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
A Planet Built Like a Packing Peanut Picture a world with about four times Earth’s mass, stretched out until it’s mostly empty space, thin enough, cubic meter for cubic meter, to come out lighter than packing foam. That’s Kepler-51 c, a planet circling a young Sun-like star, with a bulk density of just 30 kilograms … Read more
CT Cha b Is Bigger Than Jupiter, and Nobody’s Sure What to Call It Picture Jupiter. Not the number, the actual planet, the one with the storm band you can find in a backyard telescope, the biggest thing in the solar system by a wide margin. Now stretch that picture until it’s roughly 2.2 times … Read more
HEADLINE: Kepler-245 d’s catalog density: 11.1 kg/m³, thinner than foam ARTICLE: The Planet That Was Supposed to Float A world carrying the mass of 21.6 Earths ought to be heavy stuff, rock, metal, or gas under real pressure. One number attached to Kepler-245 d says otherwise: a bulk density of just 11.1 kilograms per cubic … Read more
A Year That Ends Before Your Shift Does Clock in for a full workday, and somewhere out past the galaxy’s crowded core, an entire planet could finish its year, go home, and beat you to the parking lot. That planet is M62H b, and its “year”, one full lap around its host star, takes 11,485.586 … Read more
