Free Republic

My suggestion, which was not adopted, was that each planet be named for its stellar parent as usual, but then be designated by its orbital period in days, to one decimal point . The orbital periods may certainly be expected to be constrained to within a tenth of a day or so. No two planets could be confused (unless there are Trojan planets which share orbits but may be rare, and at any rate might have the additional unambiguous designations of i and ii, as needed.) Thus we would have Gliese 876-1.9, Gliese 876-30.9, and Gliese 876-60.1. Those with a...

Researchers are racing to find the first planet that might support life as we know it.Gliese 876 is a modest star, just one-third the mass of our sun and only 15 light-years away, but it has a history-making planetary system all its own. In 1998 a team led by Geoff Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley detected the first sign of something interesting there: a giant planet, twice the mass of Jupiter, circling Gliese 876 once every two months, its gravity yanking the star back and forth at the speed of a jet plane. Three years later the...

The tally of known exoplanets currently stands at 334. The list includes nearly three dozen systems that have two or more known planets... The elliptical orbits of most exoplanets discovered so far do hint at possible past chaos... in a groundbreaking study announced Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, California, Jacob Bean (Institute for Astrophysics Goettingen, Germany) presented an analysis that reveals the inclinations of the two outer planets in the three-planet system around the red-dwarf star Gliese 876, a 10th-magnitude speck 15 light-years away in Aquarius. The study shows that the two planets orbit in...