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.
Solscape
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.
Nearby Universe Mapped in 3 Dimensions
A new map developed by an international team of astronomers should help you find your way around the Universe – at least to a distance of 600 million light years. This new 3-dimensional map plots out the locations of all the major superclusters of galaxies and the voids that surround them. It includes „The Great Attractor“ and a supercluster called „Shapley“ that lies about 400 million light years away and spans 20 million light years. The map was developed using data from the 2MASS Redshift Survey, which calculated the redshifts (and therefore the distances) of 25.000 galaxies across the entire sky, and the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which provided the colours and two-dimensional positions of the galaxies.
First High-Resolution Photos from MRO
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has returned the first images – the highest-resolution photos ever taken from Martian low-altitude orbit! The pictures show objects as small as 0.9 metres in size. As of October 4, eleven images have been released so far, covering a wide variety of terrain in various locations.
More information:
HiRISE Transition Phase Imaging
New Photos From NASA Orbiter’s HiRISE Camera Detail Diverse Martian Terrain
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
Alaskan Storm Cracks Giant Iceberg To Pieces
A severe storm that occurred in the Gulf of Alaska in October 2005 generated an ocean swell that six days later broke apart a giant iceberg floating near the coast of Antarctica, more than 8.300 miles away.
http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/061002.iceberg.shtml