A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience
This planet of extragalactic origin was detected by a European team of astronomers
Over the last 15 years, astronomers have detected nearly 500 planets orbiting stars in our cosmic neighbourhood, but none outside our Milky Way has been confirmed.
Continue reading… “Planet from Another Galaxy Discovered!!!”
An international group of astrophysicists has determined that a massive planet outside our Solar System is being distorted and destroyed by its host star — a finding that helps explain the unexpectedly large size of the planet, WASP-12b.
Continue reading… “Torn Apart by Its Own Tides, Massive Planet Is on a ‘Death March’”
Astronomers have discovered the youngest extra-solar planet around a solar-type star, named BD+20 1790b.
Continue reading… “Youngest Extra-Solar Planet Discovered Around Solar-Type Star”
By studying a triple planetary system that resembles a scaled-up version of our own Sun’s family of planets, astronomers have been able to obtain the first direct spectrum — the “chemical fingerprint” [1] — of a planet orbiting a distant star [2], thus bringing new insights into the planet’s formation and composition. The result represents a milestone in the search for life elsewhere in the Universe.
Continue reading… “Astronomers Capture First Direct Spectrum of an Exoplanet”
Today, at an international ESO/CAUP exoplanet conference in Porto, the team who built the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, better known as HARPS, the spectrograph for ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope, reports on the incredible discovery of some 32 new exoplanets, cementing HARPS’s position as the world’s foremost exoplanet hunter. This result also increases the number of known low-mass planets by an impressive 30%. Over the past five years HARPS has spotted more than 75 of the roughly 400 or so exoplanets now known.
Continue reading… “Towards Other Earths: 32 New Exoplanets Found”
