Astronomers unveil camera
that will find extra terrestrial
life
Thanks for submitting this, diana-slowburner!
Significant orbital disruption, which can take billions of year to manifest, may eject planets from their proper orbit around a star.
Giant Planets Seen Guzzling
Gas as They Grow: Key Stage
of Birth of Giant Planets Seen
for First Time
did we just find a habitable super-Earth?! Yup!
Super-Earth Discovered in Star’s Habitable Zone
Scientists added three new planets to three discovered in 2008 orbiting an orange star called HD 40307, which is roughly three-quarters as massive as the sun and located about 42 light-years away in the constellation Pictor.
Of particular interest is the outermost planet, which is believed to fly around its parent star over 320 days, a distance that places it within HD 40307’s so-called “habitable zone.”
“All we know at this point is that it has a minimum mass of about 7.1 Earth-masses. We have no explicit follow-up planned, thought the HARPS team is probably still gathering more data, and may in the future be able to confirm these results, and perhaps add even more planets to the brood,” astronomer Steven Vogt, with the University of California’s Lick Observatory, wrote in an email to Discovery News.
Based on our experience with other star systems this newly discovered planet is likely made of rock and may contain water. It receives 62 percent of the radiation from its star that Earth receives from the sun, but Earth is relatively near to the leading edge of the habitable zone.
Kepler Spots ‘Perfectly Aligned’ Alien Worlds
When NASA’s Kepler space telescope started finding planets at odd angles to their parent stars, scientists wondered if our solar system’s tidy geometry, with the planets neatly orbiting around the sun’s equator, was an exception to the rule.
That idea can be laid to rest thanks to an innovative use of the Kepler data which aligned three planets circling the sun-like star Kepler-30 with a giant spot on the star’s surface.
The study showed the trio of planets orbiting within one degree, relative to each other and relative to the star’s equator. That finding is an indication that Kepler-30, like our own solar system, formed from a rotating disk of gas.
Image: The planets of the Kepler-30 system, seen here in an artist’s impression, all transit the same starspot, indicating that they lie in the same geometric plane. Credit: Sanchis-Ojeda et al
