Research
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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...
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2025.02.25
First Direct Measurements of Globular Cluster Mass Loss Through Stellar Streams
Globular clusters are dense, ancient groups of stars orbiting galaxies like the Milky Way, often containing hundreds of thousands to even several million stars. Over billions of years, these clusters gradually lose mass due to two-body relaxation and tidal stripping. This slow unraveling process can eventually cause some clusters to dissolve entirely, contributing their stars to the galaxy's ha...
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