Latest Extrasolar planet Stories
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Starting in early 2013, redOrbit will be launching a new podcast series called Your Universe Today, where we interview leading scientists about cutting-edge research in everything from space travel to the origins of our Universe. But we’re in the holiday spirit and couldn’t wait until January to unveil our new podcast project, so we’ve decided to give you a sneak peak of what’s to come. In the second...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Listen to the podcast “How Planets Form” with redOrbit's Dr. John Millis and planet-hunting expert Dr. Eric Mamajek of the University of Rochester. Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered just how many of the stars you see might have planets orbiting them, and if so, what those planets might be like? Our galaxy alone contains at least 200 billion stars, and researchers have been searching effortlessly to find out...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new study, using the capabilities of the Subaru Telescope, has captured a clear image of the protoplanetary disk of the star UX Tau A. An international team of researchers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and the Japanese universities of Kobe, Hyogo, and Saitama released a detailed study of the disk's characteristics, suggesting that its dust particles are large in size and non-spherical in shape. The...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A rare glimpse of a "Super Jupiter" has been caught while the planet was circling around its host star with a mass 2.5 times that of our Sun. Astronomers, led by Joseph Carson (College of Charleston and Max Planck Institute for Astronomy) and using the Subaru Telescope, were able to capture an image of the planet around the massive star K Andromedae. Only a few exoplanets have ever been captured in actual astronomical images,...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As the Kepler Space Telescope's prime mission comes to an end after three-and-a-half years, its new extended mission will begin. NASA's Kepler telescope has helped scientists identify more than 2,300 planet candidates, and confirm more than 100 plants. The telescope is helping to unravel more information about the universe, and gather details about what lies beyond those stars in the sky. Hundreds of Earth-size planet candidates...
[ Watch the Video: Artists Impression of Free-Floating Planet ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have identified a body that is most likely a planet wandering throughout space without a parent star. The free-floating planet candidate is the closet such object to the Solar System observed so far, lying at a distance of about 100 light-years away. Astronomers using the European Space Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Canada-France-Hawaii...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The search for planets around other stars might have gotten a little easier now that a Lowell Observatory astronomer and her colleagues have developed a set of directions, per se, to aid others in the hunt for exoplanets. Publishing their work in the journal Astrophysical Letters, Evgenya Shkolnik and her collaborators examined new and existing data from known stars and brown dwarfs that are less than 300 million years old, as...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online A large gap discovered in the protoplanetary disk of a Sun-like star may have resulted from the birth of multiple planets, an international team of researchers claim in a new study. Jun Hashimoto of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), Ruobing Dong of Princeton University, and colleagues used state-of-the-art equipment to examine PDS 70 (an object discovered by the Pico dos Dias Observatory in Brazil in the...
University of Notre Dame Justin Crepp, Freimann Assistant Professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, provided the high-contrast imaging observations that confirmed the first extrasolar planet discovered in a quadruple star system. He is a co-author on a paper about the discovery, “Planet Hunters: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet in a Quadruple Star System,” recently posted to the open-access arXiv.org, and submitted for publication to The Astrophysical Journal. Crepp’s...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The European Space Agency (ESA) announced Friday October 19 that its new small Science Program mission, called Cheops (CHaracterizing ExOPlanets Satellite), will focus on nearby, bright stars that are already known to have planets in their orbit. The mission, expected to launch in 2017, will search for the telltale signs of transits as planets pass across the face of their host stars. To do this, Cheops will employ high-precision...
Latest Extrasolar planet 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...
Planetary and Space Science is a peer-reviewed scientific journal established in 1959 and published by Elsevier 15 times per year. As of May 2012, the editor-in-chief is Rita Schulz (The Netherlands). The journal publishes original research articles and short communications. The main focus is on solar system processes which encompass multiple areas of the natural sciences. Research that involves planetary and space sciences involves many disciplines. Celestial mechanics is part of these...
Terrestrial Planet -- A terrestrial planet is a planet that is mostly composed of silicate rocks and may or may not have a relatively thin atmosphere. The term is derived from the Greek word for Earth, so an alternate definition would be those planets that are more Earth-like than not. Terrestrial planets are very different from gas giants, which may or may not have solid surfaces and are composed mostly of hydrogen and helium in various physical states. Only one terrestrial planet,...
Planet -- A planet is a body of considerable mass that orbits a star and that doesn't produce energy through nuclear fusion. Until recently, only nine were known (all of them in our own Solar system). As of the end of 2002 over 100 are known, with all of the new discoveries being extrasolar planets. Astronomers often call asteroids minor planets, and call the larger planetary bodies (those which are commonly called planets) major planets. Planets within the solar system can be...
Gas Giant -- A gas giant is a generic astronomical term invented by the science fiction writer James Blish to describe any large planet that is not composed mostly of rock or other solid matter. Gas giants may still have a solid core - in fact, it is expected that such a core is probably required for a gas giant to form - but the majority of its mass is in the form of gas (or gas compressed into a liquid state). Unlike rocky planets, gas giants do not have a well-defined surface. There...
![An Astronomer\](/media/gallery/spitzer-space-telescope-sirtf/thumbs/thumbs_746643main_pia17008_full.jpg "An Astronomer\")
