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Could we tweak the solar system to make Pluto a planet again?

12 September 2023

Pluto officially lost its planethood in 2006, and this episode of Dead Planets Society is all about bringing it back by making it bigger, faster and better than ever

Dead Planets Society: #5 The Return of Pluto

11 September 2023

Join Leah and Chelsea as they belatedly mourn the loss of Pluto as a planet. Back in 2006, Pluto was demoted to “dwarf planet”, sparking widespread outrage… a decision the team is still determined to reverse.Special guests are Kathryn Volk of the University...

Dead Planets Society: #5 The Return of Pluto

11 September 2023

Join Leah and Chelsea as they belatedly mourn the loss of Pluto as a planet. Back in 2006, Pluto was demoted to “dwarf planet”, sparking widespread outrage… a decision the team is still determined to reverse.Special guests are Kathryn Volk of the University...

Two-faced star seems to have one hydrogen side and one helium side

19 July 2023

A strange star more than 1300 light years away appears to have two sides with completely different compositions, and astronomers aren’t sure how it ended up that way

Distant planet may be the first known to share its orbit with another

19 July 2023

Exoplanet PDS 70b, a gas giant seven times the mass of Jupiter, appears to share an orbit with a ball of dust around the mass of Earth's moon, which could be forming a new planet

Could we put out the sun with a sun-sized orb of water?

18 July 2023

What would happen if we pushed a sun-sized ball of water into our star? The Dead Planets Society podcast dives into the possibilities

$Trappist-1 is a red-dwarf star, the most common variety, located some 40 light-years away in Aquarius. In 2015, astronomers discovered that Trappist-1 was host to three earth-sized planets. Then it came under the spotlight again in 2017 when NASA scientists found an additional four planets, taking the total up to seven. This is the most terrestrial planets that have ever been found to orbit a single star, including our own Solar System. Trappist-1 is only fractionally larger than Jupiter in diameter. This image shows the star and six of the planets as they would appear from the vantage point of the fifth outermost planet, Trappist-1f. All of the planets and the Sun are to scale. One of the worlds is seen transiting in front of the star.$

JWST finds the planet TRAPPIST-1b may not have an atmosphere

27 March 2023

Many researchers thought the worlds orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 would have thick atmospheres, but new observations of one of them show that it doesn’t

Visualisation of the dwarf planet Quaoar

Dwarf planet Quaoar has a weirdly big ring of debris encircling it

8 February 2023

Quaoar, a dwarf planet in our solar system, has a ring of debris orbiting it that is far further out than we thought the laws of physics allow

JWST has taken astonishing images of debris orbiting a nearby star

11 January 2023

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has observed a glowing disc of debris left over from planet formation around a nearby star called AU Microscopii

Electron microscope image of hexagonal diamond in a meteorite

Strange hexagonal diamonds found in meteorite from another planet

12 September 2022

Diamonds found in four meteorites in north-west Africa probably came from an ancient dwarf planet, and they are expected to be harder than Earth diamonds