Extrasolar Planets

A Planetary System That Never Was Teaches About Those That May Be

May 22, 2012

While Kepler and similar missions are turning up planets by the fist full, there’s long been many places that astronomers haven’t expected to find planetary systems. The main places include regions where gravitational forces conspire to make the region around potential host stars too unstable to form into planets. And there’s no place in the [...]

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Doomed Mercury-Sized Exoplanet May Be Turning to Dust

May 18, 2012

The old saying of the universe being stranger than we can imagine definitely applies to a newfound exoplanet orbiting a star about 1,500 light years from Earth. Researchers using the Kepler space observatory have detected what appears to be a planet about the size of Mercury literally turning to dust. A long tail of debris [...]

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JPL Wants To FINESSE Info From Exoplanets

May 17, 2012

Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s proposed FINESSE space telescope may not hunt for exoplanets, but it will find out what they’re made of.

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Rogue Planets Could Drive By And Scoop Up Life

May 10, 2012

Free-floating “rogue” planets may occasionally dip into the inner Solar System, picking up dust containing organic compounds — a.k.a. the ingredients for life — and carry it back out into the galaxy, according to new research by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director of the University of Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology in the UK.

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Alien Life May Not Be So Alien – If It Exists At All

May 9, 2012

Are we too hopeful in our hunt for extraterrestrial life? Regardless of exoplanet counts, super-Earths and Goldilocks zones, the probability of life elsewhere in the Universe is still a moot point — to date, we still only know of one instance of it. But even if life does exist somehow, somewhere besides Earth, would it [...]

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Light From a ‘SuperEarth’ Detected for the First Time

May 8, 2012

The star 55 Cancri has been a source of joy and firsts for planet hunters. Not only was it one of the first known stars to host an extrasolar planet, but now the light from one of its five known planets has been detected directly with the Spitzer Space Telescope, the first time a ‘smaller’ [...]

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Searching for Exoplanet Oceans More Challenging Than First Thought

May 8, 2012

As astronomers continue to discover more exoplanets, the focus has slowly shifted from what sizes such planets are, to what they’re made of. First attempts have been made at determining atmospheric composition but one of the most desirable finds wouldn’t be the gasses in the atmosphere, but the detection of liquid water which is a [...]

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Will This Be The Fate Of The Earth?

May 3, 2012

Astronomers have found four nearby white dwarf stars surrounded by disks of material that could be the remains of rocky planets much like Earth — and one star in particular appears to be in the act of swallowing up what’s left of an Earthlike planet’s core. The research, announced today by the Royal Astronomical Society, [...]

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We Really Hope ET is Out There, But There’s Not Enough Scientific Evidence, Researchers Say

April 26, 2012

For many of us who grew up listening to Carl Sagan, watching robotic spacecraft travel to other worlds, and indulging in science fiction books and movies, it’s a given: one day we’ll find life somewhere else in the solar system or Universe. But are we being too optimistic? Two researchers say that our hopes and [...]

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New Evidence For Fomalhaut Planets

April 15, 2012

The planetary system of the star Fomalhaut has been one of intense debate over the past few years. In 2008, it was announced that a large, Saturn mass planet shepherd a large dust ring and was spotted in visual images from Hubble. But in late 2011 infrared observations called the previous detections into question. Now [...]

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Frantic Comet Massacre Taking Place at Fomalhaut

April 11, 2012

There may be some frantic activity going on in the narrow, dusty disk surrounding a nearby star named Fomalhaut. Scientists have been trying to understand the makeup of the disk, and new observations by the Herschel Space Observatory reveals the disk may come from cometary collisions. But in order to create the amount of dust [...]

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How Would Humans Respond to First Contact from an Alien World?

April 5, 2012

According to Star Trek lore, it is only 51 years until humans encounter their first contact with an alien species. In the movie “Star Trek: First Contact,” on April 5, 2063, Vulcans pay a visit to an Earth recovering from a war-torn period (see the movie clip below.) But will such a planet-wide, history-changing event [...]

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Kepler Mission Extended to 2016

April 3, 2012

With NASA’s tight budget, there were concerns that some of the agency’s most successful astrophysics missions might not be able to continue. Anxieties were rampant about one mission in particular, the very fruitful exoplanet-hunting Kepler mission, as several years of observations are required in order for Kepler to confirm a repeated orbit as a planet [...]

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“Tidal Venuses” May Have Been Wrung Out To Dry

March 28, 2012

Earth-sized exoplanets within a distant star’s habitable zone could still be very much uninhabitable, depending on potential tidal stresses — either past or present — that could have “squeezed out” all the water, leaving behind a bone-dry ball of rock.

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Astronomers Discover Ancient Planetary System

March 28, 2012

From a press release from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy: A group of European astronomers has discovered an ancient planetary system that is likely to be a survivor from one of the earliest cosmic eras, 13 billion years ago. The system consists of the star HIP 11952 and two planets, which have orbital periods [...]

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Billions of Habitable Worlds Likely in the Milky Way

March 28, 2012

Could there be ‘tens of billions’ of habitable worlds in our own galaxy? That’s the results from a new study that searched for rocky planets in the habitable zones around red dwarf stars. An international team of astronomers using ESO’s HARPS spectrograph now estimates that there are tens of billions of such planets in the [...]

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Can “Warp Speed” Planets Zoom Through Interstellar Space?

March 24, 2012

Nearly ten years ago, astronomers were stunned to discover a star that had been apparently flung from its own system and travelling at over a million kilometers per hour. Over the years, a question was brought up: If stars can be ejected at a high velocity, what about planets? Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) [...]

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Live Interview: The Latest Exoplanet News from Kepler

March 2, 2012

We love exoplanets! And the Kepler mission is giving us more to love. Our special guest on our latest live interview via a Google+ Hangout On Air was astronomer Darin Ragozzine with the Kepler mission, sharing insight how Kepler is blowing our previous concepts on exoplanets out of the water. Darin is an ITC Fellow [...]

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Excellent Exoplanet Visualization: The Kepler Orrery II

March 1, 2012

About a year ago, Daniel Fabrycky from the Kepler spacecraft science team put together a terrific orrery-type visualization of all the multiple-planet systems discovered by the Kepler spacecraft as of February of 2011. With a new round of exoplanets just announced, here’s part two. This one is a visualization of the planetary systems discovered by [...]

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Next Live Interview: The Latest Exoplanet News from Kepler

March 1, 2012

Coming up next in our series of live interviews with astronomers and scientists is a discussion of the latest news from the Kepler mission. Joining us will be Darin Ragozzine, a postdoctoral researcher with the Kepler mission, at the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory who studies transiting exoplanets, as well [...]

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