Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and elsewhere report the discovery of a new brown dwarf about 60 times more massive than Jupiter. The newfound substellar object, designated TOI-7019 b, is a brown dwarf known to orbit a star that is part of the Milky Way’s ancient thick disk. The finding is detailed in a paper published December 5 on the arXiv preprint server.

Brown dwarfs (BDs) are intermediate objects between planets and stars, occupying the mass range between 13 and 80 Jupiter masses (0.012 and 0.076 solar masses). However, although many brown dwarfs have been detected to date, these objects orbiting other stars are a rare find.

Recently, a team of astronomers led by CfA’s Jea Adams Redai found another rare brown dwarf, which is a companion to the star TOI-7019. This star was initially observed with NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which detected a transit signal in its light curve. Now, follow-up observations of this star confirmed that the transit signal is produced by a substellar object.

The first planet ever found orbiting another star was detected in 1995, and it belonged to a class now known as a “hot Jupiter.” These exoplanets are comparable in mass to Jupiter but circle their stars in just a few days. Scientists now believe that hot Jupiters originally formed far from their stars, similar to Jupiter in our Solar System, and later moved inward.

Two main processes have been proposed to explain this journey: high-eccentricity migration, where gravitational interactions with other objects distort a planet’s orbit before tidal forces near the star gradually make it circular; and disk migration, in which a planet slowly spirals inward while embedded in the protoplanetary disk of gas and dust.

A distant neutron star unexpectedly reawakened, unleashing a powerful X-ray surge that may reveal how the universe’s most extreme stars feed.

In a finding that echoes science fiction, astronomers at Northwestern University have captured a direct image of an exoplanet that orbits two stars, similar to the fictional world of Tatooine.

Directly imaging a planet beyond our solar system is uncommon on its own, but spotting one that revolves around a pair of suns is far more unusual. This newly identified planet stands out even among those rare cases. It travels closer to its two host stars than any other directly imaged planet found in a binary star system and sits six times nearer to its suns than comparable exoplanets discovered so far.

This observation gives scientists a valuable new way to study how planets form and move in systems with more than one star. By watching how the planet and its stars interact, researchers can better test and refine models of planetary formation under complex gravitational conditions.

If you feel a thrill every time we discover something new about the cosmos, then November 25th may have been a noteworthy day to you. That’s the day that NASA completed assembly of the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope.

The two main segments of the powerful space telescope were joined together in the large clean room at Goddard Space Flight Center that day. This means that the telescope is on track for launch as early as Fall 2026.

The Roman is an infrared telescope that’s set to become a flagship in the telescope fleet. It has only two instruments, the Wide-Field Instrument (WFI) and the Coronagraph Instrument (CGI).

Although they are technically gas giants, Uranus and Neptune are referred to as “ice giants” due to their composition.

This refers to the fact that Uranus and Neptune have more methane, water, and other volatiles than their larger counterparts (Jupiter and Saturn).

Given the pressure conditions in the planets’ interiors, these elements become solid, essentially becoming ‘ices.’

With an infrared eye, NEO Surveyor will target dangerous space rocks glowing in the dark

Astronomers from the University of Hawai’i (UH) at Manoa and elsewhere have observed the Taurus star-forming region, which resulted in the discovery of planetary-mass and stellar companions of two ultracool dwarf stars. The new finding was presented in a paper published December 4 on the pre-print server arXiv.

Taurus molecular cloud (TMC-1) is an interstellar molecular cloud hosting a stellar nursery, which contains hundreds of newly formed stars. Given that TMC-1 is located only 430 light years away from Earth, it is possibly the nearest large region of star formation.

The relatively young age of this region, estimated to be some 1–5 million years old, makes it an excellent window for astronomers into the earliest stages of wide-orbit planet and brown dwarf formation.