Exoplanets

[Drone]

Well the kelper reminds me the nvidia kelper series is the planet is owned by nvidia?

Kepler was a famous German astronomer. I dunno maybe people at nvidia just wanted to show how "smart-ass" they are so they decided to choose this codename. Apparently maybe they even haven't ever heard about Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Whatever ...

Some interesting news here:

Researchers at MIT, the University of California at Santa Cruz and other institutions have detected the first exoplanetary system, 10,000 light years away, with regularly aligned orbits similar to those in our solar system. At the center of this faraway system is Kepler-30, a star as bright and massive as the sun. After analyzing data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, the MIT scientists and their colleagues discovered that the star - much like the sun - rotates around a vertical axis and its three planets have orbits that are all in the same plane.

In that system the planets and the star are aligned with each other just like in our solar system. Unlike the hot-jupiter systems which are misaligned.

Kepler-30 rotates along an axis perpendicular to the orbital plane of its largest planet. The researchers determined the alignment of the planets' orbits by studying the gravitational effects of one planet on another. By measuring the timing variations of planets as they transit the star, the team derived their respective orbital configurations, and found that all three planets are aligned along the same plane. The overall planetary structure looks much like our solar system.

It's awesome that far-off alien world looks like our solar system. Just like scientists say we may find clues in extrasolar planetary systems to help understand the puzzles of the solar system, and vice versa.

More here:

http://web.mit.edu/physics/news/spotlight/20120725_winn.html

 

[Drone]

Another newfound world.

Thirty-three light-years away, in the constellation Leo, astronomers have found a world (5200 miles across, about 2/3 as large as Earth) called UCF-1.01, orbiting a dim red-dwarf star GJ 436.

Space is a cool place

UCF-1.01 is probably not a very nice place. It whips around its host star in only 1.4 Earth-days, at a distance of about 1.6 million miles (we're 93 million miles from our sun). Temperatures on its surface probably exceed 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, raising the possibility that some of it is molten, covered in lava. Any atmosphere would have boiled away long ago.

The place is hot and it's hard to see it.

Researchers could not see it directly - its sun is nothing but a dot in a telescope - but they could see a tiny dip in the star's brightness as the disc of UCF-1.01 passed in front of it. For now, they cannot even calculate its mass; current technology is not good enough for a reliable number.

http://news.yahoo.com/planet-found-smaller-earth-orbiting-distant-star-203543868--abc-news-tech.html

 

[AphexDreamer]

We should send some organic material to Gliese 581g to try and see if we can seed life there.

 

[Drone]

New multi-planet system has been found. It's called Kepler-47. It consists of two stars and two planets. The primary star is about the same mass as the Sun, and its companion is an M-dwarf star one-third its size. The inner planet is three times the size of Earth and orbits the binary star every 49.5 days, while the outer planet is 4.6 times the size of Earth with an orbit of 303.2 days.


http://phys.org/news/2012-08-kepler-multi-planet-binary-star.html

The outer planet is the first planet found to orbit a binary star within the "habitable zone," where liquid water could exist. However, the planet's size (about the same as Uranus) means that it is an icy giant, and not an abode for life.

 

[Drone]

Another Gliese planet has been found. It's a rock-water world covered with a dense cloud layer.

It's called Gliese 163c and located 50 light years away in the Dorado constellation.

Gliese 163c has a minimum mass of 6.9 Earth masses and takes nearly 26 days to orbit its red dwarf star. Another larger planet, Gliese 163b, was also found to orbit the star much closer with a 9 days period. An additional third, but unconfirmed planet, might be orbiting the star much farther away.

This super-Earth planet is hot, plus it "baths" in stellar wind.

Gliese 163c receives on average 40% more light from its parent star than Earth from the Sun, making it hotter. Its surface temperature might be around 60°C.

http://phys.org/news/2012-08-hot-potential-habitable-exoplanet-gliese.html


p.s. I posted info about other Gliese planet in this post:

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2680256&postcount=23

 

[Drone]

Diamond planet - 55 Cancri e - has been found I bet every woman would love to live there, and it's not that far just 40 ly away As always astronomers have used transit method to find the planet.

55 Cancri e - has a radius twice Earth's, and a mass eight times greater, making it a "super-Earth." It is one of five planets orbiting a sun-like star, 55 Cancri, that is located 40 light years from Earth yet visible to the naked eye in the constellation of Cancer. The planet orbits at hyper speed - its year lasts just 18 hours. It's also blazingly hot, with a temperature of about 3900F.

Ok go back to diamonds ...

The surface of this planet is likely covered in graphite and diamond rather than water and granite. The study estimates that at least a third of the planet's mass - the equivalent of about three Earth masses - could be diamond.

http://phys.org/news/2012-10-nearby-super-earth-diamond-planet.html

http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/article00649.html

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/pia15622.html

http://www.space.com/23138-diamond-planet-super-earth-discovery.html

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/news/spitzer20120508.html

 

[3870x2]

I wonder what the melting point of diamond is...

EDIT:
6422F

There is a good chance that there is liquid diamond there.

 

[Depth]

Diamond planet - 55 Cancri e - has been found I bet every woman would love to live there, and it's not that far just 40 ly away As always astronomers have used transit method to find the planet.

http://phys.org/news/2012-10-nearby-super-earth-diamond-planet.html

"A radius twice Earth's, and a mass eight times greater, with 18 hours to a year"

I wonder how it's shape is. Think it's formed like a diamond as well?

Probably oval or shaped like a teardrop but it's a nice thought.

 

[de.das.dude]

how could they say they find it when the planet is invisible?
planet is an object, so it should be seen, has size
but if it aint seen, it could be anything, dark energy, big meteorit or UFO spaceship in cloak mode maybe
they even aint see it at all
but it still interesting

you sound like the church.

 

[3870x2]

you sound like the church.

I don't quite understand.

An atheist would say this same statement.

 

[de.das.dude]

I don't quite understand.

An atheist would say this same statement.

lol. i meant the old church.

 

[Drone]

Astronomers think they've found another system. It's called KOI-500 and located 1100 light-years away in the constellation Lyra. They haven't validate the data yet.

An extreme case in point is a newly found solar system that was announced on October 15, 2012 which packs five planets into a region less than one-twelve the size of Earth's orbit!

Scientists think that planets didn't form at their current locations but have 'migrated' into the ultra-compact configuration during the formation process.

The five planets have "years" that are only 1, 3.1, 4.6, 7.1, and 9.5 days. All five planets zip around their star within a region 150 times smaller in area than the Earth's orbit, despite containing more material than several Earths (the planets range from 1.3 to 2.6 times the size of the Earth).

That's quite a crowded situation.

http://phys.org/news/2012-10-extreme-solar-arent-planetary.html

____________________________________

edit: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet in a Quadruple Star System (see the second part of this post) is now officially confirmed. YAY!

As well as two Kepler planets which were confirmed in 2011.

 

[Drone]

Wow so many planets they find these days. In binary, triple and now even quadruple systems. Some crowded around a single star, others reside in more complex environments. It's amazing how technology steps further and further, and how amazingly sensitive it got. All those objects can't be seen but can be detected. We live in exciting times! Meh, if I only could rewind my life I'd definitely have been an astronomer .... *sigh*

Ok ... some more news:

European astronomers have discovered a planet with about the mass of the Earth orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri system - the nearest to Earth. It is also the lightest exoplanet ever discovered around a star like the Sun.

This is the first planet with a mass similar to Earth ever found around a star like the Sun. Its orbit is very close to its star (it's orbiting Alpha Centauri B every 3.2 days) and it must be much too hot for life as we know it.

Alpha Centauri is one of the brightest stars in the southern skies and is the nearest stellar system to our Solar System - only 4.3 ly away. It is actually a triple star - Alpha Centauri A and B, and a more distant and faint red component known as Proxima Centauri.

So we have a planet in Alpha Centauri. It's so "close". Fascinating!

Alpha Centauri B is very similar to the Sun but slightly smaller and less bright. The newly discovered planet, with a mass of a little more than that of the Earth, is orbiting about six million kilometers away from the star, much closer than Mercury is to the Sun. The orbit of the other bright component of the double star, Alpha Centauri A, keeps it hundreds of times further away, but it would still be a very brilliant object in the planet's skies.

The European team detected the planet by picking up the tiny wobbles in the motion of the star Alpha Centauri B created by the gravitational pull of the orbiting planet. The effect is minute - it causes the star to move back and forth by no more than 51 cm/s (1.8 km/hour), about the speed of a baby crawling. This is the highest precision ever achieved using this method.

Well done. Thumbs up!
http://phys.org/news/2012-10-earth-sized-planet-solar.html
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And even more news! Astronomers found a planet (now called PH1) in a system with four stars! Such planets are the extreme and called circumbinary planets. I've never heard that word before, but now I know It's amazing that volunteers using the Planethunters.org website and professional astronomers together found it. I hope they'll find more in the future.

A joint effort of citizen scientists and professional astronomers has led to the first reported case of a planet orbiting twin suns that in turn is orbited by a second distant pair of stars.

YO DAWG I HERD YOU LIKE BINARY STARS SO WE PUT BINARY SYSTEM IN BINARY SYSTEM But I digress..

PH1 orbits outside the 20-day orbit of a pair of eclipsing stars that are 1.5 and 0.41 times the mass of the Sun. It revolves around its host stars roughly every 138 days. Beyond the planet's orbit at about 1000 AU (roughly 1000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun) is a second pair of stars orbiting the planetary system.

It's astonishing that astronomers can glean so much information about another planet thousands of light years away just by studying the light from its parent star.

http://phys.org/news/2012-10-armchair-astronomers-planet-quadruple-star.html

 

[Inceptor]

The Alpha Centauri B b news is exciting... Well as exciting as planet hunting news could get, I suppose.
There's no real, relatively immediate incentive to spend money on large telescopes, deep space probes, and 'deep space tech', in general, at the moment.
I hope astronomers find more planets in the Alpha Centauri system.

 

[Drone]

Astronomers found a potentially habitable exoplanet, HD 40307 g
There is a 50% chance that it'd be a rocky planet like Earth.

Located ~42 light-years away in the southern constellation Pictor, it's not tidally locked and it's partying in water-friendly zone.

http://www.tech-stew.com/post/2012/...tentially-habitable-Super-Earth-HD40307g.aspx

That planet is quite heavy and ain't too warm (the sixth planet from its star) ... Its host star HD 40307 is "quiet and old" and smaller than the Sun (0.75 Mass of the Sun).

HD 40307 g appears to be in the star's liquid-water habitable zone, and orbiting at 0.6 AU in an approximately 200-day-long orbit. At this distance the estimated 7-Earth-mass exoplanet receives around 62% of the radiation that Earth gets from the Sun.

Astronomers need a direct imaging mission, because transit method doesn't give important details about this planet. I'd like to know about its atmosphere This six-planet system is quite interesting.

 

[PopcornMachine]

Very cool stuff.

Located ~42 light-years away ...

But, 42? Could it be a coincidence? I think not.

 

[Drone]

Shocking news! Astronomers found free-floating planet wandering through space. And finally we have a picture!

The planet called CFBDSIR2149 is a faint blue dot at the centre of the picture.

This is the closest such object to the Solar System. It does not orbit a star and hence does not shine by reflected light; the faint glow it emits can only be detected in infrared light. The object appears blueish in this near-infrared view because much of the light at longer infrared wavelengths is absorbed by methane and other molecules in the planet's atmosphere.

Rover Wanderer Nomad Vagabond

The planet was found to be 50-120 millions years old, with a temperature of approximately 400 degrees celsius, and a mass 4-7 times that of Jupiter.

It's way too young but hot and heavy isolated chick. The absence of a shining star in the vicinity of this planet enabled astronomers to study its atmosphere in great detail. Fascinating!

http://phys.org/news/2012-11-astronomers-homeless-planet-space.html

A lost starless rogue world

In visible light the object is so cool that it would only shine dimly with a deep red colour when seen close-up.

 

[qubit]

Free floating planet - nice find.

The only thing missing from that animation is the wooshing sound things make as they fly through space, like in all the sci-fi movies.

 

[Drone]

A new analysis has determined the frequencies of planets of all sizes, from Earths up to gas giants. Key findings include the fact that one in six stars hosts an Earth-sized planet in an orbit of 85 days or less, and that almost all sun-like stars have a planetary system of some sort.

NASA's Kepler mission Monday announced the discovery of 461 new planet candidates. Four of the potential new planets are less than twice the size of Earth and orbit in their sun's "habitable zone," the region in the planetary system where liquid water might exist on the surface of a planet. Since the last Kepler catalog was released in February 2012, the number of candidates discovered in the Kepler data now totals 2,740 potential planets orbiting 2,036 stars. Today, 43% of Kepler's planet candidates are observed to have neighbor planets.

The large number of multi-candidate systems being found by Kepler implies that a substantial fraction of exoplanets reside in flat multi-planet systems.

The Kepler space telescope identifies planet candidates by repeatedly measuring the change in brightness of more than 150,000 stars in search of planets that pass in front of, or "transit," their host star. At least three transits are required to verify a signal as a potential planet.

Scientists analyzed more than 13,000 transit-like signals to eliminate known spacecraft instrumentation and astrophysical false positives, phenomena that masquerade as planetary candidates, to identify the potential new planets.

Candidates require additional follow-up observations and analyses to be confirmed as planets. At the beginning of 2012, 33 candidates in the Kepler data had been confirmed as planets. Today, there are 105.

Holy cow so many different planets. Just like they say: "It's no longer a question of will we find a true Earth analogue, but a question of when."

 

[McSteel]

I think we'll shift from "when" to "how many" pretty quick.

 

[Drone]

Video of the day:

Zombie-planet Fomalhaut b

Very dim with eccentric orbit

 

[Drone]

Strange Exoplanet HAT-P-7b with Backwards Orbit

The planetary system around the star HAT-P-7 includes a companion star HAT-P-7B and two planets (HAT-P-7b and HAT-P-7c). The orbit of the planet HAT-P-7c is located between the retrograde HAT-P-7b and the star HAT-P-7B. The second star (HAT-P-7B) pulled the giant outer planet (HAT-P-7c) into a tilted orbit until its path started affecting the inner planet (HAT-P-7b), generating the latter's retrograde orbit.

Sounds complicated. Inner planet HAT-P-7b orbits backwards around its star because there's other planet HAT-P-7c and a companion star HAT-P-7B.

The planetary system around the star HAT-P-7 includes a companion star and two planets. These photos of the system were taken by the Subaru Telescope.

 

[Drone]

NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers Tiny Planet System: Smallest Planet Yet Found Around a Star Similar to Our Sun

The planets are located in a system called Kepler-37, ~ 210 ly from Earth in the constellation Lyra. The smallest planet, Kepler-37b, is slightly larger than our moon, measuring about one-third the size of Earth. It is smaller than Mercury, which made its detection a challenge.

Yet another solar system but now with tiniest planet and two companion planets.

Astronomers think Kepler-37b does not have an atmosphere and cannot support life as we know it. The tiny planet almost certainly is rocky in composition. Kepler-37c, the closer neighboring planet, is slightly smaller than Venus, measuring almost three-quarters the size of Earth. Kepler-37d, the farther planet, is twice the size of Earth. All three planets orbit the star at less than the distance Mercury is to the sun, suggesting they are very hot, inhospitable worlds. Kepler-37b orbits every 13 days at less than one-third Mercury's distance from the sun. The estimated surface temperature of this smoldering planet, at more than 700 K, would be hot enough to melt the zinc in a penny. Kepler-37c and Kepler-37d, orbit every 21 days and 40 days, respectively.

Hellish places.

 

[Drone]

Closest Star System Found

It's called WISE J104915.57-531906 - a pair of brown dwarfs located only 6.5 ly away (so close that Earth's television transmissions from 2006 are now arriving there). This system is the third-closest star system to the Sun!

The star system is named "WISE J104915.57-531906" because it was discovered in a map of the entire sky obtained by the NASA-funded Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite. It is only slightly farther away than the second-closest star, Barnard's star, which was discovered 6 ly from the Sun in 1916. The closest star system consists of Alpha Centauri, found to be a neighbor of the Sun in 1839 at 4.4 ly, and the fainter Proxima Centauri, discovered in 1917 at 4.2 ly.

Here's the image:

 

[Drone]

New star system found:

A star HR 8799 with 4 planets (hot and toxic).

HR 8799's system, which is 128 ly away from Earth, is one of only a couple of these stars that have been imaged, and the only one for which spectroscopy of all the planets has been obtained. These warm, red planets are unlike any other known object in our universe. All four planets have different spectra, and all four are peculiar.

That's really cool

Planets have "lukewarm" temperatures of about 1000 K, either have methane or ammonia, with little or no signs of their chemical partners. Other chemicals such as acetylene, previously undiscovered on any exoplanet, and carbon dioxide may be present as well. The planets also are "redder," meaning that they emit longer wavelengths of light, than celestial objects with similar temperatures. This could be explained by significant but patchy cloud cover on the planets.