Astronomers Detect New Chemical Signature in an Exoplanet’s Atmosphere
April 27th 2021, 1:08 pm
This planet is a so-called ultra-hot Jupiter, a gas-giant planet orbiting its host star much closer than Mercury orbits the sun
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An international collaboration of astronomers led by a researcher from the Astrobiology Center and Queen’s University Belfast has detected a new chemical signature in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet i.e., a planet that orbits a star other than our sun.
The hydroxyl radical (OH) was found on the dayside of the exoplanet WASP-33b. This planet is a so-called ‘ultra-hot Jupiter,” a gas-giant planet orbiting its host star much closer than Mercury orbits the sun (Figure 1) and therefore reaching atmospheric temperatures of more than 2500 degrees C (hot enough to melt most metals).
Could the discovery of this molecule hold the key to finding a second Earth ?
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As a young girl growing up in small-town Vermont, Aki Roberge dreamed of other worlds.
An avid science fiction fan, she wondered if the kinds of planets she saw in the âStar Warsâ movies, with their varied climates and cultures, creatures and civilizations, might really exist.
Today, and for more than a decade now, she actually explores such possibilities, searching not for parched Tatooine or ice-clad Hoth, but for real exoplanets â planets orbiting other stars.
Dr. Aki Roberge, a research scientist in NASAâs Exoplanet and Stellar Astrophysics Lab at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, right outside Washington, D.C., will talk about her life, her work and the latest breakthroughs in this relatively new branch of astronomy at 7 p.m. Friday. Itâs part of Wyoming Stargazingâs âThe World Above the Tetonsâ speaker series.
“It’s increasingly seeming that the solar system is something of an oddball,” said Gregory Laughlin, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “While it’s still too soon to know for sure how odd the solar system is, if it turns out to be a cosmological anomaly, then so might be Earth – and life.”
ESO’s VLT Captures a “Very Young Version of our Own Sun”
“This discovery is a snapshot of an environment that is very similar to our Solar System, but at a much earlier stage of its evolution,” says Alexander Bohn, at Leiden University in the Netherlands, about the image of a young, Sun-like star with multiple planets directly imaged located about 300 light-years away in the Southern constellation of Musca (The Fly) in July of 2020 by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT). Bohn’s team imaged this system during their search for young, giant planets around stars like our Sun but far younger. The sta
The Giant Magellan Telescope’s 6th Mirror has Just Been Cast. One More to Go
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The Giant Magellan Telescope’s 6th Mirror has Just Been Cast. One More to Go
By 2029, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) in northern Chile will begin collecting its first light from the cosmos. As part of a new class of next-generation instruments known as “extremely large telescopes” (ELTs), the GMT will combine the power of sophisticated primary mirrors, flexible secondary mirrors, adaptive optics (AOs), and spectrometers to see further and with greater detail than any optical telescopes that came before.
At the heart of the telescope are seven monolithic mirror segments, each measuring 8.4 m (27.6 ft) in diameter, which will give it the resolving power of a 24.5 m (80.4 ft) primary mirror. According to recent statements from the GMT Organization (GMTO), the University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab began casting the sixth and seventh segments for the telescope’s primar
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