Exoplanet

Rocky with a hint of hydrogen: what’s a good recipe for a planet? Life

Rocky with a hint of hydrogen: what’s a good recipe for a planet?

Rocky planets are rather small and gas giants are large – that’s one hypothesis you might come up with if you look at our Solar System. But is that true always and everywhere? Is our own system an example of the rule or an exception to the rule? Astronomers have now found more than 3700 exoplanets, but very little is known about their composition. At most the radius and mass are known. But even if the size and mass are known, it is still very difficult to say whether the exoplanet has, in fact, a large, but thanks to…
Exoplanets have pretty moons too Space

Exoplanets have pretty moons too

Nobody really believes that our Solar System is the only one with moons. But the existence of moons in other star systems has only been a hypothesis up until now. So-called exomoons are particularly difficult to find, because they are smaller than their host planets (which is, of course, in their nature) and they follow complicated paths due to their orbits around their planets and, in turn, around their stars. Such objects are usually identified by measuring the occultation caused when they pass in front of their star (transit method). Nevertheless, the Hubble Space Telescope has now finally found…
Searching for planets with molecular fingerprinting Space

Searching for planets with molecular fingerprinting

The star Beta Pictoris is 63 light years from Earth. In 1983, a dusty disk was discovered around it and in 2008, an exoplanet. This exoplanet is a gas giant with thirteen times the mass of Jupiter and was named Beta Pictoris b. Now the planet is being used for a test run of a new method for searching for planets. The technique, which the team of researchers describes here, works like this: The fact that planets can rarely be seen directly in a telescope is normally due to the brightness of the central star that outshines everything else.…
The youngest planets in the Milky Way: triplets discovered around baby star Space

The youngest planets in the Milky Way: triplets discovered around baby star

HD 163296, which is 330 light years from Earth, is not an especially spectacular star. It is approximately twice as heavy as our sun, and belongs to the class of Herbig Ae/Be stars. These are very young stars (HD 163296 is 4 million years old) that are still on their way to the main series. Hydrogen fusion has not yet ignited in its interior. Instead, the radiated energy comes from its contraction. At the end of 2016, the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) discovered a pronounced protoplanetary disk around HD 163296 and by analyzing this disk, two thinner sections were…
Book now: NASA opens a travel bureau for exoplanets Life

Book now: NASA opens a travel bureau for exoplanets

NASA had a great idea there: At the "Exoplanet Travel Bureau" you can now book – fictious – trips to different exotic destinations in space. You have the choice between Trappist-1d (or 1e, NASA isn’t sure), Kepler-16b, Kepler-186f, and more. The program then beams you to the surface of the planet, where you can look around by clicking your mouse and learn about some of the sights. Of course the views are (for now) only from an artist’s imagination. (more…)