Category: Extrasolar Planets

Artist illustration of a planet orbiting a very young, active star. Image credit: UFL. Click to enlarge.
Astronomers have discovered a planet orbiting a very young star nearly 100 light years away using a relatively small, publicly accessible telescope turbocharged with a new planet-finding instrument.

The feat suggests that astronomers have found a way to dramatically accelerate the pace of the hunt for planets outside our solar system.

“In the last two decades, astronomers have searched about 3,000 stars for new planets,” said Jian Ge, a professor of astronomy at the University of Florida. “Our success with this new instrument shows that we will soon be able to search stars much more quickly and cheaply ? perhaps as many as a couple of hundred thousand stars in the next two decades.”

Ge and colleagues at the University of Florida, Tennessee State University, the Institute of Astrophysics in Spain’s Canary Islands, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Texas presented their findings today at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Their work is important in part because of what the astronomers found ? a planet, at least half as massive as Jupiter, orbiting a star just 600 million years old. That’s very young compared, for example, with the sun’s 5 billion years.

“This is one of the youngest stars ever identified with a planetary companion,” Ge said. Perhaps more significant, the instrument used to find the planet points the way to a much more accessible method for finding others ? including those capable of supporting life.

Planets outside our solar system are typically swamped by the light of their stars, making it difficult to observe them visually. In the 1990s, astronomers began using a measurement technique called Doppler radial velocity to detect planets by observing the wobble in a star that is gravitationally induced by an orbiting planet.

This technique, which has uncovered the vast majority of the 160-plus extrasolar planets found so far, works by hunting through the spectrum of starlight for the subtle Doppler shifts that occur as the star and planet move toward and away from their common center of mass. The instrument at the heart of this technique is usually a spectrograph, but this instrument is problematic.

“A major problem with spectrographs is that they collect only a small percentage of photons from the target light source, which means that they are only useful to search for distant planets when mounted on relatively large telescopes,” Ge said.

The astronomers’ new instrument, the Exoplanet Tracker, or ET, eliminates this problem by swapping the spectrograph with an interferometer, a device that can take more precise radial velocity measurements. Tests show the interferometer can capture as much as 20 percent of available photons, making the instrument far more powerful, which opens its use for distant planet hunting to smaller telescopes.

At a development cost of about $200,000, the interferometer-equipped ET is also far cheaper than comparable spectrographs, which cost more than $1 million. And at about 4 feet long, 2 feet wide and weighing about 150 pounds, it is lighter and smaller. The instrument is based on a concept first proposed in 1997 by Lawrence Livermore National Lab physicist David Erskine.

The astronomers used the Exoplanet Tracker on the special 0.9-meter Coud? feed system within the National Science Foundation’s 2.1-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Ariz.

Like radial velocity instruments equipped with spectrographs, the ET instrument in its present form can search only one object at a time. But Ge’s team has demonstrated that it can hunt for planets around multiple stars simultaneously ? a key element of its heightened utility. The team is working on a version capable of surveying as many as 100 stars simultaneously.

The Exoplanet Tracker will be used next spring for a trial planet survey on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey 2.5 meter wide-field telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. The new instrument is funded with an $875,000 grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation. A much more ambitious, long-term survey is in the planning stages.

The Kitt Peak Coud? feed telescope that Ge and colleagues used to discover the new planet has a 0.9-meter mirror on a tall tower, a mirror that directs incoming starlight into an observing room in the base of the 2.1-meter telescope. The standard spectrograph in the facility fills the room ? while ET occupies a small corner.

The new planet is the most distant ever found using the Doppler technique with a telescope mirror less than 1 meter in size. There are hundreds of such telescopes worldwide, compared with just a handful of the larger 2- and 3-meter telescopes more commonly used in planet finding ? telescopes that tend to be in extremely high demand and difficult to access.

“These smaller telescopes are relatively cheap and relatively available,” Ge said, “so you can often get access to many dozens of nights on them if you have a promising proposal.”

Kitt Peak National Observatory is part of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, Ariz., which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc., under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.

“This is the first time that a planet has been discovered using a publicly funded telescope at the U.S. national observatory,” said Buell Jannuzi, acting director of Kitt Peak National Observatory. “We are very excited that the broader community of astronomers around the world will be able to propose to use the single-object Exoplanet Tracker instrument at Kitt Peak to carry out their own research programs, starting in the fall of 2006.”

That said, discovering new planets is never easy.

In the latest find, astronomers went to great lengths to ensure they were actually “seeing” a planet. That’s because the star, which has about 80 percent of the mass of our sun, retains much of its youthful rotation speed, which makes it capable of generating strong magnetic fields and associated dark star spots. These are similar to the magnetically generated sunspots on our own sun, and they can mimic the presence of a planet in orbit around the star.

To check against this possibility, Greg Henry, an astronomer at Tennessee State, observed the star with an automated telescope in Arizona, and found the star to be changing its brightness as it rotates.

“My observations reveal a rotation period of about 12 days for the star,” Henry said. “Thus, if the planetary orbital period is indeed less than five days, the dark spots rotating around on the surface of the star every 12 days cannot be causing the false appearance of a planet.”

Located in the direction of the constellation Virgo, the newly discovered planet completes its orbit in less than five days, meaning it orbits very close to its parent star and is very hot. That means it’s too close to the star to lie within the “habitable zone” where life is possible.

Original Source: UFL News Release

An artist’s concept of a debris disk forming planets. Image credit: NASA/JPL Click to enlarge
Astronomers have found a debris disk around a sun-like star that may be forming or has formed its terrestrial planets. The disk – a probable analog to our asteroid belt – may have begun a solar-system-scale demolition derby, where the rocky remains of failed planets collide chaotically.

“This is one of a very rare class of objects that may give us a glimpse into what our solar system may have looked like during the formation of our terrestrial planets,” said Dean C. Hines of the Space Science Institute, a leader of the team that discovered the rare objects with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

“The target is essentially a star similar to our sun, seen at a time when the terrestrial planets in our solar system were thought to have formed,” Hines said. “We see evidence that this star might have an asteroid belt, roughly at the distance Jupiter is from our sun.”

“This object is very unusual in the context of all the others we’ve looked at,” said University of Arizona assistant astronomy Professor Michael R. Meyer, a colleague in the discovery. Meyer directs a Spitzer Legacy project to study solar system formation and evolution in a sample of 328 young sun-like stars in the Milky Way. The project turned up the unusual system.

“This is the only such debris disk among the 33 sun-like stars we’ve studied in our project so far, and one of only five such objects known,” Meyer said.

The star, named HD 12039, is about 30 million years old, or the age of the sun when the terrestrial planets are thought to have been 80 percent complete and the Earth-moon system formed, the astronomers said. It is roughly 137 light years away, or the distance light travels in 137 years.

HD 12039 is a “G” type star like our sun, a yellow star with surface temperatures between 5,000 and 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It hasn’t yet settled into the “main sequence,” or mature nuclear-burning phase as our sun has. It’s eight percent brighter, just slightly cooler and a little more massive than our sun, or 1.02 solar masses.

The Spitzer team discovered that the star’s debris disk temperature is 110 degrees Kelvin, or minus 262 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s warmer than temperatures of the frigid outer debris disks that Meyer’s Spitzer team commonly finds around sun-like stars. They’ve found that between 10 and 20 percent of the sun-like stars in their sample so far — whether young, middle-aged or old — have outer disks like our Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune.

“The temperature of the dust in HD 12039’s strange, narrow debris ring puts it between four and six astronomical units from the star — smack dab where Jupiter is in our solar system,” Meyer said. (An astronomical unit, or AU, is the mean distance between Earth and the sun.)

“What’s curious about this disk is that there’s little if any dust inside four AU and beyond six AU. It’s a narrowly confined ring that could be similar in some ways to the outer rings we see around Saturn,” Meyer said.

Just as small moons shepherd the ice grains orbiting Saturn into discrete rings, and just as Jupiter tends the outer edge of our solar system’s asteroid belt, an unseen giant planet may be nudging dust into the narrow debris ring around this star, the astronomers said.

“We think this is a tight, narrow ring of rocky objects similar to those in our asteroid belt, except this ring is five AU from its star, instead of two-to-three AU, the distance between our asteroid belt and the sun,” Meyer said.

“At 30 million years, the material we see in this star likely has to come from ground-up rocks in a zone where terrestrial planets could form,” Hines said.

NASA earlier this year announced a Spitzer telescope discovery of another of these alien asteroid belts. It orbits a two-billion-year-old sun-like star 35 light years away, at a distance comparable to that between Venus and the sun.

Based on Spitzer Telescope results to date, only one percent to three percent of the young, sun-like stars in our Milky Way have massive terrestrial debris disks, Meyer said.

“We could be witnessing a common, short-lived event through which all systems pass, or we could be seeing a rare example of a massive warm debris disk surrounding an unusual, sun-like star,” Meyer said.

The astronomers describe their work in an article to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For information on the Spitzer Space Telescope visit:
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer

The Space Science Institute is a nonprofit organization that carries out world-class research in space and Earth science, together with innovative science education programs that inspire and deepen the public’s understanding of planet Earth and its place in the grander universe. The institute’s integrated research and education programs span planetary science, space physics, astrophysics, astrobiology and Earth science.

Original Source: UA News Release

***image***Astronomers looking for earth-like planets in other solar systems ? exoplanets ? now have a new field guide thanks to earth and planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis.

Bruce Fegley, Ph.D., Washington University professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, and Laura Schaefer, laboratory assistant, have used thermochemical equilibrium calculations to model the chemistry of silicate vapor and steam-rich atmospheres formed when earth-like planets are undergoing accretion . During the accretion process, with surface temperatures of several thousands degrees Kelvin (K), a magma ocean forms and vaporizes.

“What you have are elements that are typically found in rocks in a vapor atmosphere,” said Schaefer. “At temperatures above 3,080 K, silicon monoxide gas is the major species in the atmosphere. At temperatures under 3,080 K, sodium gas is the major species. These are the indicators of an earth-like planet forming.”

At such red-hot temperatures during the latter stages of the exoplanets’ formation, the signal should be distinct, said Fegley.

“It should be easily detectable because this silicon monoxide gas is easily observable,” with different types of telescopes at infrared and radio wavelengths, Fegley said.

Schaefer presented the results at the annual meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, held Sept. 4-9 in Cambridge, England. The NASA Astrobiology Institute and Origins Program supported the work.

Forming a maser

Steve Charnley, a colleague at NASA AMES, suggested that some of the light emitted by SiO gas during the accretion process could form a maser ? Microwave Amplification by Stimulation Emission of Radiation. Whereas a laser is comprised of photons in the ultraviolet or visible light spectrum, masers are energy packets in the microwave image.

Schaefer explains: “What you basically have is a clump of silicon monoxide gas, and some of it is excited into a state higher than ground level. You have some radiation coming in and it knocks against these silicon monoxide molecules and they drop down to a lower state.

“By doing that, it also emits another photon, so then you essentially have a propagating light. You end up with this really very high intensity illumination coming out of this gas.”

According to Schaefer, the light from newly forming exoplanets should be possible to see.

“There are natural lasers in the solar system,” she said. “We see them in the atmospheres of Mars and Venus, and also in some cometary atmospheres.”

In recent months, astronomers have reported earth-like planets with six to seven times the mass of our earth. While they resemble a terrestrial planet like earth, there has not yet been a foolproof method of detection. The spectra of silicon monoxide and sodium gas would be the indication of a magma ocean on the astronomical object, and thus an indication a planet is forming, said Fegley.

The calculations that Fegley and Schaefer used also apply to our own earth. The researchers found that during later, cooler stages of accretion (below 1,500 K), the major gases in the steam-rich atmosphere are water, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, carbon and nitrogen, with the carbon converting to methane as the steam atmosphere cools.

Original Source: WUSTL News Release

Artist’s conception of the 25-million-year-old protoplanetary disk. Credit: David A, Aguilar (CfA) Click to enlarge
Every rule has an exception. One rule in astronomy, supported by considerable evidence, states that dust disks around newborn stars disappear in a few million years. Most likely, they vanish because the material has collected into full-sized planets. Astronomers have discovered the first exception to this rule – a 25-million-year-old dust disk that shows no evidence of planet formation.

“Finding this disk is as unexpected as locating a 200-year-old person,” said astronomer Lee Hartmann of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), lead author on the paper announcing the find.

The discovery raises the puzzling question of why this disk has not formed planets despite its advanced age. Most protoplanetary disks last only a few million years, while the oldest previously known disks have ages of about 10 million years.

“We don’t know why this disk has lasted so long, because we don’t know what makes the planetary formation process start,” said co-author Nuria Calvet of CfA.

The disk in question orbits a pair of red dwarf stars in the Stephenson 34 system, located approximately 350 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. Data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows that its inner edge is located about 65 million miles from the binary stars. The disk extends to a distance of at least 650 million miles. Additional material may orbit farther out where temperatures are too low for Spitzer to detect it.

Astronomers estimate the newfound disk to be about 25 million years old. They calculated the age by modeling the central stars within the system, since stars and disk share the same age. The appearance of the disk itself also supports an advanced age.

“The disk looks a lot different than most other disks we’ve seen. This disk looks a lot more evolved than those around younger stars,” said Hartmann.

Hartmann and Calvet hold opposite opinions about the eventual fate of the disk around Stephenson 34.

“Most stars, by the age of 10 million years, have done whatever they’re going to do,” said Hartmann. “If it hasn’t made planets by now, it probably never will.”

Calvet disagreed. “This disk still has a lot of gas in it, so it may still form giant planets.”

Both astronomers emphasize that such debates are a natural part of the scientific process.

“Some people expect scientists to have all the answers. But research is all about exploring the edge of what is known,” said Hartmann. “That’s what makes it so exciting!”

In the future, Hartmann and Calvet plan to search for more old disks in order to learn why some disks survive so much longer than most others.

“It’s important to find more objects like this because they give us clues about the conditions that influence the formation of planets,” said Calvet.

This research will be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Original Source: CfA News Release

Artist’s animation shows the view from a hypothetical moon in orbit around the planet. Image credit: NASA. Click to enlarge
A NASA-funded astronomer has discovered a world where the sun sets over the horizon, followed by a second sun and then a third. The new planet, called HD 188753 Ab, is the first known to reside in a classic triple-star system.

“The sky view from this planet would be spectacular, with an occasional triple sunset,” said Dr. Maciej Konacki (MATCH-ee Konn-ATZ-kee) of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., who found the planet using the Keck I telescope atop Mauna Kea mountain in Hawaii. “Before now, we had no clues about whether planets could form in such gravitationally complex systems.”

The finding, reported in this week’s issue of Nature, suggests that planets are more robust than previously believed.

“This is good news for planets,” said Dr. Shri Kulkarni, who oversees Konacki’s research at Caltech. “Planets may live in all sorts of interesting neighborhoods that, until now, have gone largely unexplored.” Kulkarni is the interdisciplinary scientist for NASA’s planned SIM PlanetQuest mission, which will search for signs of Earth-like worlds.

Systems with multiple stars are widespread throughout the universe, accounting for more than half of all stars. Our Sun’s closest star, Alpha Centauri, is a member of a trio.

“Multiple-star systems have not been popular planet-hunting grounds,” said Konacki. “They are difficult to observe and were believed to be inhospitable to planets.”

The new planet belongs to a common class of extrasolar planets called “hot Jupiters,” which are gas giants that zip closely around their parent stars. In this case, the planet whips every 3.3 days around a star that is circled every 25.7 years by a pirouetting pair of stars locked in a 156-day orbit.

The circus-like trio of stars is a cramped bunch, fitting into the same amount of space as the distance between Saturn and our Sun. Such tight living quarters throw theories of hot Jupiter formation into question. Astronomers had thought that hot Jupiters formed far away from their parent stars, before migrating inward.

“In this close-knit system, there would be no room at the outskirts of the parent star system for a planet to grow,” said Konacki.

Previously, astronomers had identified planets around about 20 binary stars and one set of triple stars. But the stars in those systems had a lot of space between them. Most multiple-star arrangements are crowded together and difficult to study.

Konacki overcame this challenge using a modified version of the radial velocity, or “wobble,” planet-hunting technique. In the traditional wobble method, a planet’s presence is inferred by the gravitational tug, or wobble, it induces in its parent star. The strategy works well for single stars or far-apart binary and triple stars, but could not be applied to close-star systems because the stars’ light blends together.

By developing detailed models of close-star systems, Konacki was able to tease apart the tangled starlight. This allowed him to pinpoint, for the first time, the tug of a planet on a star snuggled next to other stars. Of 20 systems examined so far, HD 188753, located 149 light-years away, was the only one found to harbor a planet.

Hot Jupiters are believed to form out of thick disks, or “doughnuts,” of material that swirl around the outer fringes of young stars. The disk material clumps together to form a solid core, then pulls gas onto it. Eventually, the gas giant drifts inward. The discovery of a world under three suns contradicts this scenario. HD 188753 would have sported a truncated disk in its youth, due to the disruptive presence of its stellar companions. That leaves no room for HD 188753’s planet to form, and raises a host of new questions.

The masses of the three stars in HD 188753 system range from two-thirds to about the same mass as our Sun. The planet is slightly more massive than Jupiter.

For artist’s concepts and other graphics, visit http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/ . For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html .

Original Source: NASA News Release

An extrasolar planet with hypothetical (possible but unproven) water-bearing moons. Image credit: NASA/IPAC/R. Hurt. Click to enlarge
Over the past decade, astronomers using a planet-hunting technique that measures small changes in a star’s speed relative to Earth, have discovered more than 130 extrasolar planets. The first such planets were gas giants, the mass of Jupiter or larger. After several years, the scientists began to detect Saturn-mass planets. And last August, they announced the discovery of a handful of Neptune-mass planets. Could these be super-Earths?

In a recent talk at a symposium on extrasolar planets, Carnegie Institution of Washington astronomer Alan Boss explained the possibilities.

Radial-velocity planet-hunting techniques recently have pushed our discovery capability below the Saturn-mass limit down into what we would call the ice-giant limit.

So we are now able to find planets, close to their host stars, with masses comparable to that of Uranus and Neptune (14 to 17 times the mass of Earth).

In large part this is due to Michel Mayor and his colleagues having a new spectrometer in La Silla, which has unprecedented spectral resolution down to about 1 meter per second or so. And I think Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler’s group are quite close behind that as well.

The interesting question, though, is: What are these things? Are they ice giants that formed several AUs out and migrated in, or are they something else? Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly what their masses are. Even more importantly, we don’t really know what their density is. So they could be 15-Earth-mass rocks, or they could be 15-Earth-mass ice giants.

What we really need to do is to have folks go out and discover another 7 or so. We’ve got 3 so far. If we had 10 altogether, then we’ll have enough that 1 of them, at least, should transit its star and then we’ll be able to get some idea of what its density is.

I think, though, that there’s a good chance that these might actually be a new class of planet altogether: super-Earths. The reason I would argue that is that, at least in 2 of the systems where they’ve been found, these “hot Neptunes” are accompanied by a larger Jupiter-mass planet with a longer-period orbit.

If the lower-mass planets are ice giants that formed far from their stars, unless you have some highly contrived scenario, you wouldn’t imagine them to end up migrating inward, past the larger guys. These systems look more like our own solar system, where you have the low-mass fellows inside of the gas giants.

The planets in a system like our system presumably did not undergo very much migration. So I would claim that perhaps these guys are objects which formed inside the gas giants and only migrated in a little bit, ending up where we can detect them with the short-period spectroscopy surveys.

In support of this idea, there’s some theoretical work from Carnegie’s George Wetherill from almost 10 years ago, now, where he had done some calculations of the accumulation process of rocky planets. He often found there was quite a spread in the masses of what you got out, because accumulation’s a very stochastic process. For the typical parameters he used, at the end of 100 million years or so, he would not only get objects of 1 Earth mass, but also objects ranging up to 3 Earth masses.

Well, at the time, he assumed for his calculations a fairly low surface density at 1 AU, where these planets were forming. Given what we know now, if you want to be able to make a Jupiter at 5 AU using the core-accretion model of planetary formation, you have to crank up the density in the protoplanetary disk by a factor of 7 or so over what Wetherill assumed.

That scales directly with the mass of the planets you’d expect to find as a result. So if you did these calculations over again, assuming this higher initial density, the upper limit on the mass of the inner planets would go from 3 Earth masses, which is what Wetherill got, up to say 21 Earth masses. That is in the range of what we are estimating for these newly discovered hot Neptune-mass objects.

So perhaps what we really are seeing is a new class of objects, super-Earths, rather than ice giants.

Original Source: NASA Astrobiology

Perhaps 1 in 4 stars have planets. Image credit: Hubble. Click to enlarge.
In the past decade, more than 130 extrasolar planets have been discovered to date. Most of these have been found using a technique that measures tiny changes in a star’s radial velocity, the speed of its motion relative to Earth. In a talk at a recent symposium on extrasolar planets, astronomer Alan Boss, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, presented this overview of the difficult measurements – and the profound discoveries – made by planet-hunters using the radial-velocity technique.

In 1991, Michel Mayor and Antoine Duquennoy published a classic survey of binary stars in our solar neighborhood. They found all the binary companions that they could, but there were another 200 or so G-type stars that didn’t seem to have any binary companions. Subsequently, Michel Mayor, along with Didier Queloz, decided to look at these 200-odd stars, potential solar analogs, to see if they had planetary systems. The technique they used involved looking for stellar wobbles, cyclical changes in the stars’ radial velocity, induced by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets.

In the spring of 1994, they installed a new spectrometer on their telescope at the Haute Provence Observatory, ELODIE, which had a resolution of about 13 meters per second. This was just about the right level to be able to see the velocity wobble, the Doppler wobble, induced in the Sun by a Jupiter-like planet. By the end of 1994 they had noticed a very interesting wobble in a star called 51 Peg.

Unfortunately, 51 Peg at that point was getting closer and closer to the Sun and couldn’t be observed, so they had to take a 6-month sabbatical, and come back in the summer of 1995 and start looking at 51 Peg again. They had an 8-night observing run at the Haute Provence Observatory, and by the end of that observing run, they were ready to go to Nature and publish.

The curve they produced fit a model of 51 Peg, a solar-type star, being orbited by a planet with roughly a half of a Jupiter mass, on a nice, circular orbit. The only problem was that the object had an orbital period of 4.23 days. It was orbiting in at about 0.05 AU, nowhere near where people had been expecting to find Jupiter-mass planets. So it was a bit of a puzzle. But it was clear early on that this had to be a planet, which perhaps had formed farther out and migrated in. That was the only way to explain how it could exist at that location.

The next step was to see if anyone else could reproduce the result. Because, of course, the critical problem with the planet around Barnard’s star was that no one could confirm it. There were several other planet-hunting efforts underway at the time in 1995, but the folks who got to the telescope first were Paul Butler and Geoff Marcy. They were able to confirm 51 Peg’s planet, with even smaller scatter than the original discovery measurements.

We realized at this point that the field of extrasolar planets had truly been born. In October 1995 a new era was entered, where we actually had convincing, solid proof of the existence of extrasolar planets around normal stars.

Now Geoff and Paul had been working in this field for many years. They had actually started seriously around 1987, and so they had a lot of data ready to analyze. They immediately began to reduce all of their data, looking for short period orbits, took some more measurements, and by January of 1996, they were able to announce a couple more planets. One of them, 47 UMa b, was considerably more reassuring a planet than the one discovered orbiting 51 Peg. It was roughly a 2 or 3 Jupiter-mass object orbiting at a distance of 2 or so AU, more like what we were expecting to find based on the planets in our own solar system. We now know that this is a multiple-planet system, but at the time they fit it with a single Keplerian orbit.

Almost all of the known extrasolar planets have been found using this radial-velocity technique; roughly 117 planets have been discovered that way. But there’s another way of finding planets, transit detection. The first transit detection was achieved by David Charboneau and colleagues and separately by Greg Henry and colleagues in 2000. This was a planet which had been found originally by radial velocity, but then these other researchers went on and did both ground-based and later Hubble photometry of the host star and found a really wonderful light curve, indicative of the planet passing in front of the star, dimming its light slightly. The initial detection by Charbonneau’s team was done, believe it or not, using a 4-inch telescope in a parking lot in Boulder, Colorado.

The dip in the star’s light amplitude is about 1.5 percent, so it’s truly amazing that this very first transit detection could have been made by a good amateur telescope. When HST went back and re-did the photometry with much higher precision, it produced an incredibly beautiful light curve, which is so precise you could use it to try to search for moons around the planet and place limits on how large they could be.

So transits are now coming into their own. I think they’re the second leading way of finding planets. Six planets have been discovered by transits now.

Original source: NASA Astrobiology

Artist illustration of the planet orbiting the sun-like star HD 149026. Image credit: U.C. Santa Cruz. Click to enlarge.
NASA researchers recently discovered the largest solid core ever found in an extrasolar planet, and their discovery confirms a planet formation theory.

“For theorists, the discovery of a planet with such a large core is as important as the discovery of the first extrasolar planet around the star 51 Pegasi in 1995,” said Shigeru Ida, theorist from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan.

When a consortium of American, Japanese and Chilean astronomers first looked at this planet, they expected one similar to Jupiter. “None of our models predicted that nature could make a planet like the one we are studying,” said Bun’ei Sato, consortium member and postdoctoral fellow at Okayama Astrophysical Observatory, Japan.

Scientists have rarely had opportunities like this to collect such solid evidence about planet formation. More than 150 extrasolar planets have been discovered by observing changes in the speed of a star, as it moves toward and away from Earth. The changes in speed are caused by the gravitational pull of planets.

This planet also passes in front of its star and dims the starlight. “When that happens, we are able to calculate the physical size of the planet, whether it has a solid core, and even what its atmosphere is like,” said Debra Fischer. She is consortium team leader and professor of astronomy at San Francisco State University, Calif.

The planet, orbiting the sun-like star HD 149026, is roughly equal in mass to Saturn, but it is significantly smaller in diameter. It takes just 2.87 days to circle its star, and the upper atmosphere temperature is approximately 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Modeling of the planet’s structure shows it has a solid core approximately 70 times Earth’s mass.

This is the first observational evidence that proves the “core accretion” theory about how planets are formed. Scientists have two competing but viable theories about planet formation.

In the “gravitational instability” theory, planets form during a rapid collapse of a dense cloud. With the “core accretion” theory, planets start as small rock-ice cores that grow as they gravitationally acquire additional mass. Scientists believe the large, rocky core of this planet could not have formed by cloud collapse. They think it must have grown a core first, and then acquired gas.

“This is a confirmation of the core accretion theory for planet formation and evidence that planets of this kind should exist in abundance,” said Greg Henry, an astronomer at Tennessee State University, Nashville. He detected the dimming of the star by the planet with his robotic telescopes at Fairborn Observatory in Mount Hopkins, Arizona.

Original Source: NASA News Release

Hubble image of the ring around Fomalhaut. Image credit: Hubble. Click to enlarge.
NASA Hubble Space Telescope’s most detailed visible-light image ever taken of a narrow, dusty ring around the nearby star Fomalhaut (HD 216956), offers the strongest evidence yet that an unruly and unseen planet may be gravitationally tugging on the ring.

Hubble unequivocally shows that the center of the ring is a whopping 1.4 billion miles (15 astronomical units) away from the star. This is a distance equal to nearly halfway across our solar system. The most plausible explanation, astronomers said, is that an unseen planet moving in an elliptical orbit is reshaping the ring with its gravitational pull. The geometrically striking ring, tilted obliquely toward Earth, would not have such a great offset if it were simply being influenced by Fomalhaut’s gravity alone.

An offset of the ring center from the star has been inferred from previous and longer wavelength observations using submillimeter telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, the Spitzer Space Telescope, Caltech’s Submillimeter Observatory and applying theoretical modeling and physical assumptions. Now Hubble’s sharp images directly reveal the ring’s offset from Fomalhaut.

These new observations provide strong evidence that at least one unseen planetary mass object is orbiting the star. Hubble would have detected an object larger than a planet, such as a brown dwarf. “Our new Hubble images confirm those earlier hypotheses that proposed a planet was perturbing the ring,” said Paul Kalas of the University of California at Berkeley. The ring is similar to our solar system’s Kuiper Belt, a vast reservoir of icy material left over from the formation of our solar system planets.

The observations offer insights into our solar system’s formative years, when the planets played a game of demolition derby with the debris left over from the formation of our planets, gravitationally scattering many objects across space. Some icy material may have collided with the inner solar system planets, irrigating them with water formed in the colder outer solar system. Other debris may have traveled outward, forming the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, a spherical cloud of material surrounding the solar system.

Only Hubble has the exquisite optical resolution to resolve that the ring’s inner edge is sharper than its outer edge, a telltale sign that an object is gravitationally sweeping out material like a plow clearing away snow. Another classic signature of a planet’s influence is the ring’s relatively narrow width, about 2.3 billion miles (25 astronomical units). Without an object to gravitationally keep the ring material intact, astronomers said, the particles would spread out much wider.

“What we see in this ring is similar to what is seen in the Cassini spacecraft images of Saturn’s narrow rings. In those images, Saturn’s moons are ‘shepherding’ the ring material and keeping the ring from spreading out,” Kalas said.

The suspected planet may be orbiting far away from Fomalhaut, inside the dust ring’s inner edge, between 4.7 billion and 6.5 billion miles (50 to 70 astronomical units) from the star. The ring is 12 billion miles (133 astronomical units) from Fomalhaut, which is much farther away than our outermost planet Pluto is from the Sun. These Hubble observations do not detect the putative planet directly, so the astronomers cannot measure its mass. They will, instead, conduct computer simulations of the ring’s dynamics to estimate the planet’s mass.

Kalas and collaborators James R. Graham of the University of California at Berkeley and Mark Clampin of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will publish their findings in the June 23, 2005 issue of the journal Nature.

Fomalhaut, a 200-million-year-old star, is a mere infant compared to our own 4.5-billion-year-old Sun. It resides 25 light-years away from the Sun. Located in the constellation Piscis Austrinus (the Southern Fish), the Fomalhaut ring is ten times as old as debris disks seen previously around the stars AU Microscopii and Beta Pictoris, where planets may still be forming. If our solar system is any example, planets should have formed around Fomalhaut within tens of millions of years after the birth of the star.

The Hubble images also provide a glimpse of the outer planetary region surrounding a star other than our Sun. Many of the more than 100 planets detected beyond our solar system are orbiting close to their stars. Most of the current planet-detecting techniques favor finding planets that are close to their stars.

“The size of Fomalhaut’s dust ring suggests that not all planetary systems form and evolve in the same way ? planetary architectures can be quite different from star to star,” Kalas explained. “While Fomalhaut’s ring is analogous to the Kuiper Belt, its diameter is four times greater than that of the Kuiper Belt.”

The astronomers used the Advanced Camera for Surveys’ (ACS) coronagraph aboard Hubble to block out the light from the bright star so they could see details in the faint ring.

“The ACS’s coronagraph offers high contrast, allowing us to see the ring’s structure against the extremely bright glare from Fomalhaut,” Clampin said. “This observation is currently impossible to do at visible wavelengths without the Hubble Space Telescope. The fact that we were able to detect it with Hubble was unexpected, but impressive.”

Kalas and his collaborators used Hubble over a five-month period in 2004 ? May 17, Aug. 2, and Oct. 27 ? to map the ring’s structure. One side of the ring has yet to be imaged because it extended beyond the ACS camera’s field of view. The astronomers will use Hubble again this summer to map the entire ring. They expect that the additional Hubble data will reveal whether or not the ring has any gaps, which could have been carved out by the gravitational influence of an unseen body. The longer, deeper exposures also may show whether the ring has an even wider diameter than currently seen. In addition, the astronomers will measure the ring’s colors to determine its physical properties, including its composition.

Previous thermal emission maps of Fomalhaut showed that one side of the ring is warmer than the other side, implying that the ring is off center by about half the distance measured by Hubble. This difference might be explained by the fact that Hubble’s ACS images of the ring’s structure are 100 times sharper than the longer wavelength observations, and hence, yield a much more accurate result. Or the discrepancy might imply that the ring’s size looks different at other wavelengths.

Fomalhaut’s dust ring was discovered in 1983 in observations made by NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). The system is a compelling target for future telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Terrestrial Planet Finder, Kalas said.

Original Source: Hubble News Release