The light from distant worlds
p2pnet.net News:- Astronomers have for the first time directly detected light from planets outside our solar system.
Two separate research teams have found some 130 stars outside our solar system that have planets orbiting them, says Scientific American.
The stars had already been detected via indirect methods, it says, but now a team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has measured light from planet HD 209458b, orbiting a star 153 light-years away from our planet, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics meanwhile saw the light from planet TrES1, more than three times as far away near the constellation Lyra.
This is a new era," Goddard team leader Drake Deming is quoted as saying in New Scientist. "This is the first time we have actually seen light."
David Charbonneau at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, led a team studying a planet of the class called "hot Jupiters", which orbit Sun-like stars.
"These gas giants probably evolved in a manner similar to those in our solar system," says New Scientist. "The orbits of both planets, as observed from Earth, take them behind their host stars. The teams took advantage of this to tease out the planets’ radiation from infrared images captured by NASA’s Spitzer space telescope."
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See:-
Scientific American – Astronomers See Light from Extrasolar Planets, March 23, 2005
New Scientist – Glow of alien planets glimpsed at last, March 22, 2005
