Space and astronomy news
[/caption] NASA’s Kepler mission has detected no shortage of planets; more than a thousand candidates were discovered in 2011, a handful of which were Earth-like in size. As data from the mission keeps pouring in, astronomers are continuing to confirm and classify these possible exoplanets. Today, a team of astronomers from the California Institute of …
[/caption] It’s only a few days into 2012 and already some new exoplanet discoveries have been announced. As 2011 ended, there were a total of 716 confirmed exoplanets and 2,326 planetary candidates, found by both orbiting space telescopes like Kepler and ground-based observatories. The pace of new discoveries has accelerated enormously in the past few …
Continue reading “Four New Exoplanets to Start Off the New Year!”
[/caption] December 2011 will go down in history as the first time humanity was able to detect an Earth-sized planet around another Sun-like star, said Francois Fressin, an astronomer from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Fressin and his team used the Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft to find two rocky worlds – one just a bit bigger than …
Continue reading “First Earth-Sized Exoplanets Found by Kepler”
[/caption] Anyone who has an interest in exoplanets probably knows about the various online catalogs that have become available in recent years, such as The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia for example, providing up-to-date information and statistics on the rapidly growing number of worlds being discovered orbiting other stars. So far, these have been listings of all known …
Continue reading “The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog is Now Online!”
[/caption] Everyone is familiar with the fact that the moon changes phases. But what many don’t know is that planets also go through phases. Shown above are the phases for Venus. We look inwards on Venus from a more distant vantage point in our solar system, but in principle, planets in other solar systems would …
[/caption] It wasn’t that long ago that astronomers began discovering the first planets around other stars. But as the field of exoplanetary astronomy explodes, astronomers have begun looking to the future and considering the possibility of detecting moons around these planets. Surprisingly, the potential for doing so may not be that far off. Before exploring …
[/caption] Over the past 21 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has gathered boatloads of data, with the Hubble archive center filling about 18 DVDs for every week of the telescope’s life. Now, with improved data mining techniques, an intense re-analysis of HST images from 1998 has revealed some hidden treasures: previously undetected extrasolar planets. Scientists …
Continue reading “Buried Treasure: Astronomers Find Exoplanets Hidden in Old Hubble Data”
[/caption] Yesterday astronomers with the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher or HARPS, announced a record-breaking discovery of more than fifty new exoplanets. This is the largest batch of confirmed extra solar planets ever announced at once. Another reason the discovery is noteworthy is that sixteen of the planets that were detected fall under the …
[/caption] Wow. This remarkable visualization shows every Kepler planetary candidate host star with its transiting companion in silhouette. Jason Rowe from the Kepler science team created the image, and the sizes of the stars and transiting companions are properly scaled. For reference, Rowe has included the Sun with a transiting Earth and Jupiter (below the …
Continue reading “Amazing Image: Kepler’s Transiting Exoplanets”
Here’s a terrific visualization of all the multiple-planet systems discovered by the Kepler spacecraft as of February 2, 2011. The planets’ orbits go through the entire 3.5 year mission. The different colors represent different sized planets — “hot” colors are the big planets, cooler colors are the smaller ones, relative to the other planets in …