Latest Exoplanetology Stories
Since the online citizen science project Planet Hunters launched last December, 40,000 web users from around the world have been helping professional astronomers analyze the light from 150,000 stars in the hopes of discovering Earth-like planets orbiting around them. Users analyze real scientific data collected by NASA's Kepler mission, which has been searching for planets beyond our own solar system — called exoplanets — since its launch in March 2009. Now astronomers at...
The stars are boiling! The reason is the energy generated in the center of the star that wants to escape. If this does not happen quickly enough, the star starts to ‘boil’ in the outer layers causing vibrations that result in light variations, like in the Sun. Such oscillations have now been discovered by Victoria Antoci and collaborators using the NASA spacecraft Kepler, but in a much hotter star. The scientists publish this in the most recent issue of “Nature”. Besides the...
WASHINGTON, Sept. 15, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA's Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet -- a planet orbiting two stars -- 200 light-years from Earth. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) Unlike Star Wars' Tatooine, the planet is cold, gaseous and not thought to harbor life, but its...
NASA's Kepler spacecraft has discovered a new planet that orbits around a pair of low-mass stars, not unlike the fictional world of Tatooine from the Star Wars universe, the U.S. space agency announced Thursday afternoon. "The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact," NASA said in a statement on Thursday. "Unlike Star Wars’ Tatooine, the planet is cold, gaseous and not thought to harbor life, but...
Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 11 a.m. PDT, Sept. 15 NASA will host a news briefing at 11 a.m. PDT, Thursday, Sept. 15, to announce a new discovery by the Kepler mission. The briefing will be held in the Syvertson auditorium, building N-201, at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. The event will be carried live on NASA Television and the agency's website at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or...
A nearby star is pummeling a companion planet with a barrage of X-rays 100,000 times more intense than the Earth receives from the sun. New data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope suggest that high-energy radiation is evaporating about 5 million tons of matter from the planet every second. This result gives insight into the difficult survival path for some planets. The planet, known as CoRoT-2b, has a mass about three...
Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 11 a.m. PDT, Sept. 15 MOFFETT FIELD, Calif., Sept. 13, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA will host a news briefing at 11 a.m. PDT, Thursday, Sept. 15, to announce a new discovery by the Kepler mission. The briefing will be held in the Syvertson auditorium, building N-201, at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. The event will be carried live on NASA Television and the agency's website at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv. (Logo:...
Richest haul of planets so far includes 16 new super-Earths [ View Video ] Astronomers using ESO’s world-leading exoplanet hunter HARPS have today announced a rich haul of more than 50 new exoplanets, including 16 super-Earths, one of which orbits at the edge of the habitable zone of its star. By studying the properties of all the HARPS planets found so far, the team has found that about 40% of stars similar to the Sun have at least one planet lighter than Saturn. The HARPS...
Usually, running five minutes late is a bad thing since you might lose your dinner reservation or miss out on tickets to the latest show. But when a planet runs five minutes late, astronomers get excited because it suggests that another world is nearby. NASA's Kepler spacecraft has spotted a planet that alternately runs late and early in its orbit because a second, "invisible" world is tugging on it. This is the first definite detection of a previously unknown planet using this...
Astronomers said on Thursday that they have discovered the darkest known exoplanet they say is the size of Jupiter. The researchers said exoplanet, TrES-2b, is blacker than coal or any planet or moon in our solar system."TrES-2b is considerably less reflective than black acrylic paint, so it's truly an alien world," astronomer David Kipping of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), lead author on the paper reporting the research, said in a statement.TrES-2b lacks...
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...
