Artist's impression showing the planet orbiting the Sun-like star HD 85512 in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sail) - Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
And there’s us thinking NASA’s Kepler telescope rules the roost over exoplanet hunting!
Today astronomers in La Silla, Chile announced a fertile haul of more than 50 new exoplanets – the latest results using ESO’s exoplanet hunter HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher). The haul includes 16 super-Earths, one of which orbits at the edge of it’s habitable zone around its star. By studying the properties of the planets found so far, the ESO team have discovered that around 40% of stars similar to our Sun have at least one planet lighter than Saturn.
Lead author Dr Michel Mayor, from the University of Geneva in Switzerland, said the haul included “an exceptionally rich population of super-Earths and Neptune-type planets hosted by stars very similar to our Sun”.
He added: “The new results show that the pace of discovery is accelerating.”
One of the recently announced newly discovered planets, HD 85512 b, is estimated to be only 3.6 times the mass of the Earth and is located at the edge of the habitable zone.
“This is the lowest-mass confirmed planet discovered by the radial velocity method that potentially lies in the habitable zone of its star, and the second low-mass planet discovered by HARPS inside the habitable zone,” says Lisa Kaltenegger (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany and Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Boston, USA), who is an expert on exoplanets habitability.
Astronomers are confident they are close to discovering other small and rocky habitable planets around stars similar to our Sun. Moving forward new instruments are planned to further the search and include a copy of HARPS to be installed on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in the Canary Islands, to survey stars in the northern sky, as well as a new and more powerful planet-finder, ESPRESSO, to be installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in 2016. Looking further into the future the planned CODEX instrument on the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) will push this technique to a higher level.
Wouldn’t it be great to wake up one morning to a fresh Sky-Watching post actually detailing a habitable planet! I guess by then we could just beam the information directly to your brain!
After watching again the beautiful work by Terje Sorgjerd (The Aurora and The Mountain) I thought I’d have another look around for other videos in a similar vein. The two videos below are truly stunning, and perfect example of what draws so many people to astronomy and stargazing in general.
ALMA Time Lapse Sequence – Shot on location at the ALMA array in the Atacama Desert, Chile on June 2010 (credit to Jose Francisco Delgado).
VLT Time Lapse Sequence – Shot on location at ESO‘s VLT at the Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert, Chile (credit to Stephane Guisard and Jose Francisco Salgado).
Beautiful stuff, makes you feel kinda small doesn’t it? I particularly love the second video as it seems to have everything, wide vistas, time lapse from inside the ‘scopes (which I’ve never seen before and they’re awesome), many shots of the VLT laser guide star and possibly the first “Milky Way-set” I’ve ever seen!
Now, when will the clouds scuppering my astrophotography aspirations over the south east UK finally cut me a break!?
This new large Chandra image shows the “Carina Nebula“, a star-forming region in the Sagittarius-Carina arm of the Milky Way only 7,500 light years from Earth.
Chandra’s sharp X-ray vision has detected over 14,000 stars in this region, revealed in a diffuse X-ray glow, and provided strong evidence that massive stars have already self-destructed in this fantastic “supernova factory”.
Carina Nebula (Click to enlarge, it's big!) - Credit: NASA/CXC/PSU/L.Townsley et al.
Lower energy X-rays in this image are red, medium energy X- rays are green, and the highest energy X-rays are blue. The Chandra survey has a large field of 1.4 square degrees, made of a mosaic of 22 individual Chandra pointings.
In total, this image represents 1.2 million seconds – or nearly two weeks – of Chandra observing time. Multi-wavelength data has been used in combination with this new Chandra campaign, including infrared observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Very Large Telescope (VLT).
This absolutely stunning image was taken in December 2010 at the Paranal Observatory (on Cerro Paranal, a 2,635m high mountain in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile), home of ESO‘s Very Large Telescope (VLT). The VLT is actually made up of 4 telescopes, each with an 8.2m aperture, seen to the right of this photograph.
Click to enlarge (opens in new tab) - Credit: Yuri Beletsky (ESO)
But what’s the bright orange dot above the large telescope on the right? Unfamiliar to even seasoned Sky-Watchers, it’s actually the Moon. The image was taken during a total lunar eclipse when the normally bright full moon was turned into a faint orange tinted orb by the intervening Earth’s atmosphere.
The image below is a duplicate of the main photo, but is annotated to show object information.
Click to enlarge (opens in new tab) - Credit: Yuri Beletsky (ESO)
View the original post at NASA’s “Astronomy Picture of the Day” here
