Astronomer Joseph Harrington, of the University of Central Florida, has reported the first direct observation of distinct day and night temperatures on a planet orbiting another star. Unfortunately, the extrasolar (outside our solar system) planet doesn’t look to be very hospitable, as the temperatures range over 2,500 Fahrenheit between the night and day sides. Harrington […]
Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) have confirmed the extrasolar (outside our solar system) planet status of two of the 16 candidates discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in a 2004 sweep of the sky. One of the new exoplanets has a mass a little below 10 Jupiter masses, while […]
The latest issue of the journal Optical Letters carries an intriguing article about a new optical device that might allow astronomers to view extrasolar planets directly, without the distracting and concealing glare of the parent star. This would be accomplished by “nulling” out the light of the parent star by exploiting its wave nature, while […]
Astronomers from the Ames Research Center and the University of California have discovered the most Earth-like planet yet, located only 15 light years from Earth. The new planet looks like a rocky world about 7.5 times as massive as the Earth. It travels in a nearly circular orbit only 2 million miles from its parent […]
A team of astronomers has confirmed the discovery of a giant extra-solar planet, approximately five times the mass of Jupiter, that is gravitationally bound to a young brown dwarf star. The research, appearing in Astronomy and Astrophysics, puts an end to a year long discussion on the nature of this object, which started with the […]
