Marking a further step in the hunt for worlds orbiting other stars, astronomers yesterday said they had found a cool planet the size of Jupiter that encircles a sun at searing proximity.
The work is a technical exploit in the field of extrasolar planets — or exoplanets — as planets outside our solar system are called, they said.
“This is the first [exoplanet] whose properties we can study in depth,” said Claire Moutou, one of 60 astronomers who took part in the discovery.
“It is bound to become a Rosetta Stone in exoplanet research,” she said.
More than 400 exoplanets have been spotted since the first came to light in 1995.
To the disappointment of those dreaming of a home away from home, none has yet proved to be a small, rocky, watery world like our own.
Instead, most are “hot Jupiters,” or huge gassy balls that are so close to their stars that their surfaces can be scorched to 1,000°C or more.
The new find, named CoRoT-9b after the French orbital telescope that originally spotted it in 2008, takes a little more than 95 days to orbit its host star, CoRoT-9, which is located 1,500 light years away in the constellation of Serpens, the Snake.
By comparison, Mercury takes 88 days to orbit the Sun.
CoRoT-9b, though, is a gas giant with a mass about 80 percent that of Jupiter and — compared with other such exoplanets — is relatively temperate, with a surface temperature of between minus 20°C and 160°C, research published by the journal Nature showed.
The big range in estimates stems mainly from uncertainty about the reflectivity of clouds in the planet’s upper atmosphere.
More details about CoRoT-9b are likely to follow, for it is one of only 70 exoplanets about which information has been captured because they happen to transit directly between the star and the telescope.
This alignment means that the star’s light passes through the planet’s atmosphere, yielding key data about the planet’s size and chemical composition.
In the case of CoRoT-9b, the transit takes about eight hours, which gives an extraordinary opportunity for astronomers.
“It’s the first extrasolar planet where we are quite sure it is fairly similar to one in our own solar system,” and it’s the first extrasolar planet where we can test models that we have developed for solar system planets,” said lead researcher Hans Deeg of the Institute of Astrophysics, which is located on Spain’s Canary Islands.
In the early stages of exoplanet hunting, the planets that showed up were very hot or orbited their stars in wildly eccentric orbits.
However, as their skills and tools improve, astronomers are more and more able to spot planets with characteristics that look similar to those in our own backyard, Deeg said.
One discovery is that there is “quite a large variation” in the types of planets that orbit close to their star, Deeg said.
“For instance, Venus was probably apt for life in its early phases before a greenhouse effect set in and elevated temperatures by several hundred degrees,” he said.
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
Yemen’s separatist leader has vowed to keep working for an independent state in the country’s south, in his first social media post since he disappeared earlier this month after his group briefly seized swathes of territory. Aidarous al-Zubaidi’s United Arab Emirates (UAE)-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) forces last month captured two Yemeni provinces in an offensive that was rolled back by Saudi strikes and Riyadh’s allied forces on the ground. Al-Zubaidi then disappeared after he failed to board a flight to Riyadh for talks earlier this month, with Saudi Arabia accusing him of fleeing to Abu Dhabi, while supporters insisted he was
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
The Chinese Embassy in Manila yesterday said it has filed a diplomatic protest against a Philippine Coast Guard spokesman over a social media post that included cartoonish images of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela and an embassy official had been trading barbs since last week over issues concerning the disputed South China Sea. The crucial waterway, which Beijing claims historic rights to despite an international ruling that its assertion has no legal basis, has been the site of repeated clashes between Chinese and Philippine vessels. Tarriela’s Facebook post on Wednesday included a photo of him giving a
RSS