Exoplanet

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. (altro…)