... 2005 April 5 . Light From A Distant Planet . Illustration Credit: R. Hurt ( SSC-Caltech ), JPL-Caltech , NASA . Explanation: Light emitted by a planet far beyond our Solar System has been identified for the first time. The planet, illustrated in the above drawing , had its light detected by comparing the brightness of only the parent star, when the planet was behind the star, to the light emitted when both the planet and its parent star were visible. ... About APOD | ...

... Light from a Extra Solar Planet . ... 5.04.2005 . ... Credit: R. Hurt ( SSC-Caltech ), JPL-Caltech , NASA Explanation: Light emitted by a planet far beyond our Solar System has been identified for the first time. The planet, illustrated in the above drawing , had its light detected by comparing the brightness of only the parent star, when the planet was behind the star, to the light emitted when both the planet and its parent star were visible. ... Publications with keywords: planet - light . ...

... More on 51 Peg: . The discovery of a Jupiter--mass planet in orbit around the solar--type star 51Peg has been reported by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz (Geneva Observatory) on October 6th at the 9th Cambridge workshop on "cool stars, stellar systems, and the sun" held at Florence (Italy). ... Recall that the measurements of radial velocity only yield v sin i which in turn gives us M sin i. For most values of i, sin i will be greater than 0.5 and this gives a mass estimate of 0.5 Jupiter masses. ...

... Tonight's Sky . ... SUN MOON MERCURY VENUS MARS, JUPITER SATURN . ... Moon . ... Observing . ... Astronomy for Kids . ... Observing springtime deep-sky objects with a large telescope . ... Would it be possible to find a moon around an extrasolar planet? ... Get instant access to subscriber content on Astronomy.com! ... If you are already registered on Astronomy.com, please log in below. ... Receive news, sky-event information, observing tips, and more from Astronomy's weekly email newsletter. ...

... Planets . ... Earth Satellites . ... Looking in the direction of the constellation Cygnus the Swan and launched by NASA in 2009 is the Kepler Space Observatory.Many previous missions searching for exoplanets mainly detected large giant planets, like large hot Jupiters (it is easier to detect larger planets).However KeplerтАЩs main objective is to search for much smaller planets located in a habitable zone which is not too close nor too far from their star; planets which may be just like our Earth. ...

... Kepler is a mission designed to detect and characterize Earth-sized planets around solar-like stars. The sizes of the planets are determined from the decrease in light from a star that occurs during planetary transits, and the orbital period is determined from the repeatability of the transits. ... These goals are accomplished by continuously and simultaneously monitoring a single field of 140,000 stars for evidence of brightness changes caused by transits of Earth-sized or larger planets. ...

... Mechanical Orrery by Gilkerson An orrery is a mechanical device designed to illustrate the motions of the planets in their orbits about the Sun. ... Tiles are indicated at 16-day intervals for the terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars), at 80-day intervals for Ceres and the two comets, and 160-day intervals for Jupiter and Saturn. ... The most dynamic feature of the Human Orrery is its capacity to explain Kepler's laws of planetary motion in a fun and interesting way. ...

... There has been a heated public discussion in the past few years about whether our ninth planet is really deserving of the name. Since Pluto orbits a star, and is much less luminous, it certainly satisfies the definition we have above. The problem is actually not with Pluto, but with a very large number of other bodies in our Solar System which also satisfy this definition, but which are not called planets. Perhaps the most notable of these is Ceres, the largest asteroid. ... Planet . ...

... The study of extra solar planets will be one of the most important areas of research in astronomy in this century. ... The first planets outside the solar system were found in 1992 around the millisecond pulsar PSR B1257+12 by Alex Wolszczan at the Arecibo Observatory . ... Three space missions based on this principle (MOST, COROT and Kepler ) have already been launched or approved, and have the last one at least has the potential to find Earth-sized planets. ... SIM ( NASA ) is one of such missions...

Neptunes in the Noise: Improved Precision in Exoplanet Transit Detection AimИe Hall , Simon Hodgkin , Gabor Kovacs and Don Pollacco 1 1 1 1 2 Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge 2 Department of Physics, University of Warwick Figure 2 (right): Distribution of radii of all known exoplanets (grey), with those from Kepler (green) and SuperWASP (blue) also shown. We present early results from a new analysis of raw data taken with the SuperWASP telescope[1]. ...

... Science User Portal . ... For the first time, astronomers have been able to directly follow the motion of an exoplanet as it moves from one side of its host star to the other. ... Only 12 million years old, or less than three-thousandths of the age of the Sun, Beta Pictoris is 75% more massive than our parent star. ... This research was presented in a paper to appear this week in Science Express (тАЬA Giant Planet Imaged in the disk of the Young Star Beta Pictoris,тАЭ by A.-M. Lagrange et al.) ...

The Astronomy Net . Articles | ... Forums . ... Planets | ... The list below is a live snapshot of where the planets and moon are located right now. ... The links in the left hand column take you to a mirror of the excellent NinePlanets web site where you can read about each planet and much much more. The latest news includes the fact that Pluto is no longer classified as a planet. ... Pluto is now classified as a 'dwarf planet' which includes Ceres and soon to be many others. ... 100 . ...

... 8, ``Celestial Mechanics'', 2002 Precession and free core nutation of neutron stars A. Gusev, I. Kitiashvili Kazan University, Russia In 1992 Wolszczan and Frail discovered a planetary system around the pulsar PSR 1257+12 [1]. ... Third case: the most likely possibility is the free precession of the pulsar with a rigid 81 neutron star. ... It is known that rotation of the terrestrial planets having rigid mantle and elliptical liquid core is characterized by Free Core Nutation (FCN). ...

T he Siding Spring Survey (SSS) is a Near-Earth Object search program that utilises the 0.5-m Uppsala Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, N.S.W., Australia. ... The mission of the Siding Spring Survey is to contribute to the inventory of near-earth objects (NEOs), or more specifically, the potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) and comets (PHOs) that may pose a threat of impact and thus harm to civilization. ... Based on the CSS Mission page . ... Siding Spring Survey Main Page . ...

This source is hiding behind our Galaxy at a distance of ~18 Mpc, located at a galactic latitide of 0 degrees. ... As we look towards longer wavelengths, 60 micron, to try and penetrate the Galactic Plane, we still see confusion from galactic sources. ... If the image seems some what confusing that is because the MOST is a continuum radio telescope and when it looks in the direction of our Galaxy it detects radiation from sources within our Galaxy and from sources that may lie behind our Galaxy. ...

spaceweb@oulu.fi - last update: 12 March 1999, 0935 UT (RR) . ... In first order the magnetic field created by this magnet is that of a dipole whose axis is tilted with respect to the spin axis by about 11 degrees. ... The difference between the dipole axis and geographic axis is one of the reasons why there are so many different coordinate systems needed to describe locations in space around the Earth. The area around the Earth governed by its magnetic field is called the magnetosphere . ...

... Bad Astronomy . ... Bitesize Astronomy . ... Keep Bad Astronomy close to your heart, and help make me filthy rich. ... It's semi-common knowledge that stars twinkle and planets don't. By semi-common, I mean that a lot of folks know that, but I also mean it isn't strictly true. Stars twinkle because we see them from the bottom of a sea of air. ... These small bundles of air act like little lenses, bending light as it passes through them. ... What we see is the light from the star flickering. ...

... NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected a long-sought population of comets dwelling at the icy fringe of the solar system . The observation, which is the astronomical equivalent to finding the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack, bolsters proof for a primordial comet reservoir just beyond Neptune , currently the farthest planet from the Sun . ... The comet-disk lies just beyond Neptune and might stretch 500 times farther from the Sun than Earth . ... Comet Introduction Kuiper Belt Objects . ...

Saturn: The beauty of the rings. Saturn . ... Belongs to the giant planets . It has no definite solid surface. ... The free fall acceleration at the Saturn surface near equator is 9,06 m/s^2 . ... In the centre of the planet the temperature is about 20000K. The satellites . ... The rings of Saturn . ... It is proved that Saturn's rings (as well as the other planet's) are the fragments of the great cloud being near the planet with million kilometres length (see how the rings were formed ). ...

... 9a. Earth orbits Sun? . ... 10a. Scale of Solar Sys. ... If the mean distance of Earth from the Sun is 1 AU ("Astronomical Unit"), then that of Venus is 0.723 AU, of Mercury 0.387 AU and that of Mars is 1.524 AU. ... By noting (1) where on the Sun's disk is the crossing seen, (2) timing its duration at two far-apart points on Earth, and (3) comparing the times, one can calculate the distance to Venus and from it the scale of the solar system. ... One occurred in 1639--too early. ...