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2025.04.25
New Study Reveals Hidden Population of Cold, Rocky Planets
Super-Earth exoplanets—worlds slightly larger than Earth—are common in the outer regions of planetary systems, where gas giants like Jupiter are typically found. A new international study, published today in Science, adds an important piece to the puzzle of planetary system formation by highlighting a previously underexplored population of cold, rocky planets orbiting far from their stars.“W...
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2025.04.02
Pre-release of CRAFTS Wide-band Spectral Line Data Cube
The Commensal Radio Astronomy FasT Survey (CRAFTS; Li et al. 2018) is one of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) key projects. CRAFTS simultaneously records wide-band spectral line data, narrow-band spectral line data, and high temporal resolution time-domain data, enabling diverse scientific objectives. The wide-band spectral line data cover a spectral window in th...
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2025.03.27
Tsinghua Astronomers found the correlation between stellar metallicities and planet mutual inclinations
Our Solar System exhibits a flat architecture, with nearly all planets orbiting within the same plane. Among them, Mercury is the most inclined planet with a mutual inclination of 7 degrees relative to Earth’s orbital plane (Figure 1). Mutual inclination, which refers to the angle between the orbital planes of two planets, serves as a key indicator of the dynamical architecture of planetary sy...
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2025.03.19
The Story of Kepler-221 -- A Broken Chain
Kepler-221 is a G-type star hosting four planets. Among these planets, three of them -- b, c, and e – have their orbits following a rhythm known as a three-body resonance. This means that their orbital periods are close to integer, which resembles synchronized dancers following the same beat. For every six orbits of planet b, planet c completes three, and planet e completes one. But there’s a...
