Alien worlds, once hidden from knowledge, are now being discovered in droves, stunning astronomers with their unique features and sheer numbers. The discoveries are so common that more and more don’t even get reported outside scientific circles.
Larger than Earth + Likely to Have Water…
A French-led satellite launched on Wednesday to seek out new Earth-like planets beyond the solar system and to explore the interior of stars. The COROT project sent into orbit a telescope capable of detecting planets smaller than is currently known —some maybe just a few times the size of Earth and rocky, rather than the larger, gaseous types.
A NASA space telescope has delivered the first weather forecast from a planet outside our Solar System. The world, known as Upsilon Andromedae b, orbits close into a star that is 380 trillion km from Earth.
It’s official: planets are formed from the debris swirling around a young star, astronomers have confirmed, more than 250 years after the idea was first proposed.
The Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a crop of 16 possible planets circling stars near the bustling centre of the Milky Way. Five are whipping around their stars in less than a day, giving them the shortest “year” on record.
With the VISIR instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers have mapped the disc around a star more massive than the Sun. The very extended and flared disc most likely contains enough gas and dust to spawn planets. It appears as a precursor of debris discs such as the one around Vega-like stars.
Scientists have discovered two new Jupiter-sized planets around stars in the constellations of Andromeda and Delphinus. They are among the hottest planets yet discovered.
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have photographed one of the smallest objects ever seen around a normal star beyond our Sun. Weighing in at 12 times the mass of Jupiter, the object is small enough to be a planet. The conundrum is that it’s also large enough to be a brown dwarf, a failed star.