Extrasolar Planets

During the last two decades, astronomers have found hundreds of planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. New research indicates they might have found even more except for one thing – gravitational forces have pulled a planet into its parent star, said astronomer Rory Barnes of the University of Washington Virtual Planet Laboratory. The Virtual Planet Laboratory (VPL) is a team of scientists who are building computer simulated Earth-sized planets to look for habitable planets around other stars by allowing them to distinguish between planets with and without life. These simulated environments visualize what these planets look like from space to help future missions ... Read Full Story

“In the quest for Earth-like planets, we have now identified numerous systems which are excellent candidates to harbour them. Where they persist at white dwarfs, any terrestrial planets will likely not be habitable, but may have been sites where life developed during a previous epoch." Jay Farihi, of the University of Leicester One of the great feats of the NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope was to capture, for the first time, enough light from planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, to identify molecules in their atmospheres Now, using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers have found that at least 1 ... Read Full Story

  “This is a crucial stepping stone to eventually characterizing prebiotic molecules on planets where life could exist” said team leader Mark Swain of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. ************************************************************************ Orbiting around other stars are approximately 100 or more extrasolar planets, planets which orbit around a star rather than the sun. The existence of such planets is by direct astronomical observations, where it is easy to speculate but scientific endeavors have always been hard to come by. And exploring the possibility of an intelligent life form is connected to the question of whether or not the existence of extrasolar planets is real, ... Read Full Story

Launched on January 12, 2005, the Deep Impact space probe has become one of its successes. When it made history in 2005 by directing an impact from the spacecraft in to the comet Tempel 1 on July 4, things were good. The mission has recently been extended as well, being redirected for a flyby of comet Hartley on October 11, 2010. However in the meantime, its largest of five telescopes will be directed at a cluster of stars nearby (relatively speaking of course in the hopes of detecting exosolar planets. The stars are orbited by planets which were previously discovered to be like our ... Read Full Story

In the words of the Academy’s charter, enacted in 1780, the “end and design of the institution is…to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honour, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.”   ************************************************************************** Going on “as we speak”, with dates from May 19-23, 2008, the International Astronomical Union is located at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The detection and study of this new field of transiting planets has strongly emerged as a highly important research area, with expanding research on the extra-solar planets and its growth by the astronomy ... Read Full Story

"It could happen almost any time now. We now have the technological capability to identify Earth-like planets around the smallest stars." David Latham - Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics To date, Planet hunters have spotted more than 300 planets beyond our solar system, but the vast majority are hot, Jupiter-sized planets that would dwarf the Earth and are almost certainly lifeless. A few weeks ago, the first rocky planet was found outside solar system, but the surface temperature is far too hot to sustain life. The planet, called CoRoT-7b, is the first planet beyond our solar system with a proven density similar to Earth's, astronomers ... Read Full Story

Astronomers have finally found a place outside our solar system where there's a firm place to stand — if only it weren't so broiling hot. As scientists search the skies for life elsewhere, they have found more than 300 planets outside our solar system. But they all have been gas balls or can't be proven to be solid. Now a team of European astronomers has confirmed the first rocky extrasolar planet . Scientists have long figured that if life begins on a planet, it needs a solid surface to rest on, so finding one elsewhere is a big deal. "We basically live on a ... Read Full Story