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Exoplanet tally set to pass 4,000 mark
The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, run by the Observatoire de Paris, has already passed the 4,000 mark.
[...] The Nasa Exoplanet Archive is 74 planets away from the milestone. But there are 443 planet candidates detected by Nasa's [Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)] space telescope (launched in 2018) awaiting confirmation.
There are a further 2,423 candidates detected by the Kepler space telescope.
The latest exoplanet to be added to the Nasa archive was the Super Earth GI 686 b, which orbits a red dwarf star (a type cooler than our Sun) which was discovered using ground telescopes. It was added on 21 March.
Data flows from NASA's TESS Mission, leads to discovery of Saturn-sized planet
TOI 197.01 (TOI is short for "TESS Object of Interest") – is described as a "hot Saturn" in a recently accepted scientific paper. That's because the planet is about the same size as Saturn and is also very close to its star, completing an orbit in just 14 days, and therefore very hot.
The Astronomical Journal will publish the paper written by an international team of 141 astronomers. Daniel Huber, an assistant astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa's Institute for Astronomy, is the lead author of the paper. Steve Kawaler, a professor of physics and astronomy; and Miles Lucas, an undergraduate student, are co-authors from Iowa State University.
First exoplanet directly observed with optical interferometry
Astronomers using the four members of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope have made the first direct observation of a planet orbiting another star using optical interferometry.
By combining the light from the four VLT telescope units, and using the sensitive GRAVITY instrument to precisely disentangle the light of the planet from its parent star, the research team found a complex atmosphere of iron and silicates suspended in a planet-wide storm.
Known as HR8799e, the planet is a so-called "super Jupiter" with a temperature of roughly 1,000 degrees C. While the hellish world was discovered in 2010, the GRAVITY measurements provided a spectrum 10 times more detailed than earlier observations, revealing at least some of the chemical constituents of the exoplanet's atmosphere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @02:55PM (3 children)
I know that our planetary detection techniques are somewhat crude, but it is disappointing to not see any Earth-like planets detected among all those found so far. Maybe our planet is a very rare breed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @03:28PM
TESS is going to look at brighter and nearer stars. But the orbital periods will be relatively short until later in the mission when more data is collected from small regions of the sky nearly continuously.
Among the known exoplanet candidates, some have already been described as earth twins.
https://www.space.com/30026-earth-twin-kepler-452b-exoplanet-discovery.html [space.com]
There is a bias towards finding larger exoplanets. ~1 Earth mass planets are harder.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Saturday April 06 2019, @03:40PM
Mostly, I think it is that our planet is relatively small. Larger planets are easier to detect in general, and the further away you look, the more that is so.
A more sensitive detection method is needed. If we can actually get into space and build stuff there, a very large, multiple unit space telescope using interferometry should be able to get us quite a bit of fine detail that may resolve smaller planets like ours.
Or perhaps we'll come up with another detection method entirely, one that is considerably more sensitive than the best of what we use now.
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Rap is to music what stale convenience store sandwiches are to fine cuisine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @12:51AM
Earth is flat, the twin is on the flipside.