Extrasolar Planets

The Search for Extraterrestrials Narrows

2010-04-29T18:55:00.000-07:00

A large number of experts participated recently at the Astrobiology Science Conference, which was held near Houston, Texas. At the meeting, scientists and NASA representatives spoke about the challenges still ahead in discovering forms of life on other planet, both in our solar system and beyond. The participants also addressed the controversy that famed physicists Stephen Hawking set in

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope Discovers Extrasolar Planet Lacking Methane

2010-04-21T19:33:00.001-07:00

PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered something odd about a distant planet -- it lacks methane, an ingredient common to many of the planets in our solar system. "It's a big puzzle," said Kevin Stevenson, a planetary sciences graduate student at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, lead author of a study appearing tomorrow, April 22 in the journal Nature.

New Technique Can Spot Smaller Exoplanets

2010-04-16T21:37:00.001-07:00

Image comment: This image of the planets in the HR8799 system were found using vortex coronagraphImage credits: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Palomar ObservatoryUp until now, methods of detecting exoplanets beyond our solar system could only see space rocks that were very large, and also fairly far away from their parent stars. These limitations occur on account of the fact that the brightness of

New Method of Classifying Planets Proposed

2010-04-12T07:23:00.001-07:00

Image comment: Artist's drawing depicting the dwarf planet Haumea, with its tow moons. The body has a prolonged shape that puzzles astronomersImage credits: A. Feild (Space Telescope Science Institute)The way the International Astronomical Union (IAU) goes about defining planets is a topic that many are uncomfortable with. A large proportion of all astronomers in the organization do not agree

Is densest Kuiper belt object a wayward asteroid?

2010-04-10T19:09:00.000-07:00

Quaoar, a large object in the outer solar system, is mostly made of rock, unlike its icy neighbours (Illustration: NASA/G. Bacon/STScI)A giant rock is walking among the "dirty iceballs" in the outer solar system, a new study suggests. Researchers say it may have journeyed there from the asteroid belt near Mars, or it may have been the victim of a cosmic crash that blasted away its once-icy

Happy 50th Birthday SETI

2010-04-10T19:02:00.000-07:00

SETI's Allen Telescope Array via SETI InstituteFifty years ago today, on April 8th, 1960, a Cornell astronomy professor named Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope at the star Tau Ceti in the hope of hearing broadcasts from extraterrestrial intelligence. Naturally, he didn't hear anything out of the ordinary. But with this experiment, Drake began the decades-long search for

A Planet-Like Companion Growing up in the Fast Lane

2010-04-06T16:11:00.001-07:00

Hubble Space Telescope (top) and Gemini North (bottom) images of the 2M J044144 system showing the smaller companion at 8:00 position. The companion has an estimated mass of between 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter. In the right panel of both the HST and Gemini images the brighter light from the brown dwarf has been removed to show the companion more clearly. The cliché that youth grow up

Life at the SETI Institute: Laurance Doyle

2010-04-03T18:57:00.000-07:00

Dr. Laurance Doyle is a true renaissance man who thrives on discovery. His passion is to immerse himself into scientific mysteries and go, as the oft-quoted Star Trek phrase states, "where no man has gone before." Long before the discovery of the first planet beyond our solar system, astronomer Dr. Laurance Doyle, who joined the SETI Institute in 1987, began theorizing about the habitability

Beyond Earth: The Awe And Wonder Of The Extra Solars

2010-03-30T21:04:00.000-07:00

By Adam Frank It is not every day that a question haunting humanity for 2,500 years is answered once and for all. It is not every day that the gates of awe, possibility and potential are thrown open. It is not every day that for a brief moment we get to know -- truly know -- something wonderful for the first time. That day came and went 15 years ago even if most of the planet wasn't

Water On Jupiter-Like Corot-9b?

2010-03-26T04:24:00.000-07:00

The newly discovered gas giant Corot-9b may have an interior that closely resembles those of Jupiter and Saturn in our own Solar System, according to a new paper published today in Nature.Some evidence also suggest that the exoplanet, discovered last Spring, may also be temperate enough to allow the presence of liquid water. Corot-9b orbits its star every 95.274 days, a little longer than

CoRoT-9b, a temperate exoplanet

2010-03-17T12:57:00.000-07:00

The curve shows the change in the luminosity of the star as CoRoT-9b transits it. The Y-axis shows the intensity and the X-axis shows time. The dip in the curve shows a decrease of about 1.5 percent during transit.Credit: Nature.CoRoT-9b, a Jupiter-sized exoplanet thats orbits its star every 95 days, is the latest discovery of the CoRoT satellite, a project in which the German Aerospace Center (

Exoplanet WASP-12 in Its Death Throes

2010-03-01T13:39:00.000-08:00

Among the more than 400 exoplanets discovered thus far, the one known as WASP-12 is fairly important. Astronomers say that it is the only known planet orbiting a star outside our solar system that revolves around a yellow dwarf. The entire system, featuring the star WASP-12 and its planet, is located about 867 light-years away from Earth. Unlike our home world, which takes about 365 days to

Detecting an exoplanet

2010-02-15T12:29:00.000-08:00

If a planet passes directly between a star and an observer's line of sight, it blocks out a tiny portion of the star's light, thus reducing its apparent brightness. Sensitive instruments can detect this periodic dip in brightness. From the period and depth of the transits, the orbit and size of the planetary companions can be calculated. Smaller planets will produce a smaller effect, and vice

Other-worldly pursuit

2010-02-15T12:28:00.000-08:00

In the basement of the astronomy department at the University of California-Berkeley, a half-dozen researchers sit behind computers three or four nights each month and look for planets beyond our solar system. Using an internet interface and a video link, they remotely control one of the largest telescopes in the world—a 270-ton instrument at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, where two round

Exoplanetary Atmosphere Reveals Glowing Methane

2010-02-15T11:58:00.001-08:00

In a groundbreaking, new find, astronomers announce that they've managed to identify glowing methane gas in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. The finding has been made using a ground-based observatory, as opposed to an orbit-based one, so experts believe that many more such discoveries could be in store for us over the coming years. The team behind the findings also says that, if its predictions

New Technique Can Identify Molecules on Exoplanets

2010-02-15T11:53:00.000-08:00

Researchers at the American space agency NASA have recently announced that they managed to create a new method of using modest, ground-based telescopes for producing amazing new science. The technique was just recently used on an exoplanet some 63 light-years away, with the 30-year-old, 3-meter-diameter (10-foot) NASA Infrared Telescope Facility, atop Mauna Kea, in Hawaii. The method makes it

Probing Exoplanets from the Ground: A Little Telescope Goes a Long Way

2010-02-15T11:49:00.000-08:00

This artist concept shows the planetary system called HD 189733, located 63 light-years away in the constellation Vulpecula. Astronomers performed the surprising feat of measuring methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the system's known gas planet from a telescope on the ground -- NASA's 3-meter (6-foot) Infrared Telescope Facility, located atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. (Credit: NASA/

A faraway planet intrigues

2009-12-06T11:34:00.000-08:00

The panels show two possibilities for the bizarre orbit of HAT-P-7b. The top panel shows a "polar" orbit in which the planet goes over the north and south poles of the star. The bottom panel shows a "retrograde" orbit in which the planet revolves in the opposite direction as the star's rotation. Astronomers cannot distinguish these two possibilities because the exact orientation of the star's

Exoplanets Clue to Sun's Curious Chemistry

2009-12-06T11:31:00.000-08:00

Artist’s impression of a baby star still surrounded by a protoplanetary disc in which planets are forming. Using ESO’s very successful HARPS spectrograph, a team of astronomers has found that Sun-like stars which host planets have destroyed their lithium much more efficiently than planet-free stars. This finding does not only shed light on the low levels of this chemical element in the Sun,

New Exoplanet - WASP-18b

2009-09-16T13:03:00.000-07:00

WASP-18b as visualized in Celestia.When first discovered, "Hot Jupiters", giant exoplanets that orbited their stars more closely than Mercury orbits the Sun, were a source of amazement. 373 planets and 149 Hot Jupiters later close orbiting planets are a bit ho-hum.Not so WASP-18b. Discovered by the Wide Angle Search for Planets, this amazing planet screams around its sun, HD 10069, in just under

Galileo's notebooks may reveal secrets of new planet

2009-07-09T12:13:00.000-07:00

Galileo knew he had discovered a new planet in 1613, 234 years before its official discovery date, according to a new theory by a University of Melbourne physicist. Professor David Jamieson, Head of the School of Physics, is investigating the notebooks of Galileo from 400 years ago and believes that buried in the notations is the evidence that he discovered a new planet that we now know as

The Exoplanet Sleuth Behind NASA's Kepler Mission

2009-06-25T06:28:00.001-07:00

Space scientist William "Bill" Borucki is a soft-spoken, pleasant person who grew up in a small town in Wisconsin where he liked to build and launch rockets. He still does, and he convinced NASA to build and launch Kepler, the first spacecraft capable of finding Earth-size planets orbiting other stars.Bill displays a number of similarities to another mild-mannered Midwesterner, a guy named Clark

Planet Found with Oddly Tilted Orbit

2009-06-17T15:49:00.000-07:00

Most known planets orbit in the same plane, one that corresponds to a star's equator. In our solar system, Pluto (now demoted) is a diminutive exception. So astronomers were surprised to find a world much larger than Jupiter in an off-kilter orbit around a faraway star. The orbit of planet XO-3b is tilted about 37 degrees from the star's equator. Theory holds that such a misalignment must

Odd discovery may help refine theories about how planets form

2009-06-17T11:40:00.001-07:00

An international team of researchers has found a planet around another star whose orbit is steeply tilted from the plane of the star's equator, a finding that contradicts some theories about how solar systems form. Kepler Mission Status ReportNASA's Kepler spacecraft has begun its search for other Earth-like worlds. The mission, which launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on March 6, will spend

Spitzer Catches Star Cooking Up Comet Crystals

2009-05-13T16:25:00.001-07:00

The image shows a young sun-like star encircled by its planet-forming disk of gas and dust. The silicate that makes up most of the dust would have begun as non-crystallized, amorphous particles.› Related animationImage credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech May 13, 2009 SIM Lite SIM Lite (formerly Space Interferometry Mission PlanetQuest), currently under development, will measure the distances and positions of stars several hundred

New Way Of Reading Light With Help Locate Earth-like Planets Around Other Stars

2009-05-13T12:09:00.000-07:00

ScienceDaily (May 12, 2009) — Thanks to the ability of astronomers to detect the presence of extrasolar planets orbiting distant stars, scientists today are able to examine hundreds of solar systems. Now researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. have created an "astro-comb" to help astronomers detect lighter planets, more like Earth, around distant