Fifty New Alien Worlds Revealed - September 12, 2011

lol. HARPS
http://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1134a/
"European astronomers have announced the discovery of more 50 new planets beyond our solar system, including 16 that are just a notch above our own planet in mass. They say their record-breaking findings suggest that more than half of the stars like our sun possess planets, and that many of those worlds are lighter than Saturn.
The pick of the litter is a planet that's already attracted a big share of the spotlight: HD 85512 b, a world at least 3.6 times as massive as Earth that's located 36 light-years away in the constellation Vela. HD 85512 b is the only one of the 16 super-Earths on today's list that is located in its star system's habitable zone. That's the area around a star where scientists believe water could exist in liquid form, which would make a rocky planet potentially livable.
HD 85512 b's status came to light a couple of weeks ago in a paper submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, but the team behind the discovery provided more details about that super-Earth and the dozens of other worlds in papers presented today at the Extreme Solar Systems II conference in Wyoming.
The findings came from the team behind the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, or HARPS, which is installed at the European Southern Observatory's 11.8-foot (3.6-meter) La Silla Observatory in Chile.
"The detection of HD 85512 b is far from the limit of HARPS, and demonstrates the possibility of discovering other super-Earths in the habitable zones around stars similar to the sun," University of Geneva astronomer Michel Mayor said in today's news release from the ESO.
Super-Earths, which range from Earth's mass to worlds 10 times more massive, are of particular interest to planet-hunters because it's thought that they could be even more conducive to the development of life than our own planet. When the search for extrasolar planets began more than 15 years ago, the telescopes used for the task could only detect giant planets like our own solar system's Jupiter. Since then, the techniques and tools used for the search have become much more sensitive.
HARPS, for example, can detect the slight gravitational wobble caused by planets as small as Earth, if they have incredibly close-in orbits. HARPS' observations of 376 sunlike stars has led the team to conclude not only that more than half of such stars are surrounded by planets, but also that about 40 percent of them have at least one planet less massive than Saturn.
One of the team members, Lisa Kaltenegger of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told journalists today that the latest round of findings marked a new age in the search for habitable planets.
Other findings from the Extreme Solar Systems II conference:
Astronomers say they have observed brightness changes on a failed star, also known as a brown dwarf, that may indicate a storm grander than any seen yet on a planet. The stormy brown dwarf is known as 2MASS 2139. "We found that our target's brightness changed by a whopping 30 per cent in just under eight hours," the University of Toronto's Jacqueline Radigan said in a news release. "The best explanation is that brighter and darker patches of its atmosphere are coming into our view as the brown dwarf spins on its axis." Radigan is the lead author of a paper being presented this week at the Extreme Solar Systems II conference."
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/12/7728140-fifty-new-alien-world...

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• 50
• fifty
• new
• alien
• planets
• discovered
• nasa
• harps

[animalnt]

better start building my spaceship so i can get the fuck off this planet

[UkTruthSeeker2009]

Why did they call it harps was it to confuse people who wasn`t` aware of HAARP lol

[blzke]

how many light years away?

[ArtAgent13]

I think it has already been established that the supposed habitable zone,( sometimes called the Goldilocks Zone), has been found to be only partially correct. What I am saying is that liquid water has been determined to exist outside that supposed zone in our own star's system. Jupiter's moon, Europa is thought to have liquid water under the ice on its surface. This is based on the fact that the surface has features that could only be caused by liquid water. So this zone can be bypassed.

[CSXer]

Money is better spent on a project like this than SETI.

Radio signals can't even reach our few closest stars. Light signals can reach billions of light years.

[KalissaFluffy1]

this is just like wall.e :( sad

[XXFabianXXMSP]

wtf!!! ITS FAKE XD

[black00dice]

Wow, praise Nyancat for such an awe-inspiring creation Nyan Akbar!!

[koolaid22222]

r they trying to start a war with a new species???

[ZeroHumans]

Humans will overpopulate like flies and then sucide and destroy all life on this planet but those millions of other planets with more evolved plants and wildlife are light years away and SAFE from murdering destroying humans. stupid human viruses can hold your breath until you choke, it won't do you any good..you won't be able to kill even a fly on those planets. Human brute force primitive rockets take nine months just to get to Mars, what a joke.. humans are forever losers and doomed.

[Merrier15]

lock and load