Friday, November 14th, 2008

Exosolar Planet Update

The orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are shown with the Sun located at the center. HR 8799 is located 90 degrees away from the Milky Way galactic center, below the solar system. (Credits: Video courtesy of 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF) See More Videos

In recent years, finding planets orbiting distant stars has been happening with increasing regularity. This week, the journal Science has reports of two new exosolar planet finds, including a multi-planet system. One group of astronomers used the Keck and Gemini telescopes to directly image three planets around the star HR 8799, 128 light years from Earth. In another study, a second team used the Hubble Space Telescope to image a planet they call Fomalhaut b, orbiting its star, within a large dust belt.

In this segment, we'll hear about the new work in the field of discovering exosolar planets -- including research that used the Hubble Space Telescope to take optical images of a planet orbiting a star some 25 light years away.