giants, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Status Report

Sensitivity to Sub-Io-sized Exosatellite Transits In The MIRI LRS Lightcurve Of The Nearest Substellar Worlds

by Keith CowingNovember 7, 2025November 7, 2025

JWST’s unprecedented sensitivity enables precise spectrophotometric monitoring of substellar worlds, revealing atmospheric variability driven by mechanisms operating across different pressure levels.

Gas Giants

Rare Image Of Tatooine-like Planet Is Closest To Its Twin Stars Yet

Formation Of Cold Giant Planets Around Late M Dwarfs Via Core Accretion And The Fate Of Inner Rocky Worlds

First Results From The Subaru Telescope’s OASIS Survey: Direct Imaging Of New Worlds Around Unexplored Stars

Methane On The Temperate Exo-Saturn TOI-199b

Efficiency of Hydrodynamic Atmospheric Escape in Hot Jupiters and Super Earths

A JWST Transit Of A Jupiter Analog: II. A Search For Exomoons

Dust Recycling and Icy Volatile Delivery (DRIVE): A Novel Method of Volatile Enrichment in Cold Giant Planets

Upper Limits On Atmospheric Abundances Of KELT-11b And WASP-69b From A Retrieval Approach

The Coupled Tidal Evolution of the Moons and Spins of Warm Exoplanets

Sensitivity to Sub-Io-sized Exosatellite Transits In The MIRI LRS Lightcurve Of The Nearest Substellar Worlds

Perseverance Astrobiology Droid Has Completed A Martian Marathon

Machine Learning And Deep Learning For Exoplanet Detection And Atmospheric Characterization With JWST And The Upcoming Ariel Mission

Bioleaching Of Critical Trace Metals By Sphingomonas Desiccabilis: Substrate-driven Selectivity In Earth And Space Analogues

TESS Reveals The Puffiest Exoplanets Ever Found

An Agnostic Machine Learning Model of Photosynthetic Habitability