Word: extrasolar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Back in the mid-1990s, when astronomers were just beginning to find new planets around distant stars, nearly every new discovery got front-page headlines. Today, with the extrasolar-planet count up to about 400, it takes something extraordinary to make news...
...Institution of Washington announced the discovery of a fifth planet around the star 55 Cancri, which is 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer. The find makes that star system the most heavily populated one known other than our sun's and raises to 265 the total of extrasolar planets since astronomers began discovering them in 1995. To skywatchers, however, 55 Cancri is special, not just because of its litter of worlds but because of what it tells us about the possibility of life around it--and other stars...
Like almost all extrasolar planets, the new world is too small and distant to be spotted by telescope. Instead, it was discovered by measuring the tiny wobbles its gravity imposes on the motion of its parent star...
...frontiers in astronomy, with the exception of extrasolar planets, is really the time domain,” Huchra said. “When you’re trying to understand how things have changed, rarely do you get to go back and look at the same place over and over again...
...Charbonneau searches for extrasolar planets by looking for signs of planets crossing in front of stars outside our solar system. Through a series of NASA-funded telescopes located in southern California that monitor 10,000 stars at a time, Charbonneau and his researchers scour the data, measuring the brightness of the stars. If a star is dark, it could be due to an eclipse from a planet in orbit around...