A rock passed inside the Moon’s orbit, and nobody blinked A rock roughly the size of a house slid past Earth at about 58,900 miles (94,753 km), close enough that it cut inside the Moon’s own orbit, about four times nearer to us than the Moon ever gets. The pass happened on September 15, 2026, … Read more
KELT-9 b: A Planet That Runs Hotter Than a Star’s Surface Point a thermometer at the dayside of KELT-9 b and it would read about 4,600 kelvin (roughly 4,327 °C). That number belongs on a star’s spec sheet, not a planet’s. It’s close to four-fifths of the temperature of the Sun’s own visible surface, the … Read more
A Planet Light Enough to Float Picture a chunk of packing foam the size of a planet, not lighter than it, just as light. That’s Kepler-51 b, a gas giant bigger than Neptune circling a young Sun-like star. Its bulk density works out to about 30 kilograms per cubic meter (0.030 grams per cubic centimeter), … Read more
A Year That Fits Inside a Workday Picture clocking in for an eight-hour shift. Before you clock out, a small planet spotted by NASA’s Kepler space telescope has already lived through almost two full years of its own. KOI-1843.03 completes one full circuit of its star in 15,282 seconds, 4.245 hours, timed down to the … Read more
Ninety-Five Earths, One Number Picture every Earth you’ve ever seen, this one, the blue marble, copied ninety-five times and crushed into a single ball. That’s not a stand-in for size, it’s mass: the actual amount of matter packed into Saturn, weighed against Earth’s own. NASA’s NSSDC Planetary Fact Sheet lists Saturn’s mass at 5.6832 × … Read more
A Rock the Size of a Small House Slipped Inside the Moon’s Orbit A rock somewhere between the size of a small house and a ten-story building slipped through the gap between Earth and the Moon, passing closer to us than the Moon itself does, by a factor of four. On September 15, 2026, asteroid … Read more
A “Planet” Hotter Than the Sun’s Own Surface, If It’s There at All 6,910.74 K. That is the modeled dayside temperature of a candidate planet called KOI-55 c, also cataloged as Kepler-70c, orbiting the exposed core of a dying star. The Sun’s own visible surface, its photosphere, runs at 5,772 K. Do the ratio and … Read more
A Planet That Orbits Like a Comet Picture a world that swings in tight past its star, then flings itself back out into the dark, over and over, on a fixed clock. That’s not a comet’s path. It belongs to a gas giant carrying something like four times Jupiter’s mass, and its orbit is stretched … Read more
Neptune Outlives the People Who Found It MEASURED: Neptune takes 5.200×10⁹ seconds to complete one trip around the Sun, 164.79 times as long as Earth’s own orbit, which runs 3.156×10⁷ seconds, or 365.256 days. Lay the two years side by side and Neptune’s swallows nearly 165 of ours, end to end. Johann Gottfried Galle spotted … Read more
The Gas Giant That Moves Like a Comet Take a circle and squash it. Keep going until it’s barely an oval anymore, until it’s a long, thin loop with the star sitting off to one side instead of in the middle. Put a planet on that loop, riding it in toward the star and back … Read more
