And now there's Planet Bling

Hot on the heels of the discovery of a Zirconium star, Astronomers seem to have discovered diamond planet… of sorts anyway. According to the BBC a team of UK and US astronomers, including members of Keele University's astrophysics group, have found that the conditions on planet WASP-12b means that there it may be rich in diamonds.


The planet is the size of Jupiter, is a carbon-rich planet and orbits a star 1,200 light years away from Earth. It was originally found last year by the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) project, the UK's leading team of planet discoverers. Since then it has been observed by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

"Because WASP-12b is so close to its star and so hot," explains Prof Coel Hellier, "the Spitzer Space Telescope can detect the heat of the planet, and studying this radiation tells us which molecules are in its atmosphere."

"Predicting that there would be diamonds is an extrapolation, but we think that there could well be diamonds in a solar system made of the sort of material that this planet is made of," added Prof Hellier

Well there you have it. The galaxy just gets stranger and stranger….Source URL: https://idontwanttobeanythingotherthanme.blogspot.com/search/label/exoplanets
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Even more fascinating Exoplanet news

Back in 2007 I put up a post about the discovery of an exoplanet Gliese 581c. At the time it was one of three planets discovered around the red dwarf star Gliese 581c which is just 20 light years from earth ( Just down the road in astronomical terms but for the foreseeable future it may as well be on the other side of the universe in terms of getting up close and personal).

Gliese 581c is close to the star’s so called Goldilocks zone (aka the Habitable Zone or HZ - the band around a star where water can exist in liquid form and thus amenable to life…. or at least life that may be remotely earth-like). At the time it was the smallest know extra solar planet was considered a possible location of extrasolar life.

Gliese 581 seems to be a goldmine for exoplanets: In 2009, 581d, a “super-earth” was found to be in the HZ; 581e, although beyond the HZ is at 1.9 times the mass of the earth the smallest exoplanet so far.

And there’s more!

According to today’s Guardian there is yet another planet , Gliese 581g , which is potentially habitable (being in the HZ) and of a similar size to Earth.

Gliese 581g, has a mass of three to four times that of Earth and takes 37 days to orbit the star. Astronomers believe it is a rocky planet with enough gravity to retain an atmosphere.

One side of the planet is always facing the star, much as one side of the moon constantly faces Earth. This means that the far side of the planet is constantly in darkness. The most habitable region of the planet would be the line between the light and dark regions.

The average temperature on the planet is estimated to be between -31 to -12C, but the ground temperature would vary from blazing hot on the bright side and freezing on the dark side.

"Our findings offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet," said Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common."

"The number of systems with potentially habitable planets is probably on the order of 10 or 20 percent, and when you multiply that by the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, that's a large number. There could be tens of billions of these systems in our galaxy,"

This is utterly fascinating stuff. I can imagine that such discoveries will be come more and more commonplace.. I can only imagine what newer and more advanced telescopes will reveal.

Shame that we will never see them in the flesh thoughSource URL: https://idontwanttobeanythingotherthanme.blogspot.com/search/label/exoplanets
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An embarrassment of exoplanets

The discovery of exoplanets is becoming more and more commonplace. Even though nearly 500 planets have been discovered so far new discoveries are hardly dull, routine news – well not for me they aren’t.

Still, we have gotten to a point where a new discovery has to be fairly spectacular to be a major news item. This is certainly the case with the discovery of a planetary system containing at least five planets orbiting the star HD 10180. The star, which is similar to the Sun, is 127 light years away, in the southern constellation of Hydrus.

Christophe Lovis from Geneva University's observatory in Switzerland was lead researcher on the study. He said that his team had probably found "the system with the most planets yet discovered.... This highlights the fact that we are now entering a new era in exoplanet research - the study of complex planetary systems and not just of individual planets," he said.

The High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (or Harps) at the European Sothern Observatory in Chile was responsible for the discovery. Harps measures the wobble of a star; this gives a measure of how much it is being tugged on by an orbiting planet.

Using Harp, Dr Lovis and his team were able to measure the star’s wobble this and break it down, in order to calculate how many planets were in the system, how great each of their masses was, and even the path of each individual planet's orbit.

HD 10180 is unique in several respects. It has at least five "Neptune-like planets" lying within a distance equivalent to the orbit of Mars, making it more populated than our own Solar System in its inner region. And all the planets seem to have almost circular orbits.

So far, the astronomers have picked up clear signals from five planets, along with two slightly "fuzzier" signals. One of these possible sixth and seventh planets was estimated to be just 1.4 times the mass of the Earth; if its presence in the system was confirmed, it would be the lowest mass exoplanet yet discovered. It is also predicted to be very close to its host star - just 2% of the Earth-Sun distance, so one year on this planet would last only 1.2 Earth days.

Now this is a spectacular discovery. It makes me wonder what will be next.Source URL: https://idontwanttobeanythingotherthanme.blogspot.com/search/label/exoplanets
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