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Super-earth confirmed, first of many?

February 3, 2009 By

Today with much to-do and under heavy embargoes, scientists have announced the discovery of an extrasolar planet with a mass diameter of just 1.7 times that of the Earth. That’s very very small. With a mass of It whizzes around its host star, Exo-7, in around 20 hours and with a temperature of over 1,000 degrees, is incredibly hot. Using data from the satellite CoRoT (Convection Rotation and planetray Transits), the German-led French-led team of scientists detected the minute dip in the light coming from the host star from the planet passing in front of it. The discovery was confirmed with observations at a number of ground-based observatories, including VLT, the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope, McDonald Observatory.

In case you hadn’t noticed: exoplanet news is coming hard and fast. Every year since 1995, when Mayor & Queloz reported the discovery of 51 Peg b, has seen a number of “major breakthroughs” (see here, here, and many more) in the detection and characterisation of planets around other stars in our Galaxy.  Scientists have pushed the boundaries of our knowledge to a massive extent, and the rapid progress is just fantastic. But brace yourself for more.

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More Exoplanet Image Coolness

November 21, 2008 By
A possible planet orbiting Beta Pic?

A possible planet orbiting Beta Pic?

Hot on the tail of the exciting exoplanet images produced with the Gemini, Keck and Hubble telescopes, a team of French scientists have spotted a possible planetary companion to Beta Pictoris. This star bears a remarkable resemblance to the parent stars of last week’s exoplanet hosts, HR8799 and Fomalhaut – it is a very young A-type star surrounded by a marked dusty debris disk. In fact, in 1984 Beta Pic was the first star to have its debris disk imaged optically, using the 2.5 m du Pont telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

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A Double Astrono-Whammy of Exoplanet Finds

November 13, 2008 By
P. Kalas, UC Berkeley.

Image of the Fomalhaut debris disk with the image of Fomalhaut b inset. Image credit: P. Kalas, UC Berkeley.

National Research Council of Canada.

The HR8799 planetary system imaged with the Keck telescope. Image credit: National Research Council of Canada.

Since the detection of the first exoplanet in 1995, exoplanet astronomy has advanced in leaps and bounds. With well over 300 planets known to orbit stars other than the Sun, something special is needed for a discovery to hit the headlines. Today, two separate teams of astronomers are publishing results with a great big X-factor in the journal Science.

For the first time, astronomers have managed to produce images of planetary systems around other stars.

What about this, you ask? This image of the 2M1207 system, hailed as the first even exoplanet image on its release in 2005, is indeed an exoplanet image. But its host is a brown dwarf; a sub-stellar sized object that isn’t massive enough to burn fuel its core.

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Stay tuned: “Major exoplanet discovery” with Hubble

November 7, 2008 By

On 13 November NASA will hold a news conference to report on “a significant discovery about planets orbiting other stars” with the Hubble Space Telescope.

First of all, whatever the discovery is, what an excellent piece of news for the recently troubled Hubble! And I’m super curious as to what we’ll get to hear. Exoplanet discoveries are always exciting stuff, and a “major discovery” sounds promising indeed.

The announcement also reports that the science result will appear in the edition of Science to be published on Friday 14 November.

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Maybe an Exoplanet, but Hold Your Horses

September 16, 2008 By

I was just about to publish a long post about this story that has appeared on various news websites (also here) and blogs (here). But then I read to the end of the press release and decided to have a look at the paper which was posted to the preprint server astro-ph – as astronomers usually do with new publications.

It says ‘Submitted to ApJ Letters‘. Ha.

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