... Credit: Greg Bacon ( STScI ), NASA Explanation: The last decade saw the profound discovery of many worlds beyond our solar system, but none analogs of our home planet Earth . Exploiting precise observational techniques, astronomers inferred the presence of well over two dozen extrasolar planets , most nearly as massive as gas giant Jupiter or more, in close orbits around sun-like stars. ... Publications with keywords: extrasolar planet - planet - Saturn - planetary system . ... Crescent Saturn . ...

... 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. ...

... Planets . ... Stars . Exoplanets . ... Most exoplanets so far discovered fall into the category of тАШhot JupitersтАЩ, these are giant planets orbiting very close to their parent star. ... Note that we have discovered so many hot Jupiters because they are the easiest type of planet to find, they are not necessarily particularly common in the galaxy. ... Subsequently several similar hot and€а fuzzy worlds have been discovered the same way, proving this that this planet is not a one-off oddball. ...

... 2000 March 30 . Saturn-Sized Worlds Discovered . ... Explanation: The last decade saw the profound discovery of many worlds beyond our solar system, but none analogs of our home planet Earth . ... With at least 70 percent the mass of Saturn, 79 Ceti's planet orbits on average 32.5 million miles from the star compared to 93 million miles for the Earth-Sun distance . ... HD46375's planet is at least 80 percent Saturn's mass, orbiting only 3.8 million miles from its parent star. ... About APOD | ...

... 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...

Johann Kepler - a Legislator of the Sky. The laws of the planets movements put by Johann Kepler destroyed the thousand year old dogmas about the circles and spheres and opened the way to scientific understanding of celestial occurrences. ... The best object for observation was Mars - its orbit unlike the Earth's one has a noticeable eccentricity, the rotation period in comparison with Jupiter and Saturn is not too long and observation conditions are better than for Mercury and Venus. ...

... Astronomers have recently discovered about a dozen planets orbiting stars similar to the Sun. ... The Earth is the only known planet which has water in the liquid, solid and gaseous forms. ... A planet is termed "habitable" if it has surface liquid water. The presence of liquid water depends on the planet's distance from its parent star. John Chambers' programme yielded a number of artificial planetary systems, all of which showed at least one habitable, or possibly habitable, planet. ...

... Historical Data . Orbital Data . Physical Data . ... Sun . ... Jupiter . ... Saturn . ... William Herschel . ... William Cranch Bond . ... William Henry Pickering . Uranus . ... 1986 . Voyager 2 . ... William Lassell . ... J. Christy Key: Name Name of the planet or satellite. Orbits Sun or planet about which it orbits. ...

. Go Here for Hubble Ultra Deep Field . ___________________________________________________________________ The Electronic Universe Project e-mail: nuts@moo.uoregon.edu

Geotimes -- November 2005 -- Two more moons for "planet" Pluto http://www.geotimes.org/nov05/WebExtra110305.html Web Extra Thursday, November 3, 2005 Two more moons for Pluto When the New Horizons spacecraft finally reaches Pluto in July 2015, researchers will have more objects to study than previously thought. In addition to Pluto's confirmed moon Charon, astronomers have detected two more orbiting celestial bodies, which could help reveal how the planet and moon system formed. ...

... Observing . ... stars . ... Colliding planet embryos discovered . Astronomers have spotted evidence for colliding planet embryos in the Pleiades star cluster. ... Joseph Rhee of UCLA and his collaborators have measured heat from hot dust surrounding a 100 million year old s