Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have confirmed the extrasolar planet status of two of the 16 candidates discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope. One of the two confirmed exoplanets has a mass a little below 10 Jupiter masses, while the other is less than 3.8 Jupiter masses.
Kategorie: Exoplaneten
Hubble spots planets whose years hurtle by
The Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a crop of 16 possible planets circling stars near the bustling centre of the Milky Way. Five are whipping around their stars in less than a day, giving them the shortest „year“ on record. Unlike the vast majority of extrasolar planets found to date, the new ones are also very distant, lying 26.000 light years away – well beyond our own galactic suburb. That suggests they are common throughout the Milky Way, which probably contains billions of planets.
Planets prefer safe neighborhoods
A star must live in a relatively tranquil cosmic neighborhood to foster planet formation, say astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. A team of scientists from the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, Tucson, came to this conclusion after watching intense ultraviolet light and powerful winds from O-type stars rip away the potential planet-forming disks, or protoplanetary disks, around stars like our sun. At up to 100 times the mass of the sun, O stars are the most massive and energetic stars in the universe. They are at least a million times more powerful than the sun.
https://news.arizona.edu/story/planets-prefer-safe-neighborhoods