April 02, 2008, 20:30
Astronomers using robotic cameras today said that they had found 10 new planets outside our solar system, while a second team said they had found the youngest planet yet.
The findings add to a growing list of more than 270 so-called extra solar planets, they told a meeting of astronomers in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
The robot team is called "Super WASP," for Wide Area Search for Planets, and the cameras look for planets transiting, or crossing in front of, their stars. The light from the sun fades just slightly when this happens, and astronomers can extrapolate the size and location of the planet.
Most planets around other stars have been found using a different method, measuring the tiny tugs that a planet makes on its sun's gravitational field.
Don Pollaco of Queen's University in Belfast and colleagues used banks of cameras in Spain's Canary Islands, South Africa, Arizona, Hawaii, Chile, France and Australia to discover the 10 new extra solar planets.
The planets range in mass from half the size of Jupiter to more than eight times the size of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. One orbits its sun once a day and is so close that its daytime temperature could reach about
2 300 degrees celsius.
Young star is 100 000 years old
Jane Greaves of the University of St Andrews in Scotland and colleagues said they found a baby planet while using radio astronomy to examine a disk of gas and rocky particles around the star HL Tau. This star is thought to be young, also 100 000 years old compared to our 4.6 billion-year-old Sun. – Reuters
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