European Association for Astronomy Education

Source: HubbleSite

Artist’s concept of the exoplanet WASP-12b.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

“The Star That Ate My Planet” may sound like a B-grade science fiction movie title, but this is really happening 600 light-years away. Like a moth in a candle flame, a doomed Jupiter-sized planet has moved so close to its sunlike parent star that it is spilling its atmosphere onto the star. This happens because the planet gets so hot that its atmosphere puffs up to the point where the star’s gravity pulls it in. The planet will likely be completely devoured in 10 million years. Observations by Hubble’s new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph measured a variety of elements in the planet’s bloated atmosphere as the planet passed in front of its star. The planet, called WASP-12b, is the hottest known world ever discovered, with an atmosphere seething at 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. (read more)

Source: Universtity of California, Santa Barbara

Gallery of exoplanets with retrograde orbits. Exoplanets, discovered by WASP together with ESO telescopes, that unexpectedly have been found to have retrograde orbits, are shown in this artist’s conception. In all cases the star is shown to scale, with its rotation axis pointing up and with realistic colors. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

The discovery of nine new planets challenges the reigning theory of the formation of planets, according to new observations by astronomers. Two of the astronomers involved in the discoveries are based at the UC Santa Barbara-affiliated Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT), based in Goleta, Calif., near UCSB.

Unlike the planets in our solar system, two of the newly discovered planets are orbiting in the opposite direction to the rotation of their host star. This, along with a recent study of other exoplanets, upsets the primary theory of how planets are formed. There is a preponderance of these planets with their orbital spin going opposite to that of their parent star. They are called exoplanets because they are located outside of our solar system. (read more)

Source: Space Daily

An international team of astronomers have discovered compelling evidence that rocky planets are commonplace in our Galaxy. Leicester University scientist and lead researcher Dr. Jay Farihi surveyed white dwarfs, the compact remnants of stars that were once like our Sun, and found that many show signs of contamination by heavier elements and possibly even water, improving the prospects for extraterrestrial life. (read more)

Source: Space Daily

The Corot satellite strikes again with another fascinating planet discovery. This time, the newly discovered gas giant planet may have an interior that closely resembles those of Jupiter and Saturn in our own Solar System.

Very few planets are temperate enough to allow the presence of liquid water, but the newly discovered Corot-9b is one of them. It was found on 16 May 2008 and orbits its star every 95.274 days, a little longer than Mercury takes to go round the Sun. (read more)

Source: ESO Science Release eso1011

Combining observations from the CoRoT satellite and the ESO HARPS instrument, astronomers have discovered the first “normal” exoplanet that can be studied in great detail. Designated Corot-9b, the planet regularly passes in front of a star similar to the Sun located 1500 light-years away from Earth towards the constellation of Serpens (the Snake).(read more)

Source: The Kavli Foundation

Illustration of WASP-12b in orbit about its host star (Credit: ESA/C Carreau)

The class of exotic Jupiter-mass planets that orbit very close to their parent stars were not explicitly expected before their discovery. Now an international group of astrophysicists has determined that a massive planet outside our Solar System is being distorted and destroyed by its host star – a finding that helps explain the unexpectedly large size of the planet, WASP-12b.

It’s a discovery that not only explains what’s happening to WASP-12b; it also means scientists have a one-of-a-kind opportunity to observe how a planet enters this final stage of its life.

The findings were published in the February 25 issue of Nature. (read more)

Links:
arXiv
Nature

Source: arXiv:1001.2105v1

While the most distant exoplanets detected until today are OGLE-05-390L b, MOA-2007-BLG-400-L b at around 6,500 & 6,000 parsecs, which  roughly means ~21,190 & ~19,500 light-years away respectively, an international team of astronomers proposes  a new observational method that they believe will allow  the detection of exoplanets in the Andromeda galaxy (M31) that is at a distance of 2.9 million light-years from us.

A simulation of the expected microlensing event. Credit: Ingrosso et al. (2009)

The authors think that that exoplanets in the M31 galaxy may be detected with the pixel-lensing method by using telescopes making high cadence observations of an ongoing microlensing event.Although the mean mass for detectable exoplanets is about 2 M_J, even small mass exoplanets (inferior to 20 Earth masses) can cause significant deviations, which are observable with large telescopes. (read more)

Link:

Ingrosso,G., De Paolis,F., Novati,S.C., Jetzer,Ph.,  Nucita,A.A., Zakharov,A. F. (2009). Detection of Exoplanets in M31 with Pixel-Lensing: The Event Pa-99-N2 Case, in proceedings of the “Twelfth Marcel Grosmann Meeting”, Paris.

Source: ESO Science Release 02/10

ESO has just released the magnificent information that the VLT has been capable, for the first time in human, to provide data that allows the study of an exoplanet’s atmosphere.

By studying a triple planetary system that resembles a scaled-up version of our own Sun’s family of planets, astronomers have been able to obtain the first direct spectrum — the “chemical fingerprint” — of a planet orbiting a distant star, thus bringing new insights into the planet’s formation and composition. The result represents a milestone in the search for life elsewhere in the Universe. (read more)

Source:W.M. Keck Observatory News and Outreach

Artist’s impression of an extrasolar planet.
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada.

Planet hunters using Keck Observatory have detected an extrasolar planet that is only four times the mass of Earth. The planet is the second smallest exoplanet ever discovered and adds to astronomers’ growing cadre of low mass planets called super-Earths. (read more)

Credit: Gemini

Artist’s impression of the events around HD 131488.
Credit: Lynette Cook for Gemini Observatory/AURA

Using the Gemini South telescope in Chile, astronomers at UCLA have found dusty evidence for the formation of young, rocky planets around a star some 500 light years distant. But these potential extrasolar worlds are alien in an even more intriguing way… In the aftermath of collisions between planetary embryos around this star the researchers discovered that the dusty debris bears no resemblance to the planetary building blocks of our own Solar System. (read more)

Credit: Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Artist’s conception shows a Jupiter-sized planet forming from a disk of dust and gas
surrounding a young, massive star. The planet’s gravity has cleared a gap in the disk.
Credit: David A. Aguilar, CfA

Most searches for planets around other stars, also known as exoplanets, focus on Sun-like stars. Those searches have proven successful, turning up more than 400 alien worlds.

The prospects for hypothetical alien life are, by opposite, disappointing. The habitable zone, or region where liquid water could exist on a rocky surface, is at a greater distance from the star for A and B stars than for sun-like stars due to their greater luminosity. However, that luminosity comes at the price of a short lifetime. A and B stars live for only about 10 – 500 million years before running out of fuel. (read more)

Source: Space Daily

Artist’s impression of an extrasolar planet.

When scientists confirmed in October that they had detected the first rocky planet outside our solar system, it advanced the longtime quest to find an Earth-like planet hospitable to life.

Now scientists led by a University of Washington astronomer say that if CoRoT-7 b’s orbit is not almost perfectly circular, then the planet might also be undergoing fierce volcanic eruptions. It could be even more volcanically active than Jupiter’s moon Io, which has more than 400 volcanoes and is the most geologically active object in our solar system. (read more)

Source: ESO

Artists impression of the extrassolar planet. Credit: ESO/L.Calçada

Astronomers have discovered the second super-Earth exoplanet [1] for which they have determined the mass and radius, giving vital clues about its structure. It is also the first super-Earth where an atmosphere has been found. The exoplanet, orbiting a small star only 40 light-years away from us, opens up dramatic new perspectives in the quest for habitable worlds. The planet, GJ1214b, has a mass about six times that of Earth and its interior is likely to be mostly made of water ice. Its surface appears to be fairly hot and the planet is surrounded by a thick atmosphere, which makes it inhospitable for life as we know it on Earth.(read more)

Related links:
Portal to the Universe

Source: Max-Planck Institute

Extrasolar planet list keeps on growing. Another planet outside of our Solar System has been directly imaged using the Subaru telescope. Given that the first visible light image of an extrasolar planet was taken a little more than a year ago, the list is growing pretty fast since now we are over ten.

Discovery image of GJ 758 B, taken in August
2009 with Subaru HiCIAO in the near infrared.
Credit: MPIA/NAOJ

The newest one, planet GJ 758 B is also the coolest directly imaged planet, with a temperature of 600 Kelvin, and it orbits a star that is much like our own Sun. GJ 758 B has a mass of between 10-40 times that of Jupiter, making it either a really big planet or a small brown dwarf.

Other links:
Astrophysical Journal Letters (arXiv.org)
Universe Today