New Lightweight, Very Sunny Super-Earth Discovered
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Researchers writing in the Astrophysical Journal say they have discovered one very light and sunny super-Earth. Dubbed GJ3470b, the team says the planet is about 14 times the mass of our...
Latest Exoplanetology Stories
Asteroid mining company announces new crowdfunding goal to enhance the ARKYD telescope with capability to search for alien planets around distant stars BELLEVUE, Wash., June 11, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Alien planets are out there and Planetary Resources needs your help to find them! That's right, the same high-powered telescope technology being used by Planetary Resources to identify near-Earth asteroids can also be used to hunt for what scientists call extrasolar planets or...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Stars have an alluring pull on the planets that surround them, especially a class of planets known as hot Jupiters. These planets are gas giants that form farther from their stars before migrating inward and heating up. Hot Jupiters, despite their close-in orbits, are not regularly consumed by their stars, as a new study conducted with data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope reveals. These planets remain in fairly stable orbits...
University of Louisville A scientific team led by University of Louisville doctoral student Karen Collins has discovered a hot Saturn-like planet in another solar system 700 light-years away. Collins announced the discovery of exoplanet KELT-6b Tuesday, June 4, during the American Astronomical Society's national meeting in Indianapolis. Astronomers caught sight of the planet when it passed in front of, or "transited," its host star—and they've since discovered that the planet...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers writing in the Astrophysical Journal say they have found that many of the stars and planets discovered are larger than previously thought. The astronomers used the NOAO Kitt Peak National Observatory Mayall 4-meter telescope to observe candidate planets identified by the NASA Kepler Mission and found that most of the stars observed are larger than originally thought, and a quarter of them were 35 percent bigger....
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Scientists announced during the American Astronomical Society’s (AAS) national meeting in Indianapolis this week that they have discovered a hot Saturn-like planet in another solar system 700 light-years away. The team used an inexpensive ground-based telescope to discover KELT-6b, which resides in the constellation Coma Berenices near Leo. This exoplanet has an orbit that transits its star every 7.8 days. Because of the length of...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online When scientists began seeking out planets outside of our solar system, they anticipated seeing systems much like our own. Small, rocky worlds orbiting a couple of astronomical units from the host star, with the gas giant planets orbiting farther out. After all, much effort had been given to explaining how a solar system such as ours would form. Only, this is not what has been found. Many solar systems are constructed with...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) have imaged possibly the faintest exoplanet so far. The team reported in Astrophysical Journal Letters that they imaged a faint object moving near a bright star. The exoplanet has an estimated mass of four to five times that of Jupiter, which could potentially make it the least massive planet to be directly observed outside the Solar System....
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online University of British Columbia (UBC) astronomers have determined that white dwarfs cool more slowly in the early stages of their life than models have previously predicted. White dwarfs are the dense, hot remnant cores of stars that have used up all of their fuel and lost their outer layers during the red giant phase. When these objects form, their surface temperatures are very hot, but cool over time as they radiate their limited...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The smallest space telescope to ever hit the cosmos will soon start observing the largest stars in history. The BRIght Target Explorer (BRITE) telescopes will target the sky for the most luminous stars in our galaxy. Eventually, the two currently in orbit will be part of a "constellation" of telescopes in orbit that will monitor the sky regularly for years to come. Each BRITE satellite holds a small optical telescope feeding a CCD...
[ Watch the Video: Big Weather on Hot Jupiters ] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online The class of new worlds dubbed as “hot Jupiters” definitely live up to their name, according to new research that has recorded temperatures as high as 2400 degrees Kelvin (or more than 3800 degrees Fahrenheit) on one of these massive, close-orbiting exoplanets. According to NASA, those temperature readings were observed on a gas giant named HAT-P-2b by Nikole Lewis, a NASA...
Latest Exoplanetology Reference Libraries
Image Caption: Artistic concept of a planetary system. Credit: Wikipedia/NASA/JPL-Caltech The term Astronomy encompasses a broad range of topics, including the study of stars, galaxies, and planets. In order to focus on the different areas of study, many subfields of astronomy emerge. One such area is the study of planets known, appropriately, as Planetary Astronomy. Observational Planetary Astronomy Even within the field of Planetary Astronomy, there are several divisions to...
Terrestrial Planet Finder -- The Terrestrial Planet Finder is a proposed NASA telescope system capable of detecting extrasolar terrestrial planets. In May 2002, NASA chose two TPF mission architecture concepts for further study and technology development. Each would use a different means to achieve the same goal - to block the light from a parent star in order to see its much smaller, dimmer planets. That technology challenge has been likened to finding a firefly near the beam of...
Extrasolar Planet -- An extrasolar planet is a planet orbiting around a star other than the Sun. Extrasolar planets were first discovered in the 1990s as a result of improved telescope technology, CCD and computer-based image processing which allowed far more accurate measurements of stellar motions. The first extrasolar planets were reported by the astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan in 1993, orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12. Subsequent investigation has determined that they are only planets...
