{"id":243601,"date":"2026-09-04T01:32:56","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T06:32:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/college-of-letters-science-university-of-wisconsinmadison"},"modified":"2026-09-04T01:32:56","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T06:32:56","slug":"college-of-letters-science-university-of-wisconsinmadison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/college-of-letters-science-university-of-wisconsinmadison","title":{"rendered":"College of Letters &amp; Science, University of WisconsinMadison"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/college-of-letters-science-university-of-wisconsinmadison.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers with the Wisconsin Center for Origins Research have discovered their first exoplanet, a 170-million-year-old planet more than 2.5 times larger than the Earth.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s nearly 170 million years old. It\u2019s more than 2.5 times the size of Earth. And it\u2019s the first exoplanet discovered and catalogued by researchers with the <a href=\"https:\/\/wicor.wisc.edu\/\">Wisconsin Center for Origins Research<\/a> (WiCOR).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.astro.wisc.edu\/staff\/kroft-max\/\">Max Kroft<\/a>, a graduate student in the lab of Assistant Professor of Astronomy <a href=\"https:\/\/www.astro.wisc.edu\/staff\/beatty-thomas\/\">Thomas Beatty<\/a>, is the lead author on a paper that characterizes GJ 523b, a dense exoplanet that\u2019s classified as a \u201cMega-Earth\u201d due to its massive size. The paper is currently under review and will be available through the open-access archive <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2603.24682\">arXiv<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers with the Wisconsin Center for Origins Research have discovered their first exoplanet, a 170-million-year-old planet more than 2.5 times larger than the Earth. It\u2019s nearly 170 million years old. It\u2019s more than 2.5 times the size of Earth. And it\u2019s the first exoplanet discovered and catalogued by researchers with the Wisconsin Center for Origins [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[224,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}