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Thursday, 15 January 2009 08:58 |
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Image: CIW. This artist's impression shows the star OGLE-TR-56 and its planet, as it passes behind the star. | Two independent groups of astronomers, one including Hubble fellow Mercedes López-Morales, have made the first-ever ground-based detection of extrasolar planet thermal emissions. These new results, accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics, open a new frontier to extrasolar planet studies, most notably because the Spitzer Space Telescope, the major space-based tool for this work, will soon run out of cryogens, highly limiting its capabilities.
López-Morales commented in the CIW press release, "Others have tried to detect planetary atmospheres from Earth, but to no avail. We hit it right two nights last summer. The successful recipe is a planet that emits a lot of heat and has little to no wind in its atmosphere. Plus it has to be a clear, calm night on Earth to measure accurately the differences in thermal emissions when the planet is eclipsed as it goes beyond the star." For more information, see the CIW Press Release or Space.com. |
