Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Exoplanets Galore!!
Image Credit JPL/NASA. (click to enlarge)Somewhere in July the number of extrasolar planets passed 200. Despite the number of them, I still get excited over them, a new "low" mass planet (7.5 times Earth mass the lowest mass ever found so far), has just been described in a three planet system!
But new results from the Spitzer Space telescope potentially blows that total away. The image to the left of Orion and the region near it looks a bit like a hockey stick. The are that looks like the shaft stretches 70 light-years beyond the Orion nebula. This area contains 800 stars about the same mass as our sun. These sun-like stars don't hang out in big clusters of stars like the one in the Orion nebula; instead, they are be found in small clusters (right box inset), or in by themselves (middle box inset).
Stunningly, the infrared Spitzer Space telescope found 2,300 planet-forming dust disks around young stars in the Orion cloud complex. While these dust disk may not have formed planets yet (although there may be protoplanets in them), the very thought that there are potentially 2,300 planetary systems just a stones throw away (cosmically speaking) is truly mind-boggling.
# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 9:08 pm 
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