From the category archives:

Exoplanetary Science

A Boost for Exoplanet Atmosphere Studies

February 4, 2010

What JPL’s Mark Swain calls ‘an absolutely brilliant way to characterize super-Earths’ has emerged from work performed with a small NASA infrared telescope, one that has allowed scientists to identify an organic molecule in the atmosphere of a distant gas giant. HD 189733b is an old friend by now, the subject of intensive studies with [...]

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Planetary Prospects Around Centauri B

January 19, 2010

Over twenty percent of the planets we’ve found around other stars inhabit binary systems. It’s intriguing to take a close look at these. Most of the planet-bearing binaries are what is known as ‘wide S-types,’ meaning that the companion star orbits the inner star/planet system at a distance of over 100 AU. But take a [...]

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Direct Spectrum of an Exoplanet

January 14, 2010

Astronomers have obtained a direct spectrum of the exoplanet HR 8799 c, about 130 light years from Earth, and if you watch your definitions, it’s possible to call this the first ‘direct spectrum’ of such a world. I throw in the qualifier because way back in 2004, astronomers using the ESO’s Very Large Telescope and [...]

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Exoplanets: Mapping a Distant Blue Dot

January 13, 2010

Glints of light off oceans or ice caps would be useful indeed as we try to figure out what we’re seeing on a distant terrestrial world. One day we’ll have the kind of instrumentation that can make direct observations of a planet like this, separating its light from that of its star. A ‘terrestrial planet [...]

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Second Smallest Exoplanet Yet Discovered

January 8, 2010

With the American Astronomical Society meeting now wrapped up in Washington, we’re left to mull over the highlights, particularly the Kepler results. But the Keck Observatory also contributed compelling exoplanet news in the form of HD156668b, a planet some eighty light years from earth in the direction of Hercules. Working with Keck data, a research [...]

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Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority

January 6, 2010

William Borucki’s talk about the early Kepler findings on Monday created the biggest spike in traffic I’ve ever seen on Centauri Dreams, enough to blow through our memory allocation and crash the site for about twenty minutes. I had to reboot the server and up the memory to get back online, a tribute to the [...]

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On Kepler’s First Planets

January 5, 2010

Just how good is Kepler at finding planets? We’re getting a pretty good idea. In his talk yesterday at the AAS meeting in Washington, William Borucki (NASA Ames) showed a plot of the lightcurve for previously known planet HAT-P-7. The signature of the planetary transit is unmistakable in these data, a well defined dip in [...]

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Early Kepler Results Today

January 4, 2010

The American Astronomical Society’s 215th national meeting will involve some 3,500 attendees, with more than 2,200 scientific presentations on the program, but this morning the buzz is all about Kepler and the early results to be announced today. William Borucki (NASA Ames) spoke at 0830 to announce the first planets discovered by Kepler, five exoplanets [...]

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Exoplanetary Thoughts for 2010

December 31, 2009

Several stories stick in my mind as we approach the New Year, presented here in no particular order, but merely as material for musing. The detection (by the MEarth Project) of a transiting ’super-Earth’ this past month opens up interesting areas for speculation. Gliese 1214b is roughly 6.5 times as massive as Earth, orbiting an [...]

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Titan’s Lakes, An Exoplanet’s Seas

December 22, 2009

With much of the US east coast to the north of me digging out from the recent storm, I can only think how fortunate I am not to be trying to travel right now. The snow-clogged airports and snarled streets that are all over the news do have their effect on my thinking, though, which [...]

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