September 15, 2008 - BBC News
A planet has been pictured outside our Solar System which appears to be circling a star like our own Sun - a first in astronomy.
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hree astronomers from the University of Toronto used the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to take images of the young star 1RXS J160929.1-210524 and the planetary candidate.
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Monday, September 15, 2008
Scientists get images of planet with sun-like star
September 15, 2008 - Reuters
Scientists have snapped the first images of a planet outside our solar system that is orbiting a star very much like the sun.
Nearly all of the roughly 300 so-called extrasolar planets discovered to date have been detected using indirect methods such as changes observed in a star when a planet orbits directly in front of it from the perspective of Earth.
But in findings announced on Monday, University of Toronto scientists said they used the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to take direct pictures of the planet, which is about the size of Jupiter but with eight times the mass.
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Scientists have snapped the first images of a planet outside our solar system that is orbiting a star very much like the sun.
Nearly all of the roughly 300 so-called extrasolar planets discovered to date have been detected using indirect methods such as changes observed in a star when a planet orbits directly in front of it from the perspective of Earth.
But in findings announced on Monday, University of Toronto scientists said they used the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to take direct pictures of the planet, which is about the size of Jupiter but with eight times the mass.
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First Picture of Alien Planet Orbiting Sunlike Star?
September 15, 2008 - National Geographic
An image released today of a distant star and its potential planetary companion could go down in history as the first picture of a planet outside our solar system orbiting a sunlike star.
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Now scientists at the University of Toronto have captured infrared images of a so-called normal star and its potential orbiter using a ground-based telescope at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii.
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An image released today of a distant star and its potential planetary companion could go down in history as the first picture of a planet outside our solar system orbiting a sunlike star.
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Now scientists at the University of Toronto have captured infrared images of a so-called normal star and its potential orbiter using a ground-based telescope at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii.
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U of T researchers capture image of planet orbiting distant star
September 15, 2008 - CBC
Planet-hunting astronomers at the University of Toronto say they have taken a picture of a rare sight — a planet orbiting a star outside our solar system.
Astronomers David Lafrenicre, Ray Jayawardhana and Marten van Kerkwijk made their finding after doing a survey of 80 stars taken using the Gemini North telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Their findings, which have been submitted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters, have been posted online on Cornell University's arXiv website.
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Wednesday, September 10, 2008
1843 Stellar Eruption May Be New Type Of Star Explosion
September 10, 2008 - ScienceDaily
Eta Carinae, the galaxy's biggest, brightest and perhaps most studied star after the sun, has been keeping a secret: Its giant outbursts appear to be driven by an entirely new type of stellar explosion that is fainter than a typical supernova and does not destroy the star.
Reporting in the Sept. 11 issue of Nature, University of California, Berkeley, astronomer Nathan Smith proposes that Eta Carinae's historic 1843 outburst was, in fact, an explosion that produced a fast blast wave similar to, but less energetic than, a real supernova. This well-documented event in our own Milky Way Galaxy is probably related to a class of faint stellar explosions in other galaxies recognized in recent years by telescopes searching for extragalactic supernovae.
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Smith's recent observations using the international Gemini South 8-meter telescope and the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile reveal something new: Extremely fast filaments of gas moving five times faster than the debris in the Homunculus nebula were propelled away from Eta Carinae in the same event. The amount of mass in the relatively slow-moving Homunculus was already at the edge of plausibility in terms of what an extreme stellar wind could do physically, Smith said. The much faster and more energetic material he discovered poses even harsher difficulties for current theories.
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Brightest Stellar Explosion Heralds New Type Of Long-distance Astronomy
September 10, 2008 - ScienceDaily
A flash of light that blinded even small telescopes six months ago was the brightest astronomical explosion ever observed - visible to the naked eye despite originating halfway across the universe.
The gamma-ray burst, catalogued as GRB 080319B, was the result of a massive star's explosion 7.5 billion years ago that sent a pencil-beam of intense light on a direct collision course for Earth. It is the only known gamma-ray burst to have had a visible component bright enough to see with the naked eye.
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The Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT) at Lick Observatory also followed the fading afterglow of the burst, as did the Gemini South telescope in Chile. Bloom and his colleagues combined these observations with Swift data and Pi of the Sky images to complete their analysis.
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A flash of light that blinded even small telescopes six months ago was the brightest astronomical explosion ever observed - visible to the naked eye despite originating halfway across the universe.
The gamma-ray burst, catalogued as GRB 080319B, was the result of a massive star's explosion 7.5 billion years ago that sent a pencil-beam of intense light on a direct collision course for Earth. It is the only known gamma-ray burst to have had a visible component bright enough to see with the naked eye.
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The Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT) at Lick Observatory also followed the fading afterglow of the burst, as did the Gemini South telescope in Chile. Bloom and his colleagues combined these observations with Swift data and Pi of the Sky images to complete their analysis.
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Astronomers Discover Missing Link For Origin Of Comets
September 9, 2008 - ScienceDaily
An international team of scientists that includes University of British Columbia astronomer Brett Gladman has found an unusual object whose backward and tilted orbit around the Sun may clarify the origins of certain comets.
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The international team has been carrying out a targeted search for objects with highly tilted orbits. Their discovery was made using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii, with follow-up observations provided by the MMT telescope in Arizona, the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) four-metre telescope in Chile, and the Gemini South telescope, also in Chile, in which Canada is a partner.
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An international team of scientists that includes University of British Columbia astronomer Brett Gladman has found an unusual object whose backward and tilted orbit around the Sun may clarify the origins of certain comets.
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The international team has been carrying out a targeted search for objects with highly tilted orbits. Their discovery was made using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii, with follow-up observations provided by the MMT telescope in Arizona, the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) four-metre telescope in Chile, and the Gemini South telescope, also in Chile, in which Canada is a partner.
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