ESA Science & Technology - Exoplanets

ESA's exoplanet mission CHEOPS has revealed a unique planetary system consisting of six exoplanets, five of which are locked in a rare rhythmic dance as they orbit their central star. The sizes and masses of the planets, however, don't follow such an orderly pattern.

ESA's exoplanet mission Ariel, scheduled for launch in 2029, has moved from study to implementation phase, following which an industrial contractor will be selected to build the spacecraft.

ESA's new exoplanet mission, CHEOPS, has found a nearby planetary system to contain one of the hottest and most extreme extra-solar planets known to date: WASP-189 b. The finding, the very first from the mission, demonstrates CHEOPS' unique ability to shed light on the Universe around us by revealing the secrets of these alien worlds.

The launch of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana is now planned for 31 October 2021.

ESA congratulates 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who have been awarded the prestigious prize for the first discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star, and James Peebles, honoured for the theoretical framework of cosmology used to investigate the Universe on its largest scales.

With data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, water vapour has been detected in the atmosphere of a super-Earth within the habitable zone by University College London (UCL) researchers in a world first.

Proposals are solicited in response to the second Announcement of Opportunity (AO-2) for observing time in the CHEOPS Guest Observers Programme. This AO covers the period 26 March 2021 to 25 March 2022. The deadline for proposals is 1 December 2020, 13:00 CET/12:00 GMT.

Proposals are invited for the CHEOPS Discretionary Programme, an element of the Guest Observers Programme which enables scientists to propose observations of individual targets that have been discovered, or declared to be of high scientific merit, since the close of AO-1 back in mid-May 2019.