r/exoplanets

Kepler-442 b is a rocky exoplanet located approximately 1,200 light years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. Based on current NASA data, it is estimated to be slightly larger than earth, with a radius of about 1.3 Earth radii, and is thought to have a mass of roughly 2-3 earth masses, although it's exact composition remains uncertain.

The planet orbits a K-type main-sequence (orange dwarf) star with an effective temperature of approximately 4,400 K at a distance of roughly 0.41 AU, placing it within the star's habitable zone.

This is a hypothetical visualization created in Blender, loosely informed by the currently known properties of the Kepler-442 system, while the planet's appearance remains entirely unknown.

A speculative artist's impression of Kepler-442 b, a potentially habitable rocky exoplanet approximately 1,200 light years from earth.

My interpretation of an earth sized rocky exoplanet orbiting a red dwarf star in the TOI 700 system located in the southern constellation of Dorado.

Created In Blender

On its quest to find Earth’s twin, NASA is designing a next-generation space telescope that will focus on one specific, audacious goal: to directly image potentially habitable worlds and scan them for chemical signatures of life. Lockheed Martin was recently selected by the space agency to continue advancing next-gen technologies and architecture studies for this ambitious planet-hunting mission.

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is planned to be a large aperture space telescope specifically engineered to identify Earth-like planets. NASA is working on the HWO concept using lessons learned from its predecessors like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It will combine the large-stature segmented mirror philosophy of JWST with the optical wavelengths of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), all while incorporating the coronagraph advancements being tested on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, slated for launch on August 30.

While a launch isn’t expected until the late 2030s or early 2040s, the rigorous groundwork being done today by NASA and industrial partners like Lockheed Martin represents the critical first steps. The North Bethesda-based aerospace giant is involved in the development of HWO under a study called Technology Maturation for Astrophysics Space Telescopes, or TechMAST.

“Lockheed Martin has steadily contributed to different phases of research and development for HWO, securing four different contracts for TechMAST maturation since 2018,” Tat’yana Berdan, Lockheed Martin spokesperson told Universelost.com.

Read more: https://universelost.com/2026/06/14/the-hunt-for-earth-2-0-how-lockheed-martin-plans-to-spot-potentially-habitable-exoplanets/

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has largely operated on a single, fragile assumption: that if advanced aliens are out there, they want to talk to us. Traditional SETI programs spend millions of hours listening for deliberate radio broadcasts or scanning the skies for flashing laser beams. So maybe instead of waiting to catch a radio signal, we should look for the heat produced by advanced alien civilizations?

Jason T. Wright, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU) started over a decade ago the G-HAT (Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies) project. Rather than trying to eavesdrop on alien conversations, this innovative “Dysonian” SETI method relies on a much more reliable metric: the unbending laws of thermodynamics. It suggests that no matter how secretive or advanced an alien civilization becomes, it cannot hide its waste heat.

Read more

(text post because it's one of those two papers on arχiv on the same day situations).

A 3rd planet in everyone's favorite edge-on disk system was found by teams using the VLT and JWST, with initial orbit (~30 au), mass (~2-4 Jupiters), and atmospheric features (including CO2 and water): via https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23789 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23801

Do most or all gas giant exoplanets look like this? smooth banded unlike looking like jupiter all wavy swirly ocean-wave violent bands? Are these smooth banded planets like the image I showed possible?

Hey folks, hope you're all doing well 👋

So I've built an app called Exoplanets: Planets & Space — a little passion project for anyone who, like me, falls down the exoplanet rabbit hole at 2am.

It pulls from the NASA Exoplanet Archive, so it's real confirmed-planet data, and lets you:

• Browse 6,000+ exoplanets, each rendered as a 3D planet colored by its actual temperature/type
• See an ML-based habitability estimate (clearly labelled as a rough educational guess, not gospel)
• Explore star systems with their orbits, and compare planets side by side
• Get a daily space fact (Dyson spheres, the Dark Forest theory, TRAPPIST-1, etc.)

It's completely free. I'm sharing it here mainly because I'd genuinely love feedback from people who actually know this stuff. Did I get any of the science framing wrong? What would you want to see in an exoplanet app?

Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.exoplanethunter

Thanks for taking a look 🚀