Space and astronomy news
If you think exoplanet detections are only in the realm of professional planet-hunting telescopes such as Kepler, take a look at the video above. David Schneider, a senior editor for IEEE Spectrum, explains that it takes little more than a DSLR camera and a camera lens to catch a glimpse. Schneider told Universe Today that …
Continue reading “Yes, You Can Find Exoplanets With A Simple Camera And Telephoto Lens”
One big driver in the search for exoplanets is whether life can exist elsewhere in the Universe. In fact, a major goal of the Kepler space telescope is to discover an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone of a star like our Sun. But what about having two Earths orbiting close to each other for …
Continue reading “‘Double Earths’ Could Be Fun Exoplanets To Hunt For — If They Exist”
If you’ve ever stood outside after twilight has passed, or a few hours before the sun rises at dawn, then chances are you’ve witnessed the phenomenon known as zodiacal light. This effect, which looks like a faint, diffuse white glow in the night sky, is what happens when sunlight is reflected off of tiny particles …
Continue reading “VLTI Detects Exozodiacal Light Around Exoplanets”
Surprise! Three planets believed to be good candidates for having water vapor in their atmosphere actually have much lower quantities than expected. The planets (HD 189733b, HD 209458b, and WASP-12b) are “hot Jupiters” that are orbiting very close to their parent star, at a distance where it was expected the extreme temperatures would turn water …
Here’s a fun trip through the galaxy, put together by PhD student Tom Hands at the University of Leicester: In the above video, you can fly to of all the known exoplanets (around single stars only), ordered roughly by semi-major axis of largest orbit. Hands said the video is designed to give the viewer an …
Continue reading “Take a Fly-by Of All the Known Exoplanets”
Astronomers constantly probe the skies for the unexpected. They search for unforeseen bumps in their data — signaling an unknown planet orbiting a star, a new class of astronomical objects or even a new set of physical laws that will rewrite the old ones. They are willing to embrace new ideas that may replace the …
Continue reading “New Technique Puts Exoplanets on the Scale”
So far, just a handful of planets have been found orbiting stars in star clusters – and actually, astronomers weren’t too surprised about that. Star clusters can be pretty harsh places with hordes of stars huddling close together, with strong radiation and harsh stellar winds stripping planet-forming materials from the region. But it turns out …
Continue reading “Three New Exoplanets Found In a Star Cluster”
If the dataset from the Kepler mission is any indication, the most common type of exoplanets in our galaxy aren’t Earth-sized rocky worlds or hot Jupiters. In fact, the most common type of exoplanet isn’t one that we see in our own neighborhood at all. “Perhaps the most remarkable discovery by Kepler is the amount …
Continue reading “The Most Common Exoplanets Might be “Mini-Neptunes””
It was just last week that we reported on the oh-so-close approach to 1,000 confirmed exoplanets discovered thus far, and now it’s official: the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia now includes more than 1,000! (1,010, to be exact.) 21 years after the first planets beyond our own Solar System were even confirmed to exist, it’s quite a …
Continue reading “There Are Now Officially Over 1,000 Confirmed Exoplanets!”
A quiet milestone in modern astronomy may soon come to pass. As of today, The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia lists a current tally of 998 extrasolar planets across 759 planetary systems. And although various tabulations differ slightly, very soon we should be living in an era where over one thousand exoplanets are known. The history of …