Latest Extrasolar planet Stories

NASA's Kepler mission has been named the winner of the 2012 Aviation Week Laureate Award in the Space category, announced last night at the 55th annual black-tie awards dinner in Washington. Accepting the award on behalf of the Kepler mission team were Roger Hunter, Kepler project manager at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.; and James Fanson, who was the Kepler project manager during mission development at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Fanson is...

[ Watch the Video ] Three months before the last transit of Venus this century, scientists are gathering at the Observatoire de Paris to finalize their observation plans in a workshop supported by the Europlanet Research Infrastructure and the EGIDE/PHC Sakura Program. The transit of Venus on 5-6 June 2012 will give scientists two important opportunities for science: firstly, to use Venus as an example of a transiting exoplanet.  Astronomers will use the transit to test the techniques...

[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] An international team of astronomers has found evidence of life in the Universe – right here on Earth – after pointing one of the world’s largest telescope at the Moon.  While the observation might seem trivial, it has helped perfect a technique that could lead to future discoveries of life outside our solar system. The researchers used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to look at Earthshine reflected from the moon....

The prevailing model for planetary accretion, also called fractal assembly, and dating back as far as the 18th century, assumes that the Solar System’s planets grew as small grains colliding chaotically, coalescing into bigger ones, colliding yet more until they formed planetesimals. The planetesimals then collided until they formed planets as varied as the Earth and Jupiter. The model assumes that this occurred in an extremely hot (as high as 1,600 degrees Celsius) environment for the...

Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) suggest in a new study that the heavens could be teeming with “nomad planets,” wandering through space instead of orbiting around host stars. In fact, say the researchers, there could be 100,000 times more of these planets in the Milky Way alone than there are stars. And if observations confirm this estimate, it could affect the current theories of planet formation and change our understanding of the...

Chemical clues on the formation of planetary systems The study of the photospheric stellar abundances of the planet-host stars is the key to understanding how protoplanets form, as well as which protoplanetary clouds evolve planets and which do not. These studies, which have important implications for models of giant planet formation and evolution, also help us to investigate the internal and atmospheric structure and composition of extrasolar planets.. Theoretical studies suggest that...

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a new class of planet, completely enveloped by water. The "waterworld" planet has a thick, steamy atmosphere and is smaller than Uranus but larger than Earth. "GJ1214b is like no planet we know of," Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) said in a press release. "A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water." The planet is about 2.7 times Earth's diameter, and weighs almost seven times...

Phase transitions in liquid magmas at the pressure and temperature levels that exist deep within Earth-like planets could play a role in the formation of new worlds, according to a new research put forth by experts at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). According to a Friday UPI article, the process is similar to the way that graphite, when placed in high-pressure conditions, can transform into diamonds. In much the same way, the LLNL researchers assert that molten...

An international team of astronomers have discovered a potentially habitable planet 22 light years away orbiting a nearby star, reports The Telegraph. Scientists, led by Carnegie’s Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler, discovered the triple star system with a planet orbiting one of the stars, clearly within the habitable zone, where its neither too hot nor too cold, making it suitable for liquid water to be present on the surface. The host star has a different makeup than our own...

Using models similar to those used in weapons research, scientists may soon know more about exoplanets, those objects beyond the realm of our solar system. In a new study, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists and collaborators came up with new methods for deriving and testing the equation of state (EOS) of matter in exoplanets and figured out the mass-radius and mass-pressure relations for materials relevant to planetary interiors. Astronomers started detecting exoplanets...