Exoplanets – worlds of other suns

weatheriscool
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Re: Exoplanets – worlds of other suns

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Cloud-spotting on a distant exoplanet
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-cloud-spo ... lanet.html
by Europlanet

An international team of astronomers has not only detected clouds on the distant exoplanet WASP-127b, but also measured their altitude with unprecedented precision. A presentation by Dr. Romain Allart at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2021 shows how, by combining data from a space- and a ground-based telescope, the team has been able to reveal the upper structure of the planet's atmosphere. This paves the way for similar studies of many other faraway worlds.

WASP-127b, located more than 525 light-years away, is a "hot Saturn"—a giant planet similar in mass to Saturn that orbits very close to its sun. The team observed the planet passing in front of its host star to detect patterns that become embedded in the starlight as it is filtered through the planet's atmosphere and altered by the chemical constituents. By combining infrared observations from the ESA/NASA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and visible light measurements from the ESPRESSO spectrograph at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, the researchers were able to probe different regions of the atmosphere. The results brought a few surprises.

'First, as found before in this type of planet, we detected the presence of sodium, but at a much lower altitude than we were expecting. Second, there were strong water vapor signals in the infrared but none at all at visible wavelengths. This implies that water-vapor at lower levels is being screened by clouds that are opaque at visible wavelengths but transparent in the infrared,' said Allart, of the iREx/Université de Montréal and Université de Genève, who led the study.
Nanotechandmorefuture
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Re: Exoplanets – worlds of other suns

Post by Nanotechandmorefuture »

raklian wrote: Thu Aug 05, 2021 8:00 pm Image

This is why I like the timeline when it starts picking up in 2080 of more augmented humans than non augmented. So many stars in Andromeda that you would need to be synthetic to explore them all.
weatheriscool
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Re: Exoplanets – worlds of other suns

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2022 Should See Start of Technology Demos Leading to High Resolution Exoplanet Imaging
September 23, 2021 by Brian Wang

A NASA NIAC Phase III is developing and plans to fly a 2022 TDM (Technology Demonstration Mission) to prove the SGLF’s (Solar Gravitational Lens Focus) mission architecture. They will then prepare a near-term (by 2024), low-cost (less than $40M) mission to fly through the solar system faster than any spacecraft ever ~7 AU/year, capable of rendezvous with an interstellar object (ISO).

During Phase III they will consider a set of missions to demo critical technologies.

These efforts align with our roadmap for the SGLF mission capability build-up:
• 2020-21: Phase III develops SGLF design/cost, validates critical technology;
• 2021: SGLF technology roadmap; tech demo mission(s) (TDM) formulated; coronagraph design; initial TDM is designed, passes PDR, readied for flight;
• 2022: A public-private partnership (PPP) initiates technology demonstration; series of TDMs proposed via the PPP;
• 2023-4: Sailcraft flights (less than $20M) to achieve TRL 9;
• 2026-8: Sun-accelerated flights (with ~10 AU/yr); confirm CONOPS;
• 2027: SGLF Project starts for a preselected target;
• 2032-42: Launch a string-of-pearls (SoP) mission (20+ AU/yr) to the target;
• 2060: Discover life beyond the solar system.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/09/2 ... aging.html
weatheriscool
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Re: Exoplanets – worlds of other suns

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Astronomers may have discovered first planet to orbit 3 stars
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-astronome ... Q190eFF660
by University of Nevada, Las Vegas
UNLV researchers and colleagues may have identified the first known planet to orbit three stars.

Unlike our solar system, which consists of a solitary star, it is believed that half of all star systems, like GW Ori where astronomers observed the novel phenomenon, consist of two or more stars that are gravitationally bound to each other.

But no planet orbiting three stars—a circumptriple orbit—has ever been discovered. Perhaps until now.

Takeaways

Using observations from the powerful Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope, UNLV astronomers analyzed the three observed dust rings around the three stars, which are critical to forming planets.

But they found a substantial, yet puzzling, gap in the circumtriple disc.

The research team investigated different origins, including the possibility that the gap was created by gravitational torque from the three stars. But after constructing a comprehensive model of GW Ori, they found that the more likely, and fascinating, explanation for the space in the disc is the presence of one or more massive planets, Jupiter-like in nature. Gas giants, according to Jeremy Smallwood, lead author and a recent Ph.D. graduate in astronomy from UNLV, are usually the first planets to form within a star system. Terrestrial planets like Earth and Mars follow.
weatheriscool
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Re: Exoplanets – worlds of other suns

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Extreme exoplanet even more exotic than originally thought
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-extreme-e ... ought.html
by Cornell University
Considered an ultra-hot Jupiter—a place where iron gets vaporized, condenses on the night side and then falls from the sky like rain—the fiery, inferno-like WASP-76b exoplanet may be even more sizzling than scientists had realized.

An international team, led by scientists at Cornell University, University of Toronto and Queen's University Belfast, reports the discovery of ionized calcium on the planet—suggesting an atmospheric temperature higher than previously thought, or strong upper atmosphere winds.

The discovery was made in high-resolution spectra obtained with Gemini North near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Hot Jupiters are named for their high temperatures, due to proximity to their stars. WASP-76b, discovered in 2016, is about 640 light-years from Earth, but so close to its F-type star, which is slightly hotter than the sun, that the giant planet completes one orbit every 1.8 Earth days.

The research results are the first of a multiyear, Cornell-led project, Exoplanets with Gemini Spectroscopy survey, or ExoGemS, that explores the diversity of planetary atmospheres.
weatheriscool
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Re: Exoplanets – worlds of other suns

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A new theory to test hypotheses and methods for exoplanet detection
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-theory-me ... lanet.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Phys.org

Countless astrophysicists and astronomers are actively searching for unobserved celestial bodies in the universe, as detecting these bodies could improve our understanding of space and help to address unanswered astrophysical questions. Among these elusive objects are exoplanets, planets that orbit a star other than the sun, thus outside of the solar system.

One crucial challenge impeding the detection of exoplanets is that with existing methods, it is hard to see a faint emissions of a secondary source that is in the proximity of a much brighter source. This significantly limits the use of direct imaging techniques in exoplanet searches.

Researchers at University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom and Macquarie University in Australia have recently showed that it might be possible to reduce errors in detecting the presence of a weak secondary source during exoplanet searches, particularly in instances where two sources have small angular separations. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, specifically suggests that these errors could be reduced using quantum state discrimination and quantum imaging methods.

"Our work was inspired by recent papers on super-resolution quantum imaging, which was first rigorously quantified by Mankei Tsang and his colleagues at National University of Singapore," Zixin Huang, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. "These papers showed that the angular separation of two incoherent sources can be much better resolved by using quantum techniques (this is an estimation task, where the parameter we want to measure is the angular separation)."
weatheriscool
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Re: Exoplanets – worlds of other suns

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Strong signal detected on 'hot Jupiter' planet that rains iron
A team of researchers has published a study that details a strong signal being detected from a planet where it rains iron.
One planet, in particular, is certainly quite strange to say the least. It's called WASP-76b, and is described as a "hot Jupiter". Researchers found that on this planet, it rains iron from the sky, and it doesn't just drizzle it literally buckets down with iron regularly. Why does this happen? The short answer is heat, and quite a lot of it as well. According to researchers, the planet is quite close to its parent star and is tidally locked to it, only ever showing one side of the planet to its local star.

Temperature estimations on WASP-76b came out in early 2020, and researchers said that the planet probably reached around 3,800 Fahrenheit. However, those estimations may have been slightly incorrect. A new study has been published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, and within the study, researchers analyzed the planet's upper atmosphere with the Hawaiian Gemini telescope. The researchers found a strong signal of ionized calcium.

According to Ernst de Mooij, an astrophysicist at Queen's University Belfast and co-author of the study, "The signal we see from calcium, which comes from the tenuous upper atmosphere of the planet, is much stronger than what we expect from models."
Read more: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/82025/st ... RCE5nNr_-g
weatheriscool
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Re: Exoplanets – worlds of other suns

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Radio signals from distant stars suggest hidden planets
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-radio-dis ... anets.html
by University of Queensland
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Using the world's most powerful radio antenna, scientists have discovered stars unexpectedly blasting out radio waves, possibly indicating the existence of hidden planets.

The University of Queensland's Dr. Benjamin Pope and colleagues at the Dutch national observatory ASTRON have been searching for planets using the world's most powerful radio telescope Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) situated in the Netherlands.

"We've discovered signals from 19 distant red dwarf stars, four of which are best explained by the existence of planets orbiting them," Dr. Pope said.

"We've long known that the planets of our own solar system emit powerful radio waves as their magnetic fields interact with the solar wind, but radio signals from planets outside our solar system had yet to be picked up.

"This discovery is an important step for radio astronomy and could potentially lead to the discovery of planets throughout the galaxy."
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andmar74
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Re: Exoplanets – worlds of other suns

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https://www.quantamagazine.org/with-a-n ... -20211012/
After the ultra-powerful James Webb Space Telescope launches later this year, Laura Kreidberg will lead two efforts to check the weather on rocky planets orbiting other stars.
Lets hope this beast of a telescope can launch successfully ( planned for 18. december).
weatheriscool
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Re: Exoplanets – worlds of other suns

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Astronomers detect signs of an atmosphere stripped from a planet in a giant impact
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-astronome ... mpact.html
by Jennifer Chu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Young planetary systems generally experience extreme growing pains, as infant bodies collide and fuse to form progressively larger planets. In our own solar system, the Earth and moon are thought to be products of this type of giant impact. Astronomers surmise that such smashups should be commonplace in early systems, but they have been difficult to observe around other stars.

Now astronomers at MIT, the National University of Ireland at Galway, Cambridge University, and elsewhere have discovered evidence of a giant impact that occurred in a nearby star system, just 95 light years from Earth. The star, named HD 172555, is about 23 million years old, and scientists have suspected that its dust bears traces of a recent collision.

The MIT-led team has observed further evidence of a giant impact around the star. They determined that the collision likely occurred between a roughly Earth-sized terrestrial planet and a smaller impactor at least 200,000 years ago, at speeds of 10 kilometers per second, or more than 22,000 miles per hour.

Crucially, they detected gas indicating that such a high-speed impact likely blew away part of the larger planet's atmosphere—a dramatic event that would explain the observed gas and dust around the star. The findings, appearing today in Nature, represent the first detection of its kind.
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