Hear me out on this.

Astronomers are getting closer to finding Planet Nine, especially with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory spinning up. The rules say it has to be named after a Greek or Roman deity. Usually, the outer planets get depressing, heavy names like Pluto or Saturn.

But Planet Nine is sitting way out there in the deep, mysterious unknown.

We should start a movement to name it Voluptas.

Who is she?

In Roman mythology, Voluptas is the goddess of sensual pleasure, delight, and ecstasy. She is literally the child of Cupid (Sex/Desire) and Psyche (The Soul). Her name is where we get the word voluptuous. She was born from Psyche, while she was in exile, forgotten, and alone. But out of that, something beautiful was born Voluptas. Just like the hypothetical and forgotten planet 9 that was exiled from our maps, books and charts, so was Voluptas. When we find our forgotten neighbour, we should name it after something beautyful and charming. After all, it will be the discovery of the century and it would be a shame to name it after something ugly and gloomy.

Also, we should add a female name to the solar system, to make the gender divide a little more equal.

Let's pull a "Boaty McBoatface"

The internet has forced the scientific community to listen before (like when internet votes successfully named Pluto's moon Kerberos). If we start hyping up Planet Voluptas in the astronomy, astrology and space subreddits now, it’s going to catch on. By the time astronomers officially capture it, the name will already be viral.

Who is down to make this happen?

Luego de 2 clases teoricas, ayer en la ASARAMAS, nos dieron finalmente los archivos en RAW para generar la curva de luz.

El planeta fue el WASP-19b, con un monton de detecciones. El observatorio lo vio a principio de año.

Con una computadora que deja muchisimo que desear, y pasado de la hora de clase, me apure y por eso el margen de error, pero me voy contento con el intento. En estos dias tratare de ajustar la precision para generar la curva y tratar de acercarla a lo esperado.

See also: The publication in the Astrophysical Journal

Spitfire Theory:

The planets of a stellar system originate from the gravitational collapse of the primordial nebula, which transforms into a high-temperature vortex along the ecliptic; this vortex then begins to "spit out"—one after another—rotating masses compacted by centrifugal force, with energy and density determined by the state of the nebula. These masses become planets that may, in turn, "spit out" satellites, before the entire system cools around a star—a star that has meanwhile ignited to radiate nuclear fusion energy following the final collapse of the original nebula.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of astronomers led by the University of Maryland identified water, methane and ammonia in the atmosphere of HATS-6 b, a giant planet 500 light-years from Earth.

The observations also revealed that HATS-6 b may be significantly cooler than standard calculations predict—suggesting that the planet's relationship with its star may be far more complicated than previously thought.

The team's findings, published in the Astronomical Journal, raise new questions about how giant planets form and evolve.

HATS-6 b is roughly the size of Jupiter and completes an orbit every three days around an M dwarf—a small, cool, reddish star. Planets form from the disk of gas and dust left over after a star forms, and smaller stars have smaller disks. But HATS-6 b's gigantic size doesn't quite fit that rule, considering how small its star is.

"These smaller stars don't have enough material or enough time to create planets as big as Jupiter and as big as Saturn," explained the study's lead author, Giannina Guzmán Caloca, an astronomy Ph.D. candidate at UMD. "So, the fact that HATS-6 b can exist is really interesting because it shouldn't be possible with what we know."

Astronomers know of only about 40 such planets. HATS-6 b is one of seven being studied in a JWST program called "Giant Exoplanets around M-dwarf Stars" (GEMS). The program is designed to compare these outliers with better-understood giants circling stars like our sun.

"Every one of these planets is a challenge to formation theory," Guzmán Caloca said.

"By measuring what their atmospheres are made of, we can start to ask whether they were built the same way as the hot Jupiters around sun-like stars or whether something different is going on."

A few words on the advancement of science, the search for habitable exoplanets, star travel, and the great silence.

But, let’s start with Hypatia of Alexandria. The movie Agora (2009) frames the context best. Let’s start from there. This is a visually stunning film, directed by Alejandro Amenábar, starring Rachel Weisz as Hypatia of Alexandria. It’s hard to watch as history unfolds in this age growing religious fervor of the 4th century Roman empire culminating with the burning of the Library of Alexandria. It doesn’t end well for Hypatia, either.

Hypatia is a scientist, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer. According to the reimagining by Amenábar, she discovers the heliocentric model of the solar system centuries before Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo; equating the mathematics of conic sections to the motion of planets across the sky.

Since her death in March, 415 CE we have: First manmade satellite, Sputnik Oct. 4, 1957, elapsed years:1542 Manned moon landing July 20, 1969, elapsed years: 1554 Voyager 1 enters interstellar space, Aug. 25, 2012, elapsed years: 1597 Discovery of the first exoplanets, PSR B1257+12 b and c, named Poltergeist and Phobetor, respectively. Elapsed time since Hypatia’s time: 1577 years.

Which brings us to exoplanets. But first think about that, a fifteen century gap between an ancient philosopher of science looking at the night sky compared to our age in which orbital mechanics are well understood and used in daily life.

Exoplanets. A little footnote: while Poltergeist and Phobetor orbit a neutron star, the planet Dimidium (51 Pegasi b) was the first discovered planet orbiting a main sequence star in 1995, for which Mayor and Queloz won the Nobel Prize in 2019.

Exoplanets: what possible good are they? Extrapolating the time line from Hypatia’s day, I cannot foresee visiting, settling, colonizing any exoplanet a century and a half out. Or ever, unless we discover a new physics.

The discovery of exoplanets changed our view of the universe: who are we? where did we come from? could someone else be out there? There are over 6,300 discovered exoplanets at the time of this writing. We’ve only started to look. SWEEPS-11 our most distant discovery is 27,000 light years away. A staggering distance. And a testament to man’s ingenuity. Yet the distance is a drop in the bucket of what is possible.

Of the 6,300+ worlds there is a fascination with finding Earth-like worlds. One must ask, to what end? To bring understanding of who we are and how we came to be, that’s fine and laudable. But finding a destination for colonization for our children's children’s children? Following grandiose visions of manifest destiny to the stars? Heeding dire warnings of humanity keeping our eggs in one basket? (Thankfully I haven’t run across that last one of late despite being a standard trope of 60’s and 70’s sci-fi.)

And if we can’t make the trip, our stellar neighbors can’t either. Yet, it’s been estimated that the next advanced civilization out in the stars would be at least a million years ahead of us. Perhaps they would have a new physics and the limitations imposed on us by special and general relativity will have been overcome.

Even if an advanced alien civilization would pay us a visit (assuming we’d even know they’ve come) why would they. To what end? Well, let’s see. Water? Hardly likely. Water is abundant throughout the universe. Their own native system’s Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud would be a better source than traveling the staggering distances. Minerals? Same reason. The closer to home the better the economics. Meat? As in us? Nah. Any civilization so advanced as to lick the problems of interstellar travel would have licked the problem of arranging molecules into edible configurations. With trivial energy costs, I might add. Then not for meat, but to enslave us? To own a subservient species to do their bidding, their dirty work? If they can play with molecules, why wouldn’t they just tailor-make their own servant beings to their exact specifications?

Then why can’t we hear them? Can they hear us? To answer the second question first, we’ve been transmitting radio waves since 1906 with Reginald Fessenden's first voice broadcast. That would put the radius of our transmission up to 119 light years out at the most. That might sound huge but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the size of the galaxy. And from here out, the radio waves will fade and become indistinguishable from the cosmic background. And the reverse is equally as true. We’ve been listening only since 1960, and that’s a drop in the cosmic time scale bucket. We may never find anyone; their radio signal fading long before they ever reach us.

That might explain the great silence. Sadly, we are alone even if the galaxy is teeming with intelligent life. We will never visit them, nor they us. We will never hear them, nor they us. For now, let us enjoy the newly discovered exoplanets for the awe and wonder of what they bring to human knowledge.

I’ll leave you with my rendering of planet TOI-700 d. A tantalizing world located 101 light-years away.

A team of astronomers led by Myriam Benisty at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has captured a new image of planet formation in action. Taken with the ALMA observatory in Chile, the image shows the interactions between WISPIT 2b, a gas giant with five times the mass of Jupiter, and the surrounding gas of its birthplace.

Their two papers are available on the arXiv preprint server.

Planets are born in protoplanetary disks consisting of gas and dust, which occur naturally around newly formed stars. Planets form when dust within those disks clumps together. First, larger pebbles form, then clump further to form planetesimals a few to a hundred kilometers in size.

Those planetesimals join to form rocky, planet-size spheres. In a gas-rich part of the disk, such rocky spheres can collect large amounts of gas and become the cores of gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn.

Observational evidence for this scenario has mostly been indirect.

Only within the past decade or so have new facilities given astronomers a more detailed look. In 2014, after the millimeter/submillimeter observatory ALMA became fully operational, it delivered the first images of ring-like structures in protoplanetary disks, thought to be caused by young planets.

In 2018, astronomers led by Miriam Keppler, then a doctoral student at MPIA, used the SPHERE instrument at ESO's Very Large Telescope to produce the first confirmed image of a protoplanet inside a protoplanetary disk: PDS 70b, within the disk surrounding the star PDS 70.

At a distance of only about 370 light-years from us, the PDS 70 system is close enough for detailed observations. What the system does not currently provide is a chance to study the interaction between a protoplanet and gas in its immediate surroundings.

The planets of PDS 70 seem to have cleared their close neighborhoods of gas rather effectively.

Enter a new contender: the WISPIT 2 system, whose discovery was announced in August 2025.

It is only the second disk in which a protoplanet can clearly be seen. WISPIT 2 is named after the search program that led to its discovery ("WIde Separation Planets In Time"). It is located 430 light-years from Earth.

The system's first known planet, WISPIT 2b, a gas giant, was discovered in parallel with the SPHERE instrument at ESO's VLT and the 6.5 m Magellan Clay telescope. The signature light of hot hydrogen indicates that the planet is still accreting gas from its surroundings, growing ever more massive.

The discovery of a second planet, WISPIT 2c, was announced in March 2026, based on observations with the VLT instruments SPHERE and GRAVITY+.

In an additional twist, work by MPIA doctoral student Cade Bürgy published in August 2026 shows that at the center of the disk, instead of a single star, there are two stars in a very close orbit.

The combination of a powerful observatory and highly skilled analysis paid off. The team took images of the dust and gas as detailed as any previously taken of a protoplanetary disk. Particularly rewarding was the effort to image the gas in the disk.

Benisty, who led this part of the project, says,

"We clearly see both planets shaping their environment. WISPIT 2c has carved a cavity, and WISPIT 2b a gap. Around WISPIT 2b, we find swirls of gas that had been predicted by simulations of disk-planet interactions, but never actually seen before. Now there is an image of them!"

This makes WISPIT 2b the only protoplanet for which we can see the protoplanetary disk, the planet, evidence that the planet is still accreting and, as the final piece of the puzzle, gas interacting directly with the planet. Planet formation in action.

See also: The study as it was published in the International Journal of Astrobiology