[meteorite-list] First light directly detected from an extrasolar planet

From: mark ford <markf_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Mar 24 03:55:42 2005
Message-ID: <6CE3EEEFE92F4B4085B0E086B2941B31244E66_at_s-southern01.s-southern.com>

This was Interesting..

http://www.carnegieinstitution.org/news_releases/news_0503_23.html



First light detected from an extrasolar planet


Washington D.C. Most of the 150 known extrasolar planets are discovered
and studied through techniques such as finding the telltale wobble of a
star tugged by an orbiting planet, or the "blink" of a star as a planet
passes in front of it. Now for the first time scientists have observed
an extrasolar planet through the light it emits in the infrared. "I feel
we've been blind and have just been given sight," commented co-author of
the study* Dr. Sara Seager of the Carnegie Institution. "Detecting light
from these other worlds is very exciting. It opens a whole new window on
these objects. It's the beginning of our ability to study their
temperature, and composition," she added. The study, published in the
March 23 on-line edition of Nature, used measurements from NASA's
Spitzer Space Telescope, an infrared observatory launched in August
2003. Results of the work are announced today at NASA headquarters.
The planet, HD 209458b, is a so-called hot Jupiter-a massive gaseous
world that orbits very closely to its parent star in only 3.5 days. It
has not yet been possible to see these planets in the visible part of
the spectrum because the light from the star vastly outshines that from
the planet. However in the infrared, the planets show up more brightly
than they do at visible wavelengths, making them detectable. As Seager
explained: "This planet was discovered indirectly in 1999 and was later
found to transit its star-the star dims as the planet moves in front of
it during the course of the planet's orbit. With Spitzer, we first
measured the combined light of the planet and star just before the
planet went out of sight. Then when the planet was out of view, we
measured how much energy the star emitted on its own. The difference
between those readings told us how much the planet emitted." The results
of the measurements agreed with models created to determine how much
infrared radiation hot Jupiters are likely to emit. HD 209458b was found
to be a scorching 1,574 F (1130 K), confirming that hot Jupiters are in
fact intensely baked by their stars.
....More at
http://www.carnegieinstitution.org/news_releases/news_0503_23.html
Received on Thu 24 Mar 2005 03:55:39 AM PST