Planetary Resources is the private company that wants to eventually mine asteroids for profit. But initially, the group will focus on developing Earth orbiting telescopes to scan for the best asteroids, and then later, create low-cost robotic spacecraft for surveying missions and then actual spacecraft to do the mining.
But in the meantime, Planetary Resources has opened up the option of allowing access to their Arkyd-100 space telescope to others, and put out the question: “What would you do if you had access to our Arkyd-100 space telescopes?”
An MIT Researcher said he could use the Arkyd telescope to find alien planets.
Dr. Vlada Stamenkovic, a post-doctoral researcher at MIT who searches for exoplanets – distant alien worlds beyond our solar system — sent in this video to Planetary Resources with his explanation:
“It’s inspiring to think that the Arkyd can help researchers like Vlada discover Earth-like planets, and perhaps, someday, even life out there among the stars,” Planetary Resources said on their website. “We’re excited to see such enthusiasm around our projects.”
Another of the aims of Planetary Resources is to open deep-space exploration to private industry, much like the $10 million Ansari X Prize competition, which Planetary Resources member Peter Diamandis created. In previous talks, Diamandis has estimated that a small asteroid is worth about “20 trillion dollars in the platinum group metal marketplace.”
If you have something smaller in mind, perhaps similar to the proposal by Stamenkovic, Planetary Resources has opened up the possibility for anyone to submit a request for using their telescopes. If you have an idea, record a 90-second video on how you’d like to use the Arkyd-100, and share it with Planetary Resources. That can be done by creating a video response to this You Tube video or adding a link to your video on PRI’s website.
“Tell us the WHAT and the WHY. The videos getting the most likes will drive elements of our Kickstarter Campaign and get posted to the PRI website.”
Lead image caption: Artist concept of the Arkyd-100 series telescope. Credit: Planetary Resources.
Air glow (along with a lightning sprite) is visible in this image from the International Space Station. Credit: NASA
A bright red sprite appears above a lightning flash in a photo captured from the ISS
Back on April 30, Expedition 31 astronauts aboard the ISS captured this photo of a red sprite hovering above a bright flash of lightning over Myanmar. Elusive atmospheric phenomena, sprites are extremely brief bursts of electromagnetic activity that are associated with powerful lightning discharges, but exactly how and why they form isn’t yet known — although recent research (along with some incredible high-speed video) is shedding new light on sprites.
Although the appearance of bright high-altitude flashes above thunderstorms have been reported by pilots for nearly a century, it wasn’t until 1989 that a sprite was captured on camera — and the first color image of one wasn’t taken until 1994.
So-named because of their elusive nature, sprites appear as several clusters of red tendrils above a lighting flash followed by a breakup into smaller streaks, often extending as high as 55 miles (90 km) into the atmosphere. The brightest region of a sprite is typically seen at altitudes of 40-45 miles (65-75 km).
Because they occur above storms, only last for a thousandth of a second and emit light in the red portion of the visible spectrum (to which our eyes are the least sensitive) studying sprites has been notoriously difficult for atmospheric scientists. Space Station residents may get great views but they have lots of other things to do in the course of their day besides sprite hunting! Luckily, a team of scientists were able to capture some unprecedented videos of sprites from airplanes in the summer of 2011, using high-speed cameras and help from Japan’s NHK television.
Chasing storms over Denver via plane for two weeks, researchers were able to locate “hot zones” of sprites and capture them on camera from two planes flying 12 miles apart. Combining their videos with ground-based measurements they were able to create 3-dimensional maps of the formation and evolution of individual sprites.
Based on the latest research, it’s suggested that sprites form as a result of a positive electrical charge within a lightning strike that reaches the ground, which leaves the top of the cloud negatively charged — a one-in-ten chance that then makes conditions above the cloud “just right” for a sprite to form higher in the atmosphere.
“Seeing these are spectacular,” said Hans C. Stenbaek-Nielsen, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, Alaska, where much sprite research has been conducted. “But we need the movies, because not only are they so fast that you could blink and miss them, but they emit most of their light in red, where the human eye is relatively blind.”
An example of how energy can be exchanged between lower and higher regions of Earth’s atmosphere, it’s been suggested that sprites could also be found on other planets as well, and may provide insight into the exotic chemistries of alien atmospheres.
Artist's impression of a red giant star. Image credit: ESO
How’s this for a depressing look into Earth’s potential future: astronomers have witnessed the first evidence of a planet’s destruction by its aging star as it expands into a red giant.
“A similar fate may await the inner planets in our solar system, when the Sun becomes a red giant and expands all the way out to Earth’s orbit some five-billion years from now,” said Alex Wolszczan, from Penn State, University, who led a team which found evidence of a missing planet having been devoured by its parent star. Wolszczan also is the discoverer of the first planet ever found outside our solar system.
The planet-eating culprit, a red-giant star named BD+48 740 is older than the Sun and now has a radius about eleven times bigger than our Sun.
The evidence the astronomers found was a massive planet in a surprising highly elliptical orbit around the star – indicating a missing planet — plus the star’s wacky chemical composition.
“Our detailed spectroscopic analysis reveals that this red-giant star, BD+48 740, contains an abnormally high amount of lithium, a rare element created primarily during the Big Bang 14 billion years ago,” said team member Monika Adamow from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland. “Lithium is easily destroyed in stars, which is why its abnormally high abundance in this older star is so unusual.
“Theorists have identified only a few, very specific circumstances, other than the Big Bang, under which lithium can be created in stars,” Wolszczan added. “In the case of BD+48 740, it is probable that the lithium production was triggered by a mass the size of a planet that spiraled into the star and heated it up while the star was digesting it.”
The other piece of evidence discovered by the astronomers is the highly elliptical orbit of the star’s newly discovered massive planet, which is at least 1.6 times as massive as Jupiter.
“We discovered that this planet revolves around the star in an orbit that is only slightly wider than that of Mars at its narrowest point, but is much more extended at its farthest point,” said Andrzej Niedzielski, also from Nicolaus Copernicus University. “Such orbits are uncommon in planetary systems around evolved stars and, in fact, the BD+48 740 planet’s orbit is the most elliptical one detected so far.”
The Hobby-Eberly Telescope
Because gravitational interactions between planets are responsible for such peculiar orbits, the astronomers suspect that the dive of the missing planet toward the star could have given the surviving massive planet a burst of energy, throwing it into an eccentric orbit like a boomerang.
“Catching a planet in the act of being devoured by a star is an almost improbable feat to accomplish because of the comparative swiftness of the process, but the occurrence of such a collision can be deduced from the way it affects the stellar chemistry,” said Eva Villaver of the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain Villaver. “The highly elongated orbit of the massive planet we discovered around this lithium-polluted red-giant star is exactly the kind of evidence that would point to the star’s recent destruction of its now-missing planet.”
The team used the Hobby-Eberly Telescope – searching for planets – when they detected evidence of the missing planet’s destruction.
The paper describing this discovery is posted in an early online edition of the Astrophysical Journal Letters (Adamow et al. 2012, ApJ, 754, L15), or another version is available on arXiv.
Lead image caption: Artist’s impression of a red giant star. Image credit: ESO
That’s exactly the scenario shown by a mesmerizing animation called “Worlds” by Alex Parker — a single system containing 2299 multiple-transit planetary candidates identified to date by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which is currently scrutinizing a field of view within the constellation Cygnus to detect the oh-so-faint reductions in brightness caused by planets passing in front of their stars.
The search requires patience and precision; it’s not really this crowded out there.
Alex’s animation takes 2299 candidates that have been observed multiple times, each shown to scale in relation to their home star, and puts them in orbit around one star, at their relative distances.
The result, although extravagantly impossible, is no less fascinating to watch. (I suggest going full screen.)
“The Kepler observatory has detected a multitude of planet candidates orbiting distant stars,” Alex writes on his Vimeo page. “The current list contains 2321 planet candidates, though some of these have already been flagged as likely false-positives or contamination from binary stars. This animation does not contain circumbinary planets or planet candidates where only a single transit has been observed, which is why ‘only’ 2299 are shown.
“A fraction of these candidates will likely be ruled out as false positives as time goes on, while the remainder stand to be confirmed as real planets by follow-up analysis,” Alex adds.
The white ellipses seen when the animation pulls back are the relative sizes of the orbits of Mercury, Venus and Earth.
At this time the Kepler mission has identified 2321 planetary candidates, with 74 exoplanets confirmed. See more on the Kepler mission here.
Animation: Alex Parker. Image: Kepler mission planet candidates family portrait (NASA Ames/Jason Rowe/Wendy Stenzel)
As astronomers near the 800 mark for confirmed extra solar planets, it seems that notable milestones are becoming fewer and further between. Multi-planet systems aren’t even worth mentioning. Planets less massive than Earth? Already heard about it. Detecting atmospheres? Old news.
But a recent paper manages to sneak in one new first: The first detection of hot Jupiters in an open cluster. This discovery is not simply notable due to the novelty, but clusters have special characteristics that can help astronomers determine more of the history of the system.
The discovery was made by astronomers at Georgia State University using the “wobble” method in which they looked for the spectroscopic wiggle of spectral lines as planets tugged their parent stars around in orbit. The Beehive Cluster was chosen because it is a nearby cluster with over 1,000 member stars, many of which are similar in mass to the Sun. Additionally, the cluster is known to have an above average metallicity which is known to be correlated with planetary systems.
Searches of other open clusters have largely come up empty. Only two stars in open clusters have so far been found to have planets and both of those are around giant stars and as such, the planets are in wide orbits. This paucity is odd since stars are expected to form in clusters, and as such, the frequency of planets in clusters should be nearly the same as isolated stars.
The team used the 1.5-m Tillinghast Reflector at the Fred L. Whipple Observatory on Mt. Hopkins, Arizona observing a total of 53 stars in the cluster. Their results uncovered two new hot Jupiter planets in tight orbits around the parent, main-sequence stars. The first has an estimated mass of 0.54 times that of Jupiter while the second weighs in at 1.8 Jupiter masses.
The discovery helps to place constraints on how planets form and migrate in fledgling systems. Since massive planets such as these would need to form further out in colder parts of the circumstellar cloud, such planets would have to move inwards. The time period in which this happens has been a difficult question for astronomers to pin down. But since the Beehive cluster is only 600 million years old and these new planets are already in tight orbits, this helps to demonstrate that such migration is possible on short timescales.
While these are the first of their kind discovered in open clusters, this discovery puts the number of hot Jupiters in open clusters in rough agreement with expectations based on the number of such systems of stars that are no longer bound in clusters. This finding bridges the gap between formation and isolated stars that previous searches of open clusters had left open.
Exoplanet Gliese 581g is back, and “officially” ranking #1 on a list of potentially habitable worlds outside of our solar system thanks to new research from the team that originally announced its discovery in 2010.
Orbiting a star 20 light-years away, the super-Earth is now listed alongside other exoplanets Gliese 667Cc, Kepler-22b, HD85512 and Gliese 581d in the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo’s Habitable Exoplanets Catalog as good places to look for Earthlike environments… and thus the possibility of life.
First announced in September 2010 by a team led by Steven S. Vogt of UC Santa Cruz, the presence of Gliese 581g was immediately challenged by other astronomers whose data didn’t support its existence. Vogt’s team conducted further analysis of the Gliese system in which it appeared that the orbits of the planets were circular, rather than elliptical, and it was in this type of scenario that a strong signal for Gliese 581g once again appeared.
“This signal has a False Alarm Probability of < 4% and is consistent with a planet of minimum mass 2.2M [Earth masses], orbiting squarely in the star’s Habitable Zone at 0.13 AU, where liquid water on planetary surfaces is a distinct possibility” said Vogt.
And, located near the center of its star’s habitable “Goldilocks” zone and receiving about the same relative amount of light as Earth does, Gliese 581 g isn’t just on the list… it’s now considered the best candidate for being an Earthlike world — knocking previous favorite Gliese 667Cc into second place.
The announcement was made on the PHL’s press site earlier today by Professor Abel Méndez, Director of the PHL at UPR Arecibo.
Diagram of the Gliese system. The green area is the habitable zone, where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface. (PHL @ UPR Arecibo)
“The controversy around Gliese 581g will continue and we decided to include it to our main catalog based on the new significant evidence presented, and until more is known about the architecture of this interesting stellar system”
Caption: This artist’s concept shows what astronomers believe is an alien world just two-thirds the size of Earth. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Astronomers have detected what could be one of the smallest exoplanets found so far, just two-thirds the size of Earth. And, cosmically speaking, it’s in our neighborhood, at just 33 light-years away. But this planet, called UCF-1.01, is not a world most Earthlings would enjoy visiting: it likely is covered in magma.
“We have found strong evidence for a very small, very hot and very near planet with the help of the Spitzer Space Telescope,” said Kevin Stevenson from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, lead author of a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal. “Identifying nearby small planets such as UCF-1.01 may one day lead to their characterization using future instruments.”
This is the first time an exoplanet has been found using Spitzer, so astronomers are now rethinking this space telescope’s role in helping discover potentially habitable, terrestrial-sized worlds.
However, the hot, new-planet candidate was found unexpectedly in Spitzer observations. Stevenson and his colleagues were studying the Neptune-sized exoplanet GJ 436b, already known to exist around the red-dwarf star GJ 436. In the Spitzer data, the astronomers noticed slight dips in the amount of infrared light streaming from the star, separate from the dips caused by GJ 436b. A review of Spitzer archival data showed the dips were periodic, suggesting a second planet might be orbiting the star and blocking out a small fraction of the star’s light.
From the data, the astronomers were able to glean some basic properties of this exoplanet: its diameter is approximately 8,400 kilometers (5,200 miles ), or two-thirds that of Earth. UCF-1.01 would revolve quite tightly around its star, GJ 436, at about seven times the distance of Earth from the moon, with its “year” lasting only 1.4 Earth days. Given this proximity to its star, far closer than the planet Mercury is to our sun, the exoplanet’s surface temperature would be almost 600 degrees Celsius (about 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit).
The planet likely does not have an atmosphere, being so close to the star UCR-1.01’s might be a hot lava world.
“The planet could even be covered in magma,” said Joseph Harrington, also of the University of Central Florida and principal investigator of the research.
In addition to UCF-1.01, the researchers noticed hints of a third planet, dubbed UCF-1.02, orbiting GJ 436. Spitzer has observed evidence of the two new planets several times each. However, even the most sensitive instruments are unable to measure exoplanet masses as small as UCF-1.01 and UCF-1.02, which are perhaps only one-third the mass of Earth. Knowing the mass is required for confirming a discovery, so the paper authors are cautiously calling both bodies exoplanet candidates for now.
While this is Spitzer’s first potential extra solar planet, the exoplant-hunting Kepler spacecraft has identified 1,800 stars as candidates for having planetary systems, and just three are verified to contain sub-Earth-sized exoplanets. Of these, only one exoplanet is thought to be smaller than the Spitzer candidates, with a radius similar to Mars, or 57 percent that of Earth.
“I hope future observations will confirm these exciting results, which show Spitzer may be able to discover exoplanets as small as Mars,” said Michael Werner, Spitzer project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Even after almost nine years in space, Spitzer’s observations continue to take us in new and important scientific directions.”
Looking directly at stars is a bad way to find planets orbiting faraway suns but using a new technique, scientists can now sift the starlight to find new exoplanets millions of times dimmer than their parent stars.
“We are blinded by this starlight,” says Ben R. Oppenheimer, a curator in the American Museum of Natural History’s Department of Astrophysics and principal investigator for Project 1640. “Once we can actually see these exoplanets, we can determine the colors they emit, the chemical compositions of their atmospheres, and even the physical characteristics of their surfaces. Ultimately, direct measurements, when conducted from space, can be used to better understand the origin of Earth and to look for signs of life in other worlds.”
Using indirect detection methods, astronomers have found hundreds of planets orbiting other stars. The light stars emit, however, is tens of millions to billions of times brighter than the light reflected by planets.
Project 1640 is an advanced telescope imaging system, made up of the world’s most advanced adaptive optics system, instruments and software. The project operates at the 200-inch Hale Telescope at California’s Palomar Observatory. Engineers at the American Museum of Natural History, California Institute of Technology, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked more than six years developing the new system.
Earth’s atmosphere wreaks havoc with starlight. The heating and cooling of the atmosphere produces turbulence that creates a twinkling effect on the point-like light from a star. Optics within a telescope also warp light. The instruments that make up Project 1640 manipulate starlight by deforming a mirror more than 7 million times a second to counteract the twinkling. This produces a crystal clear infrared image of the star with a precision smaller than one nanometer; about 100 times smaller than a typical bacteria.
“Imaging planets directly is supremely challenging,” said Charles Beichman, executive director of the NASA ExoPlanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology. “Imagine trying to see a firefly whirling around a searchlight more than a thousand miles away.”
A coronagraph, built by the American Museum of Natural History, optically dims the star leaving other celestial objects in the field of view. Other instruments help create an “artificial eclipse” inside Project 1640. Only about half a percent of the original light remains in the form of a speckled background. These speckles can still be hundreds of times brighter than the dim planets. The instruments control the light from the speckles to further dim their brightness. What the instrument creates is a dark hole where the star had been while leaving the light reflected from any planets. Coordination of the system is extremely important, say the researchers. Even the smallest light leak would drown out the incredibly faint light from planets orbiting a star.
For now Project 1640, the world’s most advanced and highest contrast imaging system, is focusing on bright stars relatively close to Earth; about 200 light-years away. Their three-year survey includes plans to image hundreds of young stars. The planets they may find are likely to be very large, Jupiter-sized bodies.
“The more we learn about them, the more we realize how vastly different planetary systems can be from our own,” said Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer Gautam Vasisht. “All indications point to a tremendous diversity of planetary systems, far beyond what was imagined just 10 years ago. We are on the verge of an incredibly rich new field.”
Image Caption: Two images of HD 157728, a nearby star 1.5 times larger than the Sun. The star is centered in both images, and its light has been mostly removed by the adaptive optics system and coronagraph. The remaining starlight leaves a speckled background against which fainter objects cannot be seen. On the left, the image was made without the ultra-precise starlight control that Project 1640 is capable of. On the right, the wavefront sensor was active, and a darker square hole formed in the residual starlight, allowing objects up to 10 million times fainter than the star to be seen. Images were taken on June 14, 2012 with Project 1640 on the Palomar Observatory’s 200-inch Hale telescope. (Courtesy of Project 1640)
Since its discovery in 2005, exoplanet HD 189733b has been one of the most-observed extra solar planets, due to its size, compact orbit, proximity to Earth and enticing blue-sky atmosphere. But astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Swift Telescope have witnessed dramatic changes in the planet’s upper atmosphere following a violent flare from its parent which bathed the planet in intense X-ray radiation. The scientists say being able to watch the action gives a tantalizing glimpse of the changing climates and weather on planets outside our Solar System.
While HD 189733b has a blue sky like Earth, it is one of the many “hot Jupiters” that have been the easiest for exoplanet hunters to find: huge gas planets that orbit extremely close to its star. HD 189733 lies extremely close to its star, called HD 189733A, just one thirtieth the distance Earth is from the Sun, whipping around the star in 2.2 days. Additionally, the system is just 63 light-years away, so close that its star can be seen with binoculars near the famous Dumbbell Nebula.
Even though its star is slightly smaller and cooler than the Sun, this makes the planet’s climate exceptionally hot, at above 1000 degrees Celsius, and the upper atmosphere is battered by energetic extreme-ultraviolet and X-ray radiation.
Even though HD 189733b’s atmosphere wasn’t thought to be evaporating (like a similar exoplanet called Osiris, or HD 209458b) astronomers knew the potential was there. The atmospheric gases extend far beyond the planetary “surface” allowing stellar light to pass through, and in previous observations astronomers were able to get a peek into what chemical compounds surround HD 189733b. From this analysis, scientists deduced that water and methane is contained in the atmosphere; and later, the Spitzer space telescope even mapped the temperature distribution around the globe. Additional research indicated a thin layer of particles exists in the upper atmosphere of HD 189733b, creating thin reflective clouds.
Astronomer Alain Lecavelier des Etangs from at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics in France led a team using Hubble to observe the atmosphere of this planet during two periods in early 2010 and late 2011, as it was silhouetted against its parent star. While backlit in this way, the planet’s atmosphere imprints its chemical signature on the starlight, allowing astronomers to decode what is happening on scales that are too tiny to image directly. They were hoping to observe the atmosphere evaporating away, but were disappointed in 2010.
“The first set of observations were actually disappointing,” Lecavelier said, “since they showed no trace of the planet’s atmosphere at all. We only realized we had chanced upon something more interesting when the second set of observations came in.”
The team’s follow-up observations, made in 2011, showed a dramatic change, with clear signs of a plume of gas being blown from the planet at a rate of at least 1000 tons per second, at speeds of 300,000 mph, giving the planet a comet-like appearance.
“We hadn’t just confirmed that some planets’ atmospheres evaporate,” Lecavelier said, “we had watched the physical conditions in the evaporating atmosphere vary over time. Nobody had done that before.”
So why was the atmosphere’s condition changing?
Despite the extreme temperature of the planet, the atmosphere is not hot enough to evaporate at the rate seen in 2011. Instead the evaporation is thought to be driven by the intense X-ray and extreme-ultraviolet radiation from the parent star, which is about 20 times more powerful than that of our own Sun. Taking into account also that HD 189733b is a giant planet very close to its star, then it must suffer an X-ray dose 3 million times higher than the Earth.
Because X-rays and extreme ultraviolet starlight heat the planet’s atmosphere and likely drive its escape, the team also monitored the star with Swift’s X-ray Telescope (XRT). On Sept. 7, 2011, just eight hours before Hubble was scheduled to observe the transit, Swift was monitoring the star when it unleashed a powerful flare. It brightened by 3.6 times in X-rays, a spike occurring atop emission levels that already were greater than the sun’s.
“The planet’s close proximity to the star means it was struck by a blast of X-rays tens of thousands of times stronger than the Earth suffers even during an X-class solar flare, the strongest category,” said co-author Peter Wheatley, a physicist at the University of Warwick in England.
After accounting for the planet’s enormous size, the team notes that HD 189733b encountered about 3 million times as many X-rays as Earth receives from a solar flare at the threshold of the X class.
“X-ray emissions are a small part of the star’s total output, but it is the part that it is energetic enough to drive the evaporation of the atmosphere,” said co-author Peter Wheatley from the University of Warwick, in the UK. “This was the brightest X-ray flare from HD 189733A of several observed to date, and it seems very likely that the impact of this flare on the planet drove the evaporation seen a few hours later with Hubble.”
The team also said the changes in the star’s output may mean it undergoes a seasonal process similar to the Sun’s 11-year sunspot cycle.
The team hopes to clarify the changes they witnessed using future observations with Hubble and ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope, but say there is no question that the planet was hit by a stellar flare, and no question that the rate of evaporation of the planet’s atmosphere shot up.
This research shows the benefits of collaborative research between missions, as Swift saw the flare, and Hubble saw the massive amount of gas stripped out of the planet’s atmosphere. It also gives potential for future research, to watch for changes in both the star and atmospheres of other worlds.
This video from NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center provides additional information:
Lead image caption: This artist’s rendering illustrates the evaporation of HD 189733b’s atmosphere in response to a powerful eruption from its host star. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope detected the escaping gases and NASA’s Swift satellite caught the stellar flare. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Second image caption: Swift’s Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope captured this view of HD 189733b’s star on Sept. 14, 2011. The image is 6 arcminutes across. Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler
An international team of astronomers has figured out a way to determine details of an exoplanet’s atmosphere from 50 light-years away… even though the planet doesn’t transit the face of its star as seen from Earth.
Tau Boötis b is a “hot Jupiter” type of exoplanet, 6 times more massive than Jupiter. It was the first planet to be identified orbiting its parent star, Tau Boötis, located 50 light-years away. It’s also one of the first exoplanets we’ve known about, discovered in 1996 via the radial velocity method — that is, Tau Boötis b exerts a slight tug on its star, shifting its position enough to be detectable from Earth. But the exoplanet doesn’t pass in front of its star like some others do, which until now made measurements of its atmosphere impossible.
Today, an international team of scientists working with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile have announced the success of a “clever new trick” of examining such non-transiting exoplanet atmospheres. By gathering high-quality infrared observations of the Tau Boötis system with the VLT’s CRIRES instrument the researchers were able to differentiate the radiation coming from the planet versus that emitted by its star, allowing the velocity and mass of Tau Boötis b to be determined.
“Thanks to the high quality observations provided by the VLT and CRIRES we were able to study the spectrum of the system in much more detail than has been possible before,” said Ignas Snellen with Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, co-author of the research paper. “Only about 0.01% of the light we see comes from the planet, and the rest from the star, so this was not easy.”
Using this technique, the researchers determined that Tau Boötis b’s thick atmosphere contains carbon monoxide and, curiously, exhibits cooler temperatures at higher altitudes — the opposite of what’s been found on other hot Jupiter exoplanets.
“Maybe one day we may even find evidence for biological activity on Earth-like planets in this way.”
– Ignas Snellen, Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands
In addition to atmospheric details, the team was also able to use the new method to determine Tau Boötis b’s mass and orbital angle — 44 degrees, another detail not previously identifiable.
“The new technique also means that we can now study the atmospheres of exoplanets that don’t transit their stars, as well as measuring their masses accurately, which was impossible before,” said Snellen. “This is a big step forward.
“Maybe one day we may even find evidence for biological activity on Earth-like planets in this way.”
This research was presented in a paper “The signature of orbital motion from the dayside of the planet Tau Boötis b”, to appear in the journal Nature on June 28, 2012.
Added 6/27: The team’s paper can be found on arXiv here.
Top image: artist’s impression of the exoplanet Tau Boötis b. (ESO/L. Calçada). Side image: ESO’s VLT telescopes at the Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Atacama desert. (Iztok Boncina/ESO)
