The first exoplanet ever discovered was 51 Pegasi b in 1995. It kicked marked the slow beginning of what would soon become the ‘exoplanet gold rush.’ It meant that for the first time, we had the technological capacity to discover new worlds, and science fiction soon became science fact. 51 Pegasi b was also a very strange planet. A massive Jupiter sized world orbiting very close to its home star. On one hand it was this characteristic that made it much easier to detect. On the other, it showed us that we did not understand planetary system formation as well...
At one point in history, let’s say around 1994, astronomers were fairly confident in their understanding of the formation of planetary systems. Even though at the time we hadn’t found any planets orbiting other stars, they had long been theorized, and we figured that systems would form much like our own solar system. Rocky planets in the interior, gaseous giants further out, and a huge icy debris field at the outer edges. And then along came 51 Pegasi b. Half the mass of Jupiter, it orbits its star in only 4 days, far closer than Mercury. It was considered a...
At least once a month we hear of a new exoplanet with a strange and amazing story. From the ‘Super-Saturn’ ringed world to Magnetic Fields to systems of three Earths, there is an abundance of planets and strange systems. The latest weird discovery brings us to a star 1,500 light years away in the constellation Cygnus. The small-Mercury sized planet it hosts orbits in only 16 hours, bringing its surface temperature to over 1,800 degrees celsius. This amount of heat is enough to vapourize rock, and so the star is literally roasting the planet and blasting away its surface. The dust...
It’s been cold lately. The temperature has fallen somewhere between Hoth and Pluto, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon. It seems we complain about the weather no matter the season. It’s too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too bright, too dark. We do have a lot of variation in the seasons, but compared to some other planets, Earth is pretty mild in its climate. One such case is the recently discovered Kepler 432b. A massive planet six times heavier than Jupiter with a comparable size, it orbits closer to its parent star than Mercury...
I’ve always been a fan of data visualization. We have so much raw data in the world that can reveal incredible information about our Universe, and the only thing stopping us is the time to analyse it all. Sometime data visualizations pop up that really put things into perspective, help us see trends that we didn’t know of before, and offer insights into where we should look in the future. I feel like I find something amazing that someone has produced on a daily basis, and being able to visualize complex data can give anyone a deeper understanding of the...
Move over Saturn, J1407b has rings that are far more spectacular than anyone would have imagined. This distant ‘planet’ (It may not actually be a planet) orbits an orange star 117 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, and has a ring system consisting of 30 separate rings, each of which could be tens of Millions of Kilometres wide. In Spring of 2007, while monitoring the light from the star, astronomers noticed that the star was being eclipsed multiple times to varying degrees. This led the team, consisting of astronomers from Leiden Observatory and the University of Rochester, to conclude that...
As the Kepler Space Telescope continues work on its second mission, the slow trickle of new exoplanet discoveries has begun. In the past few weeks scientists working with Kepler data have been able to identify new planets, and of course the variation continues to surprise us all. Most Recently, Kepler discovered a system of three planets orbiting the nearby red dwarf star EPIC 201367065, which is about half the size and mass of the Sun. The planets are all super-Earths, being only 2.1, 1.7, and 1.5 times the size of Earth and receiving 10.5, 3.2 and 1.4 times the light intensity of Earth...
NASA is sure to start selling trips to these fabulous space destinations! The only problem is that we have no way of getting there, or more importantly, back home. Still the posters give a great homage to the ‘see America’ posters of the 1920s, and they sure make me want to visit. Kepler 186f is a habitable zone planet around a red dwarf star, meaning it could support liquid water. If any plant life forms on this planet, it would photosynthesize differently, potentially giving it a red colour palette. HD 403007g is a planet with 8 times the mass of Earth....
The New York Times has come out with some amazing Space features lately, and the latest one is the best visualization of exoplanets I’ve seen. With the Kepler mission’s discovery of nearly 3000 candidate planets, it’s a lot of work to put each system on paper, or digital paper for that matter. Check it out here. Enjoy some exoplanet surfing, from the comfort of your own home.
Yesterday I wrote about young stars that had a habitable zone further away than we thought, and how this would help us spot habitable planets more easily in the future. Today is the second news story this week dealing with finding planets, and it deals with more familiar Sun-like stars and their dusty planetary discs. Dust is both a good thing and a bad thing when looking for planets orbiting other stars. Dust tells us that there is a high likelihood of finding planets, but too much dust blocks out the planets that we look for. Warm dust is worse...
