... Also, the home star to CoRoT-7b , although 500 light years distant, is very similar to our Sun. Unfortunately, the similarities likely end there, as CoRoT-7b orbits its home star well inside the orbit of Mercury , making its year last only 20 hours, and making its peak temperature much hotter than humans might find comfortable. ... Future observations will likely narrow the composition of one of the first known rocky planets discovered outside of our Solar System. ... NASA Official: Jay Norris. ...

Discover the cosmos! ... 2009 September 23 . CoRoT Satellite Discovers Rocky Planet . ... Explanation: How similar is exoplanet CoRoT-7b to Earth? ... Also, the home star to CoRoT-7b , although 500 light years distant, is very similar to our Sun. Unfortunately, the similarities likely end there, as CoRoT-7b orbits its home star well inside the orbit of Mercury , making its year last only 20 hours, and making its peak temperature much hotter than humans might find comfortable. ... About APOD | ...

... Exoplanets . ... Artists impression of the blue exoplanet. ... This exoplanet is located in the constellation of Vulpecula, the fox, a faint pattern inside the Summer Triangle.ТљТљ This planet is a not too distant 63 light years away so has been studied by space-based telescopes.Тљ Data collected from Hubbleт??s Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) when this planet moved behind its star showed that in the shadow of the star the light reflected from HD 189733b reduced into the blue part of the spectrum. ...

... Image courtesy of Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute . ... There are already 29 multi-planet extrasolar planetary systems discovered (including this last one), so what makes this particular system unique? ... International Year of Astronomy, Ireland National Node . ...

... Tonight's Sky . ... The Magazine . ... Star Atlas . ... An artificial comet holds secrets to Earths life . ... Astronomy for Kids . ... Observing springtime deep-sky objects with a large telescope . ... The planet has extreme temperature swings and perhaps active lava flows. ... A digital supplement to Astronomy magazine. ... Join TravelQuest International with Astronomy and Discover magazines on one of three great tour options surrounding this celestial spectacle . ... Astronomy Magazine . ...

... The 50 so-called exo-planets were discovered using a telescope that is found in South America. ... By looking at a star s wobble, astronomers can work out how many exo-planets are in orbit around it and how heavy they are. After studying all of the planets discovered with this telescope so far, astronomers have found that nearly half of stars that are similar to the Sun have at least one planet that is lighter than Saturn. ... But there are many, many more waiting to be found! ...

... Bad Astronomy . ... Bitesize Astronomy . ... The Nine Planets . ... It isn't the first extrasolar planetary system to be discovered; the first planet outside our own solar system orbiting a normal Sunlike star was discovered in 1995. ... Still, this is the first solar system ever found besides our own to definitely have more than one planet. This is an important discovery: most people all along have been assuming that multiple planet systems exist, but we had never actually seen one. ...

You Can Make Stellar Images Brighter . Articles | ... A few months ago I wrote an article titled "You Can’t Make Them Brighter". So why am I now writing that you can make them brighter. ... The image of a focused star is actually a small disk called the Airy disk, named after the 19 th century scientist Sir George Airy. ... For a given aperture, a smaller Airy disk means that the light is focused to a smaller disk and is therefore brighter. ... www.astronomy.net . About Astronomy Net | ...

... As the list of extra-solar planets orbiting sun-like stars ( exoplanets.org/planet_table.shtml ) continues to grow, more and more members of multiple-planet systems ( exoplanets.org/mult.shtml ) are being discovered. ... A planet doesn't actually orbit a star; rather both orbit a point between the two objects. ... Figure 3-Two planets in orbit around 47-Ursa Majoris produce more complex variations in the Doppler-shift data. ... Could these be examples of "The Music of the NEW Spheres"? ...

Now that well over 100 planets have been discovered, we no longer need to ask the question "Are there planets out there?" ... The objective of XO is to find additional hot-Jupiters (like HD 209458b) that transit stars bright enough for detailed follow-up studies to be done with existing telescopes such as HST, Keck, and the VLT. ... Transit observations by themselves provide no information about the mass of the planet and radial velocity studies can yield only minimum masses. ...

... Uncovering the Chemistry of Earth-like Planets . ... An Earth-like planet, born from the same nebula as its host star, is composed primarily of silicate rocks and an iron-nickel metal core, and depleted in volatile content in a systematic manner. The more volatile (easier to vaporize or dissociate into gas form) an element is in an Earth-like planet, the more depleted the element is compared to its host star. ... Apr . ... Copyright (c) Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston, Inc. ...

NATIONAL ASTRONOMY AND ION