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28 July 2008
Unusual Exoplanet Dances in Sync With Its Sun-Like Star
The European Space Agency's COROT spacecraft has discovered an unusual exoplanet orbiting a star slightly more massive than our Sun. The planet, currently called COROT-exo-4b, is about the same size as Jupiter, and it takes 9.2 days to orbit its star. Most peculiar however, is that the planet and the star are in [...]
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17 July 2008
An Alien View of the Moon Transiting Earth
Ever wonder what an approaching alien spacecraft would see as it comes within tracking range of our Earth/Moon system? NASA's EXPOXI mission, which uses the old Deep Impact spacecraft, has created a video of the moon transiting (passing in front of) Earth as seen from the spacecraft's point of view 50 million kilometers (31 [...]
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15 July 2008
What's the Weather Like on Extrasolar Planet HD 189733b?
HD 189733b is a Jupiter-sized extrasolar planet orbiting a yellow dwarf star. Due to its size can compact orbit, HD 189733b is one of the most studied extrasolar planets. HD 189733b shares many similar characteristics as HD 209458b (a.k.a. "Osiris," as I reported in a UT article yesterday), and similar techniques have been used to [...]
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14 July 2008
Observing an Evaporating Extrasolar Planet
Observations of planets orbiting other stars are becoming increasingly common as astronomical techniques become more and more sophisticated. But some extrasolar planets have a stronger than normal spectroscopic signature, often stronger than their optical signature. What could be causing this? In a recent study, observations of the extrasolar planet HD 209458b (also unofficially known as [...]
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17 June 2008
Super-Earths: How Much Are They Like Earth?
With yesterday's announcement about finding a batch of so-called “super-Earths” - rocky alien worlds a few times more massive than our own - as well as another announcement back in May that 45 relatively low mass planets had been found, it's obvious astronomers are constantly improving on their techniques to find new worlds. While [...]
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16 June 2008
Three "Super-Earths" Found Orbiting One Star
"Does every single star harbor planets and, if yes, how many?" wonders planet hunter Michel Mayor. "We may not yet know the answer but we are making huge progress towards it." Mayor and his team of European astronomers have found a star which is orbited by at least three planets. Using the High [...]
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02 June 2008
Re-use, Recycle and Share Your Spacecraft to Find Exoplanets
How do you get the most out of one spacecraft? Re-use, recycle and share. The spacecraft bus that brought the Deep Impact "impactor" to comet Tempel 1 in July of 2005 is still out in its heliocentric orbit and has been put to work double time where two new missions are sharing the [...]
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02 June 2008
Planet Discovered with Only 3 Times the Mass of the Earth
Most of the planets found to date have been massive and orbiting their parent stars at a fraction the orbit of Mercury - the hot jupiters. They're interesting to astronomers, but the big goal is going to be finding Earth-mass planets orbiting other stars. To do this, astronomers are looking for less massive stars, where [...]
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22 May 2008
Exoplanet Count Rises With New Discoveries
With several space- and ground-based telescopes, as well as dedicated space missions searching for exoplanets, or planets orbiting other stars, the count of new discoveries keeps rising. The current total now stands at 287 planets. The newest spacecraft dedicated to this search, the COROT Mission (Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits), announced the finding [...]
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06 May 2008
How to Detect Watery Worlds Around Other Stars
If you want to know what a watery world might look like orbiting another star, just observe our own planet… from afar. The Blue Marble image of Earth, taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts on December 1972, shows how our planet is 70% water. Another world like ours, orbiting a distant star should be obvious [...]
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05 May 2008
Another (Better) Opportunity to Send Your Name to Space
It's a great idea, so all the missions might as well join in. Earlier today, Ian reported on how the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission is offering the chance for the public to 'ride along' to the moon by sending their names to be added to a computer chip which will be embedded on the [...]
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03 April 2008
Using Laser Combs to Find Exoplanets
We’ve run a couple of articles recently about new techniques to find Earth-like extra-solar planets. Here’s one more, but this new technique is really quite exciting. A new device, called a laser comb, uses femto-second (one millionth of one billionth of a second) pulses of laser light coupled with an atomic clock to [...]
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02 April 2008
New Search Technique May Lead to Discovery of Extra-solar Earth-Like Planets
The Holy Grail in the search for extra-solar planets would be to find an Earth-like world orbiting another star. A group of UK astronomers believe they have good chance of being the first to find such a planet with a revolutionary new camera called RISE. With RISE, scientists will search for extra-solar planets [...]
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01 April 2008
SuperWASP are Super Planet-Finding Observatories
The United Kingdom’s Wide Area Search for Planets, known as SuperWASP consists of two 8-camera robotic observatories that cover both hemispheres of the sky. In the past 6 months an international team of astronomers have used these unique observatories to discover 10 new extra-solar planets, making SuperWASP the most successful planet-hunting observatory in the world. [...]
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28 March 2008
Planet Formation Revealed?
One of the biggest unresolved questions of planet formation is how a thick disc of debris and gas surrounding young stars eventually evolves into a thin, dusty region with planets. This entire process, of course, has never actually been observed. But recently, and for the first time, a group of astrophysicists produced an [...]
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