Latest Hot Jupiters Stories

AMES, Iowa -- An international team of astronomers that includes Steve Kawaler of Iowa State University has announced the first discovery of a planet orbiting a star near the end of its life.The announcement, culminating seven years of research, will be published in the Sept. 13 issue of the journal Nature.The news provides a preliminary picture of what could be the Earth's destiny in four to five billion years. That's when the sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel, expand enormously as a red...

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected enough water vapor to fill the oceans on Earth five times inside the collapsing nest of a forming star system. Astronomers say the water vapor is pouring down from the system's natal cloud and smacking into a dusty disk where planets are thought to form. The observations provide the first direct look at how water, an essential ingredient for life as we know it, begins to make its way into planets, possibly even rocky ones like our own. "For the...

A scorching-hot gas planet beyond our solar system is steaming up with water vapor, according to new observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The planet, called HD 189733b, swelters as it zips closely around its star every two days or so. Astronomers had predicted that planets of this class, termed "hot Jupiters," would contain water vapor in their atmospheres. Yet finding solid evidence for this has been slippery. These latest data are the most convincing yet that hot...

Astronomers who used powerful telescopes in Arizona and Chile in a survey for planets around nearby stars have discovered that extrasolar planets more massive than Jupiter are extremely rare in other outer solar systems.University of Arizona astronomers and their collaborators from the European Southern Observatory, Max Planck Institute for Astronomy at Heidelberg, Italy's Arcetri Observatory, the W.M. Keck Observatory and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics just concluded a...

Supersonic winds more than six times faster than those on Jupiter are blasting through the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet 60 light years away, say scientists who've analyzed results from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. They're part of a team that mapped weather on a planet beyond our solar system, a gas giant planet called HD 189733b. "The exoplanet's wind speeds probably exceed the speed of sound," said Adam Showman of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory...

COROT has provided its first image of a giant planet orbiting another star and the first bit of "˜seismic' information on a far away, Sun-like star- with unexpected accuracy.The unanticipated level of accuracy of this raw data shows that COROT will be able to see rocky planets - perhaps even as small as Earth - and possibly provide an indication of their chemical composition. COROT, a CNES project with ESA participation, is a mission with a dual goal. It is the first space mission dedicated...

Cambridge, MA - Today, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) announced that they have found the most massive known transiting extrasolar planet. The gas giant planet, called HAT-P-2b, contains more than eight times the mass of Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system. Its powerful gravity squashes it into a ball only slightly larger than Jupiter. HAT-P-2b shows other unusual characteristics. It has an extremely oval orbit that brings it as close as 3.1...

Flagstaff, Ariz. "“ For the first time, water has been identified in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet.  Through a combination of previously published Hubble Space Telescope measurements and new theoretical models, Lowell Observatory astronomer Travis Barman has found strong evidence for water absorption in the atmosphere of transiting planet HD209458b.  This result was recently accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal (http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0704.1114). "We...

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured for the first time enough light from planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, to identify signatures of molecules in their atmospheres. The landmark achievement is a significant step toward being able to detect possible life on rocky exoplanets and comes years before astronomers had anticipated. "This is an amazing surprise," said Spitzer project scientist Dr. Michael Werner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,...

The powerful vision of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has allowed astronomers to study for the first time the layer-cake structure of the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star. Hubble discovered a dense upper layer of hot hydrogen gas where the super-hot planet's atmosphere is bleeding off into space. The planet, designated HD 209458b, is unlike any world in our solar system. It orbits so close to its star and gets so hot that its gas is streaming into space, making the planet appear to...