The interest in 'Oumuamua and comet 2I/Borisov makes it clear that interstellar neighbors wandering into our system generate loads of media coverage. And why not: Here is a way to study material from another stellar system while remaining within our own. 2I/Borisov, for example, reaches its closest approach to Earth in early December, closing to within roughly 300 million kilometers. Whatever pushed an object like this out of the parent system cannot be known, but we're likely dealing with gravitational disruption related to planets in the birth system. But more about that in a moment. For thanks to Yale University astronomers Pieter van Dokkum, Cheng-Han Hsieh, Shany Danieli, and Gregory Laughlin, we have a fine new image of 2I/Borisov. This was taken on November 24 using the W.M. Keck Observatory's Low-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer in Hawaii. The tail of the comet, according to van Dokkum, is about 160,000 kilometers long. Note the size comparison below to be reminded, as always,...

Our fascination with Alpha Centauri doubtless propels at least some of the recent interest in binary star systems, as we ponder the chances for habitable worlds around the nearest stars. But given that the population of binary or multiple star systems in our galaxy is as high as it is (multiple systems are common, and about 50 percent of stars have binary companions), determining the factors that influence habitability in this environment has much broader significance. A new study out of the Georgia Institute of Technology has been looking at the issue by modeling an Earth twin in various binary scenarios. So how does Alpha Centauri fare? We can find habitable zones in the Centauri A/B system, and into these the researchers introduced a simulated Earth around Centauri B to examine its axis dynamics. They also investigate the dynamical evolution of planets within the habitable zone of either star, generalizing from these results to the larger binary star population. The issue to be...

While the majority of exoplanet-hosting stars discovered so far are single, we do have multiple star systems in various configurations with planetary companions. This is fertile ground for study, and not just because the nearest stellar system, Alpha Centauri, contains a tight binary pair that is being closely investigated for planets. The third star here is, of course, Proxima Centauri, around which we already know of the existence of a planet in the habitable zone. The much broader question is, how likely are multiple star systems to host planets? Tackling this question in a new study is Markus Mugrauer (Friedrich Schiller University, Jena), who has been investigating how the existence of multiple stars in a system affects the formation and development of planets. Mugrauer has been working with the second data release from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission (made available in April of last year). This release contains data collected by Gaia during the first 22 months of its...

The question of habitability on planets around M-dwarfs is compelling, and has been a preoccupation of mine ever since I began working on Centauri Dreams. After all, these dim red stars make up perhaps 75 percent of the stars in the galaxy (percentages vary, but the preponderance of M-dwarfs is clear). The problems of tidal lock, keeping one side of a planet always facing its star, and the potentially extreme radiation environment around young, flaring M-dwarfs have fueled an active debate about whether life could ever emerge here. At Northwestern University, a team led by Howard Chen, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, NASA's Virtual Planet Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is tackling the problem by combining 3D climate modeling with atmospheric chemistry. The paper on this work, in press at the Astrophysical Journal, examines how general circulation models (GCM) have been able to simulate the large-scale circulation and...

It's good to see the European Space Agency's ARIEL mission getting a bit more attention in the media. The Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey was selected earlier this year as an ESA science mission, scheduled for launch in 2028. Here the goal is to cull a statistically large sample of exoplanets to examine their evolution in the context of their parent stars. Giovanna Tinetti (University College London) is principal investigator. I would urge seeing ARIEL in the context of a different kind of evolution, that being the gradual growth in our technologies as we continue getting closer to studying the atmospheres of terrestrial-class worlds. For while ARIEL cannot achieve this feat -- its focus is on exoplanets of Jupiter-mass down to super-Earths, all on close orbits, with temperatures greater than 320 Celsius -- it leverages the fact that high temperature atmospheres keep their various interesting molecules in continual circulation, rather than letting them sink...

We often think of Jupiter as a mitigating influence on asteroid or comet strikes in the inner system, its gravity changing the trajectories of potential impactors. That would make gas giants a powerful determinant of the survivability of Earth analogues, at least in terms of habitability. While we continue to investigate the question, it's interesting to consider the damage a gas giant on an elliptical orbit might do to habitable zone planets. Stephen Kane (UC-Riverside), working with Caltech astronomer Sarah Blunt, decided to find out what would happen if, in their modeling, they introduced an elliptical gas giant into the system of an Earth twin. You may remember Kane's work earlier this year combining radial velocity with direct imaging methods to find three gas giants that had been previously unobserved (citation below). The monitoring of ten target stars continues even as this new work is published. We're beginning to find more planets at ever larger distances from their stars...

The formation of planets like Neptune under the core accretion model involves a protoplanetary core that reaches around 10 Earth masses before beginning to pull in surrounding gas, the latter being a runaway process that quickly builds the atmosphere around the object. Core accretion is most efficient at doing this just outside the snow line, but if we want to understand and test the theory, we need to know a lot more about how planets are distributed in this region. And that’s a problem, because recent microlensing surveys have found that planets like Neptune are most abundant much more distant from their host stars. Outward migration can account for such worlds, but we know little about exoplanets that form at the snow line, which is where the condensation of ices can factor into the emergence of a new world. Is this just an artifact of our still evolving microlensing detection techniques? Perhaps, and exceptions to the rule can therefore be helpful. Recent work that began with a...

NASA collaborates with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) on one of our more interesting observatories. SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, is a Boeing 747 aircraft that flies an infrared telescope with a 2.7 m diameter mirror. Located on the port side of the fuselage near the tail, the telescope houses a number of instruments for infrared astronomy at wavelengths from 1-655 micrometers (μm). One of these is FORCAST (Faint Object Infrared Camera for the SOFIA Telescope), which has now spotted an intriguing phenomenon, one that may be flagging a collision of two exoplanets. The stars in question form a double system called BD +20 307, some 300 light years from Earth. Note the age of this system, about one billion years, an important consideration in what follows. About ten years ago, observations from the Spitzer instrument as well as ground observatories produced evidence of warm debris here, whereas from age alone, we would have expected warm circumstellar...

I continue to be fascinated by small stars. My earliest passion for such involved red dwarfs, which appeared to make habitable planet possibilities that would be of great interest to science fiction authors, assuming such environments could survive tidal lock and stellar flaring. But white dwarfs have a weird seductiveness of their own, because we're learning how to extract from them information about planets that orbited them before being consumed. Thus a new paper out of UCLA, which focuses on an unusual way of determining the geochemistry of rocks from beyond our Solar System. We can do this because white dwarfs, the remnants of normal stars that have gone through their red giant phase and collapsed into objects about the size of the Earth, have strong gravitational pull. That means we would expect heavy elements like carbon, oxygen and nitrogen to vanish into their interiors, utterly out of view to our instruments. We should see little more than hydrogen and helium, making what...