Mormon: Mormon: Exoplanets

Links to additional science reports are given below.
Detecting alien worlds presents a significant challenge since they are small, faint, and close to their stars. The two most prolific techniques for finding exoplanets are radial velocity (looking for wobbling stars) and transits (looking for dimming stars). A team at Tel Aviv University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has just discovered an exoplanet using a new method that relies on Einstein's special theory of relativity.
One breakthrough to come in recent years is direct imaging of exoplanets. Ground-based telescopes have begun taking infrared pictures of the planets posing near their stars in family portraits. But to astronomers, a picture is worth even more than a thousand words if its light can be broken apart into a rainbow of different wavelengths.
"This appears to be the best example our team has found yet of Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of a sun-like star," said team astrophysicist Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science of Washington. Kepler-62 is close by astronomical standards at about 1,200 light years away (708,000 trillion miles). It's a star slightly smaller than our sun, so its "habitable zone" for planets is closer in. The two ocean-friendly planets have "years" of 122 days and 267 days — the time it takes to completely orbit the star — for that reason.
"We now estimate that if we were to look at 10 of the nearest small stars we would find about four potentially habitable planets, give or take," said Ravi Kopparapu, a post-doctoral researcher in geosciences. "That is a conservative estimate," he added. "There could be more."
"In the 19th century it was thought impossible to know the composition of stars, but the invention of astronomical spectroscopy has revealed detailed information about nearby stars and distant galaxies," said Charles Beichman, executive director of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology. "Now, with Project 1640, we are beginning to turn this tool to the investigation of neighboring exoplanets to learn about the composition, temperature, and other characteristics of their atmospheres."
NASA's Kepler mission scientists have discovered a new planetary system that is home to the smallest planet yet found around a star similar to our sun.
In the last two decades astronomers have found hundreds of planets in orbit around other stars. One type of these so-called 'exoplanets' is the super-Earths that are thought to have a high proportion of rock but at the same time are significantly bigger than our own world. Now a new study led by Helmut Lammer of the Space Research Institute (IWF) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences suggests that these planets are actually surrounded by extended hydrogen-rich envelopes and that they are unlikely to ever become Earth-like. Rather than being super-Earths, these worlds are more like mini-Neptunes.

3 Comments (click to add your comment):

Allen said...

As of September 2008 the count of known exoplanets is over 300.

Allen said...

As of September 2011, over 700 exoplanets have been discovered.

Searching for extra-solar planets -- which are planets outside of our solar system -- is very popular these days. About 700 planets are known at the moment, a number that is continuously rising due to refined observational techniques.

Allen said...

As of October 2012, over 800 confirmed sightings of exoplanets have been made. Over 2000 unconfirmed sightings have been made.