Here are some recent stories of interest related to exoplanets.
—Phys.org: “Old Stars May Be the Best Places to Search for Life“
Once upon a cosmic time, scientists assumed that stars apply an eternal magnetic brake, causing an endless slowdown of their rotation. With new observations and sophisticated methods, they have now peeked into a star’s magnetic secrets and found that they are not what they expected. The cosmic hotspots for finding alien neighbors might be around stars hitting their midlife crisis and beyond. This groundbreaking study, shedding light on magnetic phenomena and habitable environments, has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
—NASA: “Earth-sized Planet Has a ‘Lava Hemisphere’“
In a system with two known planets, astronomers spotted something new: a small object transiting across the Sun-sized star. This turned out to be another planet: extra hot and Earth-sized…The newly-spotted planet, called HD 63433 d, is tidally locked, meaning there is a dayside which always faces its star and a side that is constantly in darkness. This exoplanet, or planet outside of our solar system, orbits around the star HD 63433 (TOI 1726) in the HD 63433 planetary system. This scorching world is the smallest confirmed exoplanet younger than 500 million years old. It’s also the closest discovered Earth-sized planet this young, at about 400 million years old.
—UniverseToday: “Big Planets Don’t Necessarily Mean Big Moons’”
Does the size of an exomoon help determine if life could form on an exoplanet it’s orbiting? This is something a February 2022 study published in Nature Communications hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the potential for large exomoons to form around large exoplanets (Earth-sized and larger) like how our Moon was formed around the Earth. Despite this study being published almost two years ago, its findings still hold strong regarding the search for exomoons, as astronomers have yet to confirm the existence of any exomoons anywhere in the cosmos. But why is it so important to better understand the potential for large exomoons orbiting large exoplanets?