For the first time, a giant exoplanet has been discovered orbiting a dead star (which in this case happens to a white dwarf) every 1.4 days. The planet is roughly the same size as Jupiter and is no more than 14 times as massive and has an equilibrium temperature of 165 K. The mass of the white dwarf is approximately 0.5 solar masses and with the radius roughly 10% that of the Sun. The groundbreaking discovery demonstrated that giant planets can be scattered into tight orbits without being tidally disrupted, and motivates searches for smaller transiting planets around white dwarfs. NGC 2392: A planetary nebula, a phase that results when a star like the Sun becomes a red giant and sheds its outer layers. Source: Chandra Exoplanet research is clearly amongst the most interesting research topics in astronomy. With the advancement of high-quality telescopes and detectors, thousands of exoplanets have been discovered and the numbers are only projected to surge in the coming years. Norma...
A large team of astronomers discovered the first asteroid inside the orbit of Venus using the Zwicky Transient Facility located at the Palomar Observatory in California, United States. The asteroid has been named 2020 AV2 and is roughly 2 km in size with an aphelion distance (i.e., the point in the orbit of an object where it is farthest from the Sun ) of 0.65 astronomical units. The discovery could very well indicate that there may be a yet undiscovered population of asteroid lying outside of the asteroid belt and if more such asteroids are discovered, currently favored asteroid population models may need to be adjusted. Image of the largest asteroid Ceres. Source Wikipedia As of this writing, almost all of 1 million known asteroids lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter with only a handful lying near the orbit of Earth. Many scientists argue that there must be another population of asteroids present near the orbit of Venus. However, no such ast...