28 New Exoplanets Found

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We are well over 200 in the exoplanet count. Many of these have been verified to be systems with more than one object orbiting their star.

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Astronomers have discovered 28 new planets outside of our solar system, increasing to 236 the number of known exoplanets, one of which is a hybrid Earth-Neptune object with a rocky core surrounded by a shell of ice.

"We added 12 percent to the total in the last year, and we're very proud of that," said Jason Wright of the University of California at Berkeley. "This provides new planetary systems so that we can study their properties as an ensemble."

The planets are among 37 new objects spotted within the past year.

space.com

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The same website has a page where artists have created images of some of the exoplanets. cpace.com Images

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Even though actual evidence for extra-solar planets has only been building in the last few decades, the basic premise for solar system formation predicts that planets will be common.

In addition, large planets will also tend to have lots of moons. Jupiter's moon Ganymede is larger than the planet Mercury.

As creatures who respond to light, we must resist the urge to assume that the blackness of space is empty except for the pinpoints of light we can see. Stars are simply the central gravitational point within a collapsing cloud of debris which accumulated enough mass to ignite a fusion process. Every star came from a cloud of debris, and every cloud of debris probably had gravitational eddy's which formed sub-fusion masses (planets, moons, asteroids, etc).

Planets are likely to be far more common than stars.

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I have little interest in the artist's renditions, but this picture from the end of that website is pretty cool...

http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/imagedisplay/img_display.php?pic=dustdisk_model_020212_02,0.jpg&cap=What%20our%20solar%20system%20would%20look%20like%20to%20an%20alien%20astronomer.

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How is the night life on these planets? Are the people there on the internet? Do they have cable? How are the beaches? We still have much to learn!

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"We added 12 percent to the total in the last year, and we're very proud of that," said Jason Wright of the University of California at Berkeley.

Exactly who is this "we"?

Does it include the developers and manufactures of the equipment, the installation engineers, the truck drivers who got it there, the allocators and creators of the resources, the suppliers of electricity, the builders and maintenance men, the cleaners and all the rest or is it just the ones who looked through the eyepiece and couldn't but not see what they saw?

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What's your problem? I'm guessing it means mankind.

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Who on earth is keeping track (236) and why? Who cares about all those floating rocks far far away.?

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This is so interesting, littlek. For many of us, our imagination is always intrigued by the mysteries of space, particularly the possibilities of finding other life out there, somewhere.

I especially love the images of nebulae and the incomprehensibly (to me at least) tremendous space they occupy.

http://wmatem.eis.uva.es/~marsan/discover/nebulae/cygnusloop.gif

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Diane - I love nebulae as well. Any new image of space is a good one in my eyes. Every new discovery, no matter how tenuous is also fascinating.

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Quincy wrote:

Who on earth is keeping track (236) and why? Who cares about all those floating rocks far far away.?

How common is life? Is there life in nearly every star system, or 1 in a trillion star systems? Does every star system develop orbiting planets? Do some star systems have thousands of planets? Are the inner planets always small and metallic with gaseous outer planets and a few gas giants? Do star systems collapse? How many planets are there in the galaxy?

We can make guesses about all of these questions by looking just at our own system...but we have no clue how accurate they are until we verify the principles and assumptions we make on exoplanets in other star systems. By studying exoplanets scientists are able to either verify that other systems behave as expected according to our observations, or are radically different. For example, the nebular hypothesis predicts that the inner planets should always be rocky and small with large gas giants outside of the frost line. But observations on exoplanets have shown many systems that have large planets very close to their stars. This kind of observation allows possible holes in the theory to be given more thought.

There is also just general curiosity. Sometimes you don't know exactly what you are looking for, but if we keep looking, we may find something extraordinary. It's also very empowering to be able to say something about a planet that is so many light years away. I believe that it elevates our status as an organism.

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stuh505 wrote:

We can make guesses about all of these questions by looking just at our own system...but we have no clue how accurate they are until we verify the principles and assumptions we make on exoplanets in other star systems....

....Sometimes you don't know exactly what you are looking for, but if we keep looking, we may find something extraordinary.

Yes!

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Isn't it that the techniques for finding exoplanets favours finding large planets near their stars?

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Quincy wrote:

Isn't it that the techniques for finding exoplanets favours finding large planets near their stars?

Yes. For example one method looks for periodic red and blue shifts in a star that indicate movement of the star due to a massive orbiting object. Another method would be to look for reductions in the intensity of light emitted by a star indicating an object passing between it and the observer. I'm not sure if gravitational lensing is useful for detecting exoplanets or not. Also looking at the distribution of dust around a star can tell you something about the planets it may have. The methods that we have for detecting exoplanets are by no means perfect, and detecting small planets close to their stars is extremely difficult. That's why people make a big deal about it when they succeed...

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Absolutely! It is exciting even for those of us who are not scientists. To realize that our everyday rules don't always hold true for other systems.

I was watching something the other night that said the corona of the sun is just as hot or hotter than the inner core of the sun. How could that be? No one knows yet. I hope science can explain it before I die. My curiosity will never fade.

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Diane wrote:

Absolutely! It is exciting even for those of us who are not scientists. To realize that our everyday rules don't always hold true for other systems.

I was watching something the other night that said the corona of the sun is just as hot or hotter than the inner core of the sun. How could that be? No one knows yet. I hope science can explain it before I die. My curiosity will never fade.

That doesn't sound right. According to these 5 textbooks (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/CCoraThomas.shtml) and Wikipedia, the temperature of the corona is at least 7-15 times cooler than the core of the sun...although it is hotter than the surface.

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stuh505 wrote:

Diane wrote:
Absolutely! It is exciting even for those of us who are not scientists. To realize that our everyday rules don't always hold true for other systems.

I was watching something the other night that said the corona of the sun is just as hot or hotter than the inner core of the sun. How could that be? No one knows yet. I hope science can explain it before I die. My curiosity will never fade.

That doesn't sound right. According to these 5 textbooks (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/CCoraThomas.shtml) and Wikipedia, the temperature of the corona is at least 7-15 times cooler than the core of the sun...although it is hotter than the surface.

It's ejecting from within?

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littlek wrote:

It's ejecting from within?

I have heard recently that simulations indicate that, contrary to previous assumptions, it does eject from within via massive convection currents...but this could not explain its high temperature, because it is so not dense.

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The Sun's corona is much hotter (by a factor of nearly 200) than the visible surface of the Sun...The corona is 10−12 as dense as the photosphere[surface of sun], however, and so produces about one-millionth as much visible light. The corona is separated from the photosphere by the relatively shallow chromosphere. The exact mechanism by which the corona is heated is still the subject of some debate, but likely possibilities include induction by the Sun's magnetic field and sonic pressure waves from below (the latter being less probable now that coronae are known to be present in early-type, highly magnetic stars).

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Stuh have you heard a theory about the core of the sun being cooler, way cooler than the outside?

im not sure on specifics but i broke down into hot gases spinning rapidly flow to the OUTSIDE while the inside began cooling off.

when i first heard it i thought it was a joke, but i dont know anything about giant spinning blobs of burning gas, so...

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I have heard that stars and planets are themselves living things. Therefore, the presence of life in the universe is obvious. We are simply looking for tiny specs of life such as ourselves.

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28 New Exoplanets Found

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