Hubble Space Telescope / NASA
NASA Finds More Planets
By
Marc Kaufman
Washington Post, March 24, 2008
Edited by Andy Ross
According to the
Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, there are now 277 confirmed "extrasolar"
planets, and quite a few more on the list of those suspected but not yet
confirmed. This explosion in planetary discoveries is taking place at such warp
speed that even those most intimately involved are often amazed -- especially
because their ultimate goal is nothing less than finding life elsewhere in the
universe.
Mark Swain, of NASA's
Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, last week reported finding the first "exoplanet" to have organic
methane in its atmosphere. "We're not only finding them rapidly and in great
variety, but we're starting to characterize them -- their mass and orbits, the
properties of their atmospheres, measurements of day and night, dynamics of
their winds."
So far, most of the faraway planets are large, super-hot gas giants like Jupiter
and Saturn, which are not expected to be able to support life. But with
astronomers regularly finding ingenious ways to locate and examine distant
planets -- sometimes with new technologies, sometimes because of inventive new
ways of analyzing data -- many in the field say it is just a matter of time
before they detect Earth-size, rocky planets elsewhere in the cosmos.
Carl B. Pilcher, director of the
NASA Astrobiology
Institute at the Ames Research Center in California, agrees that the big
challenge now is to detect smaller, Earth-size planets, then to find more and
better ways to learn about their atmospheres and other characteristics. He said
that just as the exoplanet search has become supercharged of late, so, too, has
the search for life on other planets and in other solar systems, which is the
primary focus of the institute.
Some of the work of finding exoplanets and analyzing their orbits and
atmospheres is being done with ground-based telescopes, and some from orbiting
observatories such as the
Hubble Space Telescope, which provided the data used to discover exoplanet
methane. In addition, astronomers and astrophysicists are developing ever more
powerful ways to interpret data and to use spectroscopy.
Considerably more powerful hardware is also on the way. NASA's
Kepler satellite, which is
designed to find distant planets as they transit in front of their stars, is
supposed to be launched next spring and is expected to locate hundreds or
thousands of new planets. The
James Webb Space Telescope,
a Hubble successor that will be able to find atmospheric molecules in rocky
exoplanets, is scheduled for launch in 2013.
Meanwhile, closer to home ...
NASA's
Phoenix lander is scheduled to set down on the Northern
plains of Mars on May 25, 2008.
AR Wonderful stuff. Makes life worth living, just to see what all this new hardware discovers.
