The Features Of Distant Planets : How Do We Know?

NASA discovered a system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star outside our solar system. All of these seven rocky planets could have water which is a key to life and three of them are firmly located in the habitable zone. This system is about 40 light-years (235 trillion miles) from Earth. Because of locating outside of our solar system, these planets are scientifically known as exoplanets. This exoplanet system is called TRAPPIST-1, name of telescope in Chile. Researchers using TRAPPIST announced they had discovered three planets in the system and then discovered more to seven by several ground-based telescopes. Moreover, NASA used data from Spitzer to measure the sizes of the seven planets and estimates the masses and density of six of them. The data indicated that they are likely to be rocky and could have liquid water on their surfaces but the mass of the seventh has not been estimated yet. Scientists assumed it could be an icy like snowball world. The temperature of TRAPPIST-1 star is cooler than our sun,

Throughout history humanity has been fascinated by the existence of extraterrestrial life. Today such ventures are in the development process and the discovery of life beyond our solar system, no matter how primitive, may soon become a huge(important?) scientific breakthrough. The three basic things that are required to consider a place even remotely habitable are water, a source of energy, and organic materials. Habitability also depends on other factors that must also be taken into consideration such as how close the planet is to its star (in the case of our solar system, the sun), how long the water and organic materials existed there, and the size and mass of the planet. One must not confuse habitable with inhabited. The term

Exobiology is the science that is concerned with the search for life in outer space; it may be called as astrobiology as well. The search for life in outer space has consumed the imagination of the humankind for long time ago. Nowadays, humankind has made a progress and found major discoveries in the quest for life existence in the universe and outer space because of the advancement of the technology. However, in the past, exobiology was considered as a science without a subject, where the people and other scientists laughed at and ridiculed the famous scientist and biologist Joshua Lederberg when he originated the term exobiology. Some people argue that life exists elsewhere in the universe, however, others believe that life only exist on Earth. A new study reveals that our galaxy, the Milky Way, has 100 billion or so stars, where 17 billion of them are Earth-size alien planets, and probably many more. The huge size of the galaxy increases the probability of life existence in the outer space. Are we alone in the universe? This question has captured the imaginations of scientist, theologians, and astrobiologists. However, they don’t know the answer yet. Understanding the complete definition of life and how life originated, and determining the techniques used for searching for life existence in outer space and evidences found can help to answer the question of “Are we alone in the universe?”

have yet been detected on any of the nearly 2,000 scientifically confirmed exoplanets. So we

Which proves that the distance of an exoplanet to its host star is important for astronomers to look for when finding Earth-like exoplanets. Astronomers use a term called the goldilocks zone to determine if an exoplanet can form liquid water on its surface. A goldilocks zone is simply a distance that an exoplanet must be to form liquid water, and the goldilocks zone is different depending on the size and temperature of the star that an exoplanet is orbiting. If an exoplanet is orbiting too close around its host star, the temperature on the exoplanet will be too hot to form liquid water ion its surface as the star will cause any liquid water that is on the exoplanets surface to boil into steam. If an exoplanet is too orbiting too far from its host star, it will receive very little starlight and the surface of the exoplanet will be too cold to melt ice into liquid water, so instead the water is frozen to form ice. Astronomers use the transit method to determine how close an exoplanet is orbiting around its host star, and have determined that an exoplanet that orbits once a week will be too close to its host star, and temperatures on the surface will be too hot. An exoplanet

Barucci, M. A., Boehnhardt, H., Cruikshank, D. P., Morbidelli, A. and Renee Dotson: 2008, The Solar System Beyond Neptune, University of Arizona Press.

This experiment was conducted to study and investigate if extraterrestrial life exists upon the exoplanet TRES 2. It was hypnotized that TRES 2 did not sustain the qualifications to support extraterrestrial existence. The results from this testing conclude the hypothesis was correct, with research as an addition from the luminosity testing it has been knowledge that TRES 2 reflects less than 1% of light making it one of the darkest exoplanets currently discovered. Light is a crucial element in the building blocks of life, it is the most important factor that influence the way life evolved on Earth. From photosynthesis, which is responsible for making producing nutrients in plantae’s and meeting our energy requirements. Furthermore TRES 2 orbits

Exoplanets are interesting to us for a number of reasons. By locating and observing them, we are able to gather a variety of useful data that tells us details about the planet, and then compare and contrast them to other exoplanets, as well as our own planet Earth. These comparisons are our attempt at better understanding the formation history of rocky planets such as the one we live on today, and furthermore understand the future of rocky planets based on their internal composition and proximity to their host stars.

Since the very beginning of exoplanet discovery, astronomers have been seeking to find an earth-like habitable planet. This search especially rose in importance in the 21st century when we were faced with intensifying problems of resource scarcity and environmental deterioration which directly influence our being on earth. In order to investigate regions in the Milky Way to discover Earth-sized exoplanets in and approximate to a habitable zone, NASA sent Kepler, a Discovery-class mission spacecraft to identify planets in the Habitable Zone of main sequence stars and to generate a better estimate of how many stars in the Milky Way have such planets (Overbye,

Many scientist used telescopes to look at the planets and turned up the brightness. It helped showing how far the planet was and to show there are planets between the star and earth. Scientist started looking for pulsating stars and using them to find different planets. To find smaller planets scientist used NASA’s Kepler telescope. The telescope was very helpful for NASA and it proved that there are smaller planets. They figured out that some stars have planets. NASA’s help was very successful and they found different planets by the

The discovery of other stars in early stages of formation support the fact that planets exist outside of our solar system. These stars, surrounded by disks of gas and dust, are called proplyds. According to astronomers, these disks are like that which the solar nebula was believed to be like, providing a good source of evidence of other planets. Extrasolar planets, or planets outside of our solar system, are believed to have formed from the distortion of the proplyd

Thanks to a sighting via the US NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (www.spitzer.caltech.edu) in a partnership with Poland’s Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or OGLE Telescope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Gravitational_Lensing_Experiment), a brand new Milky Way exoplanet has been found. The remote gas planet is at least 13,000 light years from Earth, making this adventure in planet finding one of the farthest known of its kind. These worlds are called exoplanets, which mean they circle a sun other than our own sun.

The field of exoplanets is transitioning from an age of discovery into an era of planetary characterization. In the last decade, the Kepler spacecraft revealed that planets are ubiquitous within the galaxy, and over the coming years, TESS will find hundreds of nearby terrestrial planets. A primary NASA goal in astrophysics from the Science Mission Directorate is to “search for life on planets around other stars.” To achieve this, the properties of transiting candidate planets must be well understood to assess potential habitability. In particular, the planetary radii derived from the light curves of wide-field surveys are significantly underestimated. For Kepler, by a factor of 1.5 on average (Ciardi et al. 2015). High-resolution imaging

The question of whether life exists beyond our own planet Earth has intrigued humanity since the earliest of times. However, until the last half-century, mankind lacked any useful technology to even attempt to answer the question. Over the last 50 years the onset of advanced rocketry and guided space probes has changed our perspective about the possible existence of life elsewhere in our solar system. Thanks to the innovative exploratory work of advanced space probes, we now know that conditions on certain planetary satellites in our solar system could potentially support life. Such technology has so advanced our understanding of the prospect of life beyond earth that it has given rise to the field of astrobiology, which is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to the study of life elsewhere in the universe.

Humans have longed to believe in extrasolar planets, as surely there have to be planets elsewhere in the universe. Claims of supposedly discovered extrasolar planets can be dated back to 1855 when Captain S. W. Jacobs from the Madras observatory, claimed that he had discovered a planet orbiting a binary system (Jacobs 1855), all the way up until 1991 when a team of astronomers announced then retracted the alleged discovery of an extrasolar planet around a pulsar star (Lyne and Bailes 1992). Planets are extremely hard to detect as they are a very faint light source and the light from its parent star is much brighter and essentially blocks out light from a planet (Winters 1996). It was not until 1992 when the first exoplanets were confirmed