The smallest is four times our planet, the largest nine times.
They have called super-Earths and three extrasolar planets discovered for the first time all together around one other star, in this case HD 40307 in the constellation of the painter is 42 light years away from Earth.
The author of the discovery is a well-known character, Michel Mayor, Geneva Observatory, to whom we owe the discovery in 1995 of the first extrasolar planet around 51 Pegasi. To say that this research is to be changed and improved, Mayor has presented at a conference being held in Nantes even the discovery of 42 extrasolar planets discovered in recent months. But the most is undoubtedly the sensational hat-trick of the painter.
The reason is that these planets whose nature should be rocky, have a size slightly above the Earth having a mass, a 4.2 times higher and the other two 6.7 and 9.4 times greater. They are also very close to the parent star, roughly the area where our Mercury rotates around the Sun, and therefore their year lasts four days, respectively, 10 and 20 days. The discovery was made possible by using a special spectrograph known as HARPS (High Accuracy Velocity Radaial Planet Search) installed on a European Southern Observatory telescope at La Silla in Chile
The technique of detection is always related to anomalies behavior of the star that reveals the extent depending on their presence and characteristics of the surrounding bodies. "Perfecting the comments now we can come to grasp the existence of planets with masses of only two times that of our planet," says Mayor. So far, astronomers were able to detect the existence of nearly three hundred planetary bodies around other stars in our Milky Way galaxy. For the most part, however, are of great size, similar to our Jupiter and this depends on the survey instruments. But the results of 13 years of research have led Mayor to an important conclusion: "We can infer, in fact, that about one third of all the stars like our Sun abbiano intorno pianeti di taglia contenuta». La sfida in corso รจ quella di realizzare osservatori in grado di fotografarli e nel giro di qualche anno gli astronomi giurano di riuscirci.
Giovanni Caprara
Corriere della Sera
17 giugno 2008
They have called super-Earths and three extrasolar planets discovered for the first time all together around one other star, in this case HD 40307 in the constellation of the painter is 42 light years away from Earth.
The author of the discovery is a well-known character, Michel Mayor, Geneva Observatory, to whom we owe the discovery in 1995 of the first extrasolar planet around 51 Pegasi. To say that this research is to be changed and improved, Mayor has presented at a conference being held in Nantes even the discovery of 42 extrasolar planets discovered in recent months. But the most is undoubtedly the sensational hat-trick of the painter.
The reason is that these planets whose nature should be rocky, have a size slightly above the Earth having a mass, a 4.2 times higher and the other two 6.7 and 9.4 times greater. They are also very close to the parent star, roughly the area where our Mercury rotates around the Sun, and therefore their year lasts four days, respectively, 10 and 20 days. The discovery was made possible by using a special spectrograph known as HARPS (High Accuracy Velocity Radaial Planet Search) installed on a European Southern Observatory telescope at La Silla in Chile
The technique of detection is always related to anomalies behavior of the star that reveals the extent depending on their presence and characteristics of the surrounding bodies. "Perfecting the comments now we can come to grasp the existence of planets with masses of only two times that of our planet," says Mayor. So far, astronomers were able to detect the existence of nearly three hundred planetary bodies around other stars in our Milky Way galaxy. For the most part, however, are of great size, similar to our Jupiter and this depends on the survey instruments. But the results of 13 years of research have led Mayor to an important conclusion: "We can infer, in fact, that about one third of all the stars like our Sun abbiano intorno pianeti di taglia contenuta». La sfida in corso รจ quella di realizzare osservatori in grado di fotografarli e nel giro di qualche anno gli astronomi giurano di riuscirci.
Giovanni Caprara
Corriere della Sera
17 giugno 2008
0 comments:
Post a Comment