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Posted on 04/03/2008 3:26:47 AM PDT by Fred Nerks
Astronomers using robotic cameras - including some in Australia - say they have found 10 new planets outside our solar system, while a second team says they have found the youngest planet yet.
The findings add to a growing list of more than 270 so-called extrasolar planets, they told a meeting of astronomers in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
The robot team is called "SuperWASP," for Wide Area Search for Planets, and the cameras look for planets transiting, or crossing in front of, their stars. The light from the sun fades just slightly when this happens, and astronomers can extrapolate the size and location of the planet.
Most planets around other stars have been found using a different method, measuring the tiny tugs that a planet makes on its sun's gravitational field.
Don Pollaco of Queen's University in Belfast and colleagues used banks of cameras in Australia, Spain's Canary Islands, South Africa, Arizona, Hawaii, Chile, and France to discover the 10 new extrasolar planets.
The planets range in mass from half the size of Jupiter to more than eight times the size of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. One orbits its sun once a day and is so close that its daytime temperature could reach about 2,300 degrees Celsius.
Jane Greaves of the University of St Andrews in Scotland and colleagues said they found a baby planet while using radio astronomy to examine a disc of gas and rocky particles around the star HL Tau.
This star is thought to be young, also - 100,000 years old compared to our 4.6 billion-year-old Sun.
They found a clump that appears to contain rocky pebbles, indicating a planet in its infancy.
"We see a distinct orbiting ball of gas and dust, which is exactly how a very young protoplanet should look," Ms Greaves said in a statement.
"In the future, we would expect this to condense out into a gas giant planet like a massive version of Jupiter. The protoplanet is about 14 times as massive as Jupiter and is about twice as far from HL Tau as Neptune is from our Sun."
- Reuters
kitty-litter planet?
The home planet of Larry King, Helen Thomas, John McCain, Joan Rivers and Dick Clark?
Rocky Pebbles? Must be in the Milky Way, and garnished with banana slices. ;’)
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How many exo-planets now? Anybody still counting?
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