extrasolar

Light From Super Earth 55 Cancri E Detected, An Astronomical First http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1502477.html By: Tariq Malik Published: 05/08/2012 05:59 PM EDT on SPACE.com Light from an alien "super-Earth" twice the size of our own Earth has been detected by a NASA space...

This artist's illustration shows the Kepler planet-hunting telescope as it jettisons its dust cover, to open its sensitive camera eye on the cosmos. JAN 31, 2010 NASA scheduled the press conference for 1 p.m. EST (1800 GMT) at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. NASA's Kepler spacecraft is...

NASA's Kepler spacecraft, an observatory originally designed to hunt for alien planets, has stumbled upon an intriguing discovery: a set of triplet stars circling a massive stellar parent. The new system contains three stars in orbit around each other that sometimes serendipitously align from...

The Ball Aerospace-built Deep Impact Flyby spacecraft successfully completed another “first” for NASA November 4 when its onboard cameras captured spectacular images of Comet 103P/Hartley as part of the EPOXI mission. This was the first time in history that two comets — Hartley 2 and Tempel 1 —...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AFP) – After a 2.5-year journey across the solar system, the US space probe Epoxi readied to swing by comet Hartley 2 for an up-close study of its icy, volatile surface, NASA said Wednesday. "This flyby will mark the fifth time in history that a spacecraft has been...

Two teams of astronomers have found that extrasolar planet HAT-P-7b, discovered in 2008, has a retrograde or highly tilted orbit. On May 30, 2009, a Japanese collaboration team led by Norio Narita, from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, used the Subaru Telescope's High Dispersion...

Astronomers have taken what they say are the first-ever direct images of planets outside of our solar system, including a visible-light snapshot of a single-planet system and an infrared picture of a multiple-planet system. Earth-like worlds might also exist in the three-planet system, but if...

Hello, How do you know how the weight of a very distant planet? How do they know this new plant would float on water. Is this science or just guessing? Weighing planets is a tricky business. We can't even see the vast majority of extrasolar planets! For most of them, all we can do is watch how...

Currently there are around 150 known extrasolar planets, but that number changes every week partly due to the fact that our current methods are constantly being improved. Here are the methods that have been used to at least attempt to detect extrasolar planets: 1) Direct Observation: This seems...

How do we know what the properties of extrasolar planets are? What type of devices are we using to know this information? The way to detect the extrasolar planets is to look at the light coming from the star, since there is no way of looking at the planet directly. The observations are based on...

As of today, 101 extrasolar planets have been discovered, in 87 different planetery systems (4 of the planets are around pulsars). You can get an up to date list of the planets discovered at this website . We classify the stars by their spectral type, which corresponds to a temperature and...

Would the next generation telescope "Owl" be able to detect clearly a like-Earth planet? What kind of details would it be able to reveal? OWL (the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope) is supposed to be a huge telescope with a diameter of about 100 m, and is supposed to operate in the visible and...

Can planets exist in a binary or multiple system? Have scientists ever discovered such a solar system? Planets can exist in binary systems, but not on any kind of orbit and not in any kind of a binary system. Few extrasolar planets have been found around a star that is a member of a binary, and...

How do astronomers determine that they've discovered "single" large extrasolar planets and not "multiple" lesser planets? We detect extrasolar planets not by observing the planets directly (they're too small and lost in the glare of the parent star), but by observing the motion of the parent...

You know how your site says that other people have found some types of planets? Well, why isn't it on the news, or the newspaper? The first extrasolar planet was discovered around a pulsar in 1991. The first extrasolar planet that orbits a sun-like star was discovered in 1995. Both of these...

I read a recent article on a newly discovered planet in the 55 Cancri system.It said something about it is possible it could be an earth twin because of its orbit in that solar system. Is it possible? Has anyone else heard anything else about it? If so please don't leave me in the dark. The...

Do you think that the new planets that have been recently found can maintain life? The new planets we are finding around other stars are detected only by way of their gravitational influence on their parent stars. We have no information on what they might actually be like, except that they are...

In November 2001, it was announced that the first chemicals had been detected in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet. This was done by looking at the system as the planet transited (or passed in front of) the star. The light from the star will change by a tiny amount when part of it passes...

Many of the extrasolar planets known are so-called hot Jupiters. This just means that they are Jupiter sized planets very close in to the central star. The reason that so many of these types of planets have been found is that the method used to discover extrasolar planets is most sensitive to...

The first extrasolar planets to be discovered in 1991 were (to most astronomers' amazement) around a pulsar! Why this amazed astronomers was that no one could imagine how a planet could get to be around a pulsar. Any planets around the original star should have been destroyed in the supernova...