Exoplanetary Science

New Kepler Planets in Resonance

August 26, 2010

Somewhere around 2000 light years away in the direction of the constellation Lyra is a Sun-like star orbited by at least two Saturn-class planets. What’s interesting about this news, as just discussed in the Kepler press conference I’ve been listening to this afternoon, is that for the first time we’ve detected and confirmed more than [...]

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HD 10180: A Planetary Harvest

August 25, 2010

In a sense the planets discovered around the Sun-like star HD 10180 are no surprise. We’ve long assumed that planetary systems with numerous planets were common. We lacked the evidence, it’s true, but that could be put down to the limitations of the commonly used radial velocity method, which favors massive worlds close to their [...]

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Twin Suns May Spell Disaster

August 24, 2010

The image of double suns rising over the planet Tatooine from the first Star Wars movie never quite goes away. I remember watching the film in a theater about a week after its release, being dazzled by the visuals but thinking that a planet in an orbit around both stars of a binary would have [...]

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Thoughts on Brown Dwarfs, Disks and Planets

August 16, 2010

Planetary systems around dim brown dwarfs are a fascinating thing to contemplate, and for a vivid imagining of future human activities on such planets, I’ll send you to Karl Schroeder’s Permanence. The 2002 novel posits ingenious engineering to sustain bases on such worlds, and even comes up with an interstellar propulsion method powered up by [...]

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New Planets Highlight Orbital Resonance

July 28, 2010

We’re learning a lot more about how planets interact with each other gravitationally. ‘Resonance’ is the operative term here. When planets are locked in a 2:1 orbital resonance, the outer planet orbits the host star once for every two orbits of the inner planet. A 3:2 resonance occurs when the outer planet orbits the star [...]

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Sasselov: Planets ‘Like Earth’ in Kepler Data

July 22, 2010

Dimitar Sasselov, a co-investigator on the Kepler mission, said in a TED Talk just posted that Kepler had uncovered numerous terrestrial planet candidates in its early data. Have a look at the video below (around the 8-minute mark). “Small planets dominate the picture,” says Sasselov, showing a chart of planet candidates. A great deal of [...]

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HD 209458b: A Comet-like Tail

July 16, 2010

The exoplanet HD 209458b is the subject of such intense scrutiny that the discovery of a comet-like ‘tail’ is almost anti-climactic. After all, this transiting ‘hot Jupiter’ has given us plentiful information about its atmosphere (including the presence of a massive storm), and its tight orbit around its primary, orbiting that star in 3.5 days, [...]

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WASP-3c: Implications for Finding Earthlike Planets

July 9, 2010

Learning about planets through inference is a necessary procedure, given the state of our technology. We do have a few direct images of exoplanets now, but when relying on radial velocity data or transits, we’re looking at the effects planets cause upon our measurements of their stars. With CoRoT and Kepler now yielding high-quality transit [...]

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Directly Imaged Planet Orbits Sun-like Star

June 30, 2010

Exoplanet hunting takes time, a fact that is well demonstrated in the case of a newly confirmed gas giant. Eight times as massive as Jupiter, it orbits a star much like the Sun but at a distance vast enough (300 AU) to place it well within the Kuiper Belt if it were in our own [...]

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Encouraging News re Red Dwarf Planets

June 28, 2010

Knowing of my fascination with small red stars, a friend recently asked why they seemed such problematic places for life. M-dwarfs are all over the galaxy, apparently accounting for 75 percent or more of all stars (I’m purposely leaving the brown dwarfs out of this, because we’re still learning about how prolific they may be). [...]

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