Dry Jupiter-Like Exoplanets Discovered

How we understand planetary  formation may, quite possibly, be all wrong.  

At present, the disk accretion theory is the most popular, where dust particles begin coming together in the planetary disk.  As the clumps become larger they begin attracting more and more clumps to the point where planetesimals form.  As they become larger, they begin to pull gases out of the ring to form proto - atmospheres  made up of oxygen in the form of water vapor.  

All of this worked very well until:

  From the Sci-News.com article:

• A team of astronomers headed by Dr Nikku Madhusudhan of the Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy has found that the abundance of water vapor in the atmospheres of the three newly discovered hot Jupiters – HD 189733b, HD 209458b, and WASP-12b (Located between 60 and 900 light-years away from Earth)  – is between ten and a thousand times less than what standard planet formation theories predict. 

This discovery really brings our understanding of planetary formation into question. 

These planets are classified as hot Jupiters with average temperatures between 1652 and 3992 degrees Fahrenheit. These were thought to be ideal candidates for detecting water vapor in their atmospheres.

(***I would like to interject something here.  Regardless  of the water vapor or the hot Jupiters and the disclaimer in the full article that Hubble didn't actually "see" the planets, is the fact that Hubble can see ANYTHING 900 light years away! That is so far away that the average calculator goes nuts and you get cryptic answers from scientific calc. or numbers like 5865696000000 for just 1 year of light travel.  That's 6 thousand trillion 700 billion miles more or less then times that by 900 years!  Can you even begin to wrap your head around such mind numbing numbers?  That is how powerful Hubble is.....What a fabulous tool and how lucky we are to be around in the years of it's operation.   Editor***)

Goldilock Zone Redefined

The Goldilocks Zone, according to the Wikipedia, is: 

• In astronomy and astrobiology, habitable zone (more accurately, circumstellar habitable zone ) is the scientific term for the region around a star within which it is theoretically possible for a planet with sufficient atmospheric pressure to maintain liquid water on its surface.

In the past this has been fairly easy to determine as, where ever the Earth was in reference to a yellow dwarf star, that was the habitual zone, and all other calculations could be made from this generality.  

Well Space.Com has an article that seems to throw a bit of a monkey wrench in to the mix.

In a recent article:

• Now scientists have redefined the boundaries of the habitable zone for alien planets, potentially kicking out some exoplanaets that were thought to fall within it, and maybe allowing a few that had been excluded to squeeze in.

What surprised me however was the redefined low end (how close a planet can be) for an Earth style system  was .99 AU.  Earth at 1 AU just barely makes the cut as a world almost too hot to maintain liquid water without it boiling away.  

Many astrobiologists are surprised at the closeness of Earth to the inside edge.  Plus with the new definition, many planets now fall into a to hot class not likely to harbor life.  

Read the Dvice article 

Amateur Astronomers Hunt Bigger Game.

Amateur Astronomers have long been active in the hunt for comets and asteroids, but now the art of exoplanet hunting has reached a level where amateur astronomers are making serious contributions. JPL's PlanetQuest website lists eight exoplanets discovered by amateurs. The main blog of these exoplanet hunters is Greg Laughlin's Systemic (Oklo.org). "Oklo.org users can employ a program called Systemic to comb through data about how certain stars wobble as they travel through space; this information can then be used to detect planets, which pull on their host stars as they orbit." According to PlanetQuest, these amateur astronomers are using telescopes with mirrors as small as 10-12cm!

For those slightly less ambitious, JPL's PlanetQuest is a fantastic site for those interested in exoplanets. It has information on all 307 (currently) known exoplanets in its atlas as well as information about planet hunting techniques, current and future planet hunting missions, and much more. This site and the much more bare-bones Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia are filled with fascinating information as well as demonstrations of how much more there is to learn.

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<JPL PlanetQuest article on amateur exoplanet hunters>
<Systemic Blog>
<Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia>

First sign of water found on an Alien World

Water has been detected in the atmosphere of an alien world for the first time, a new analysis of Hubble Space Telescope data suggests. The planet, called HD 209458b, is about 70% as massive as Jupiter and is scorched by the heat of its parent star, which it orbits 9 times as close as Mercury does to the Sun. Because of its orbit, astronomers have been able to glean a lot of information – such as its size and mass – about the distant world. n February, researchers using the infrared-sensitive Spitzer Space Telescope announced that there was no sign of water vapour in its atmosphere, now, Hubble observations seem to have revealed the missing water. Astronomers at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, US, did a computer analysis of previously obtained Hubble data taken when the planet partially eclipsed its parent star. Hubble observed light from the host star that had filtered through the outer reaches of the planet's atmosphere. The relatively small amount of light filtering through at about 0.9 microns suggests the presence of water, which absorbs light at this wavelength. But despite the presence of water, scientists point out that the planet's prevailing temperatures of about 1000° Celsius mean conditions would not be favourable to life.

submitted by Shaun A. Saunders

Distant Planets: Warm, Weird, Waterless

The first indicators of atmospheric makeup of two huge far-away planets reveal that they seem to be missing water, a surprising finding amid weather unlike any planets in our solar system with blast furnace-like gusts amid supersonic winds.

The absence of water from the atmosphere of both these Jupiter-sized gaseous bodies upsets one of the most basic assumptions of astronomy.

The closest of the two planets studied, HD 189733b, is 360 trillion miles from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula. The other planet, HD 209458b, is about 900 trillion miles away in the constellation Pegasus and it has a strange cloud of fine silicate particles.

The two suns the planets orbit closely have hydrogen and oxygen, the stable building blocks of water. The planets' atmospheres are supposed to be made up of the same thing, good old H2O.

Consider the atmosphere on the second of the two exoplanets, the one 900 trillion miles away: "Weather today on 209458 is hot, dry, probably cloudy with a chance of wind.

How hot? Try 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. How windy? Somewhere between 500 and 2,000 mph. Scientists studying these extrasolar planets agree that not finding water where it was expected is a wake up call for more research.