Exoplanets large and small, hot and cold...

[Tony G]

Cool! 

That means they can begin watching the first series of "Life on Mars". 
Seems kind of appropriate!

That means if they were to keep watching transmissions, when Comet C/2013 A1 hit Mars next year, in 2021 the can watch "No Life on Mars" 

Tony G

[Rick]

Rare Stellar Alignment Offers Opportunity To Hunt For Planets

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope will have two opportunities in the next few years to hunt for Earth-sized planets around the red dwarf Proxima Centauri.

The opportunities will occur in October 2014 and February 2016 when Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to our sun, passes in front of two other stars. Astronomers plotted Proxima Centauri's precise path in the heavens and predicted the two close encounters using data from Hubble.

"Proxima Centauri's trajectory offers a most interesting opportunity because of its extremely close passage to the two stars,"

More: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/proxima-centauri.html

[Rick]

Watery Asteroid Discovered in Dying Star Points to Habitable Exoplanets

stronomers have found the shattered remains of an asteroid that contained huge amounts of water orbiting an exhausted star, or white dwarf. This suggests that the star GD 61 and its planetary system – located about 150 light years away and at the end of its life – had the potential to contain Earth-like exoplanets.

The new research findings used data collected from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, both of W. M. Keck Observatory's Keck I and Keck II telescopes, as well NASA's FUSE telescope, and are reported today in the journal Science.       

This is the first time both water and a rocky surface - two key ingredients for habitable planets - have been found together beyond our solar system.

More

[Whitters]

 Using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the "habitable zone" -- the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet.

FULL STORY: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/17apr_firstearth/

[Rick]

NASA Telescopes Find Clear Skies and Water Vapor on Exoplanet

Astronomers using data from three of NASA's space telescopes -- Hubble, Spitzer and Kepler -- have discovered clear skies and steamy water vapor on a gaseous planet outside our solar system. The planet is about the size of Neptune, making it the smallest planet from which molecules of any kind have been detected.

"This discovery is a significant milepost on the road to eventually analyzing the atmospheric composition of smaller, rocky planets more like Earth," said John Grunsfeld, assistant administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "Such achievements are only possible today with the combined capabilities of these unique and powerful observatories."

Clouds in a planet's atmosphere can block the view to underlying molecules that reveal information about the planet's composition and history. Finding clear skies on a Neptune-size planet is a good sign that smaller planets might have similarly good visibility.

More: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-322

[Rick]

Hubble Maps the Temperature and Water Vapor on an Extreme Exoplanet

A team of scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have made the most detailed global map yet of the glow from a planet orbiting another star, revealing secrets of air temperatures and water.

The map provides information about temperatures at different layers of the world's atmosphere and traces the amount and distribution of water vapor on the planet. The findings have ramifications for the understanding of atmospheric dynamics and the formation of giant planets like Jupiter.

"These measurements have opened the door for a new kind of comparative planetology," said team leader Jacob Bean of the University of Chicago.

"Our observations are the first of their kind in terms of providing a two-dimensional map of the planet's thermal structure that can be used to constrain atmospheric circulation and dynamical models for hot exoplanets," said team member Kevin Stevenson of the University of Chicago.

The Hubble observations show that the planet, called WASP-43b, is no place to call home. It's a world of extremes, where seething winds howl at the speed of sound from a 3,000-degree-Fahrenheit day side that is hot enough to melt steel to a pitch-black night side that sees temperatures plunge below a relatively cool 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

More: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/28/full/

[Rick]

NASA's Kepler Marks 1,000th Exoplanet Discovery, Uncovers More Small Worlds in Habitable Zones

How many stars like our sun host planets like our Earth? NASA's Kepler Space Telescope continuously monitored more than 150,000 stars beyond our solar system, and to date has offered scientists an assortment of more than 4,000 candidate planets for further study -- the 1,000th of which was recently verified.

Using Kepler data, scientists reached this millenary milestone after validating that eight more candidates spotted by the planet-hunting telescope are, in fact, planets. The Kepler team also has added another 554 candidates to the roll of potential planets, six of which are near-Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of stars similar to our sun.

Three of the newly-validated planets are located in their distant suns' habitable zone, the range of distances from the host star where liquid water might exist on the surface of an orbiting planet. Of the three, two are likely made of rock, like Earth.

"Each result from the planet-hunting Kepler mission's treasure trove of data takes us another step closer to answering the question of whether we are alone in the universe," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "The Kepler team and its science community continue to produce impressive results with the data from this venerable explorer."

More: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4429

[Rick]

Volunteer 'Disk Detectives' Classify Possible Planetary Habitats

A NASA-sponsored website designed to crowdsource analysis of data from the agency's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission has reached an impressive milestone. In less than a year, citizen scientists using DiskDetective.org have logged 1 million classifications of potential debris disks and disks surrounding young stellar objects (YSO). This data will help provide a crucial set of targets for future planet-hunting missions.

"This is absolutely mind-boggling," said Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the project's principal investigator. "We've already broken new ground with the data, and we are hugely grateful to everyone who has contributed to Disk Detective so far."

More: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4430

[Carole]

Amazing progress, it wasn't so long ago that the first exo planet was discovered.

Carole

[Carole]

Not sure about the text as one minute it is talking about a star and then next a planet and then it goes on to says it has Moons orbitting it. Hopefully there will be some better reports around. 

"Scientists have discovered an enormous ring system around a star, the first of its kind outside our solar system.

New research shows that the system around the star - called J1407 - consists of over 30 rings, each of them tens of millions of kilometres across."

"This planet is much larger than Jupiter or Saturn," said Eric Mamajek, who helped write the research.

"Its ring system is roughly 200 times larger than Saturn's rings. You could think of it as kind of a super Saturn."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/31001078

Here's another:
http://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/gigantic-ring-system-around-j1407b/


conception of the extrasolar ring system circling the young giant planet or brown dwarf J1407b. The rings are shown eclipsing the young sun-like star J1407, as they would have appeared in early 2007. Credit: Ron Miller

[Rick]

Huffington Post had a go at this story...

Stupendous Ring System Discovered Around 'Super Saturn' Exoplanet

Call it Saturn on steroids! Astronomers have discovered an exoplanet with an enormous ring system that far surpasses Saturn's.

"This planet is much larger than Jupiter or Saturn, and its ring system is roughly 200 times larger than Saturn's rings are today," Dr. Eric Mamajek, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester and the leader of the team of astronomers, said in a written statement. "You could think of it as kind of a super Saturn."

....

To learn more about the strange planet and its rings, the astronomers are asking amateurs to help monitor the light coming from J1407.

More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/28/ring-system-super-saturn-exoplanet_n_6556310.html

[mickw]

An ancient solar system similar to our own has been discovered by scientists.
Studying data from the Kepler telescope, the team, led by the University of Birmingham, found a star orbited by five planets similar in size to Earth.
The system, 117 light-years away, is the oldest known of its kind, formed 11.2 billion years ago.
Dr Tiago Campante said it could provide a clue to "the existence of ancient life in the galaxy".
"By the time the Earth formed, the planets in this system were already older than our planet is today," he said.

More:   http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-31002598

[Rick]

NASA's Hubble Telescope Detects 'Sunscreen' Layer on Distant Planet

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected a stratosphere, one of the primary layers of Earth's atmosphere, on a massive and blazing-hot exoplanet known as WASP-33b.

The presence of a stratosphere can provide clues about the composition of a planet and how it formed. This atmospheric layer includes molecules that absorb ultraviolet and visible light, acting as a kind of "sunscreen" for the planet it surrounds. Until now, scientists were uncertain whether these molecules would be found in the atmospheres of large, extremely hot planets in other star systems.

These findings will appear in the June 12 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

"Some of these planets are so hot in their upper atmospheres, they're essentially boiling off into space," said Avi Mandell, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-author of the study. "At these temperatures, we don't necessarily expect to find an atmosphere that has molecules that can lead to these multilayered structures."

More from NASA.

[Rick]

Helium-Shrouded Planets May Be Common in Our Galaxy

They wouldn't float like balloons or give you the chance to talk in high, squeaky voices, but planets with helium skies may constitute an exotic planetary class in our Milky Way galaxy. Researchers using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope propose that warm Neptune-size planets with clouds of helium may be strewn about the galaxy by the thousands.

"We don't have any planets like this in our own solar system," said Renyu Hu, NASA Hubble Fellow at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and lead author of a new study on the findings accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. "But we think planets with helium atmospheres could be common around other stars."

More: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4620

[Rick]

NASA Telescopes Detect Jupiter-Like Storm on Small Star

Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a tiny star with a giant, cloudy storm, using data from NASA's Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes. The dark storm is akin to Jupiter's Great Red Spot: a persistent, raging storm larger than Earth.

"The star is the size of Jupiter, and its storm is the size of Jupiter's Great Red Spot," said John Gizis of the University of Delaware, Newark. "We know this newfound storm has lasted at least two years, and probably longer." Gizis is the lead author of a new study appearing in The Astrophysical Journal.

While planets have been known to have cloudy storms, this is the best evidence yet for a star that has one. The star, referred to as W1906+40, belongs to a thermally cool class of objects called L-dwarfs. Some L-dwarfs are considered stars because they fuse atoms and generate light, as our sun does, while others, called brown dwarfs, are known as "failed stars" for their lack of atomic fusion.

More: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4786