Playing Cosmic Detective
October 11th 2011 05:35
Category: extrasolar planets
Exoplanet HR 8799 system/ HST NASA ESA image
It certainly pays to look through old archives, wether your looking for your family tree or just like playing detective,you never know what might turn up.
Playing cosmic detective can produce rewards. A group of researchers trolled through Hubble database.
The group painstaking re-analysed images taken by the Hubble space telescope dating back to 1998, what they found was truly surprising.
Astronomers have found evidence for two extrasolar planets that were previously missed.
It is discoveries like these that provide valuable information on the location and movement of stars and planets over time.
By taking grouping the information data taken in 1998 and now gives astronomers an insight on how these extrasolar planets move around
their giant star named HR 8799. Star HR 8799 is located some130 light-years away.
Four giant planets are known to orbit star HR 8799 the star is massive.
The first three planets were discovered in 2008. The main reason these planets were hard to find is because they could only be seen using a technique called near-infrared imaging.
The newly discovered planets were found using near-infrared ground-based images taken with the W.M. Keck Observatory. The fourth innermost planet was discovered in 2010.
As a result of comparing images taken a decade apart the various differences were easier to see.
Having these past images and undertaking comparison studies with images taken of the same are some ten years later, the orbits of the planets can be tracked.
Knowing the orbits is critical to understanding how these distant planet behave.
It also furthers our understanding how distant planets move in relation there respective star.
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Another 400 stars in the NICMOS archive will be re- analysed using the same procedure.
There may be other planets we are yet to find within the Hubble database.
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Astroearth
Camera Sense
We haven’t scratched the surface yet. There are still some ground breaking discoveries to be made.It is all happening very quickly.