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It also has atmospheric temperatures up to 2,000-degree fahrenheit. And in case you didn’t see it in the headline: Glass Rain! 4,500 MPH winds! This place sounds awesome. NASA discovered the planet, dubbed HD 189733b, in 2005, but recently discovered new facts about its atmosphere with the Hubble telescope. The thing is only 2.9 million miles from its sun, which sounds far, but consider that Earth is 92.9 million miles away from ours. To make matters even more insane, the night temperature can be as much as 500 degrees lower than the day temperature. I’m taking the first commercial spaceflight...

SCIENTISTS have captured the moment a giant solar flare from a distant star scorched one of its orbiting planets, blasting the upper atmosphere away. NASA's Swift Telescope detected a huge X-ray flare from the star 63 light years from Earth and then the Hubble recorded the pictures as it ripped into an orbiting gas giant known as "HD 189733b". While the planet managed to survive the experience, scientists calculated it received three million times as many X-rays as Earth receives during a solar flare. At least 900 tonnes of gas was ejected from the planet's atmosphere per second at a...

Carbon dioxide, a potential fingerprint of life, has been discovered for the first time in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star.

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...

Gas giants orbiting other stars at distances that would fall well inside of Mercury's orbit were the first extrasolar planets discovered. Because of their mass and their close-in orbit, hot Jupiters' effects on their parent stars are more pronounced than in other systems. Once researchers had identified these planets as gas giants, the chin-scratching began. In our solar system, Jupiter and the other outer gas planets formed beyond what researchers have dubbed the solar system's frost line: a region in the early sun's disk of dust and gas where water, ammonia, methane, and other hydrogen-bearing compounds freeze into ice grains....

It's been quite a year for Hubble! New galaxies, colliding stars and more... Check out the magnificent views through NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, released in 2008. Above, Hubble discovers carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star, an important step along the trail of finding the chemical biotracers of extraterrestrial life as we know it. The Jupiter-sized planet, called HD 189733b, is too hot for life. But the Hubble observations are a proof-of-concept demonstration that the basic chemistry for life can be measured on planets orbiting other stars. Organic compounds can also be a by-product of life...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An organic molecule has been spotted for the first time in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system, a key step toward possibly finding signs of life on a distant world, scientists said. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope found methane in the atmosphere of a planet called HD 189733b, which is about the size of Jupiter and is 63 light-years from Earth, they said in research published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. Organic molecules contain carbon-hydrogen bonds and can be found in living things. Methane, for instance, is found in natural gas and...

Organic molecules found on alien world for first time 18:21 11 February 2008 NewScientist.com news service Stephen Battersby The giant planet HD 189733b is too hot for its methane and water vapour to signal life (Illustration: Christophe Carreau/ESA)Tools Organic molecules – in the form of methane – have been detected on a planet outside our solar system for the first time. The giant planet lies too close to its parent star for the methane to signal life, but the detection offers hope that astronomers will one day be able to analyse the atmospheres of Earth-like worlds. Astronomers Mark Swain and...

Discovered in 2005 using Doppler spectroscopy, HD 189733b is a"hot Jupiter" that circles just 3 million miles (0.03 astronomical unit) from its host star. This means it's hopelessly too close to its sun to be spotted separately with current technology. However, by good fortune, it is a transiting exoplanet that alternately passes in front of and behind its sun every 2.2 days. Recently astronomers have cleverly exploited this geometry to learn something about the Jupiter-size world's composition. First they record the combined spectrum of the star and planet together -- and then, once HD 189733b has ducked from view, that...

PARIS (AFP) - Astronomers on Wednesday announced they had spotted the first planet beyond the Solar System that has water, the precious ingredient for life. The watery world, though, is far beyond the reach of our puny chemically-powered rockets -- and in any case is quite uninhabitable. It is made of gas rather than rock and its atmosphere reaches temperatures hot enough to melt steel, which means the water exists only as superheated steam. The find, named HD189733b, is about 15 percent bigger than our Jupiter and orbits a star in the constellation of Vulpecula the Fox, according to a...

PARIS (AFP) - Astronomers on Wednesday announced they had spotted the first planet beyond the Solar System that has water, the precious ingredient for life. The watery world, though, is far beyond the reach of our puny chemically-powered rockets -- and in any case is quite uninhabitable.

HD 189733b: Hot Jupiter Credit: Heather Knutson (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA) et al., NASA / JPL-Caltech Explanation: HD 189733b is a Jupiter-sized planet known to orbit a star some 63 light-years away. But while the distant world is approximately the size of Jupiter, its close-in orbit makes it much hotter than our solar system's ruling gas giant. Like other detected hot Jupiters, its rotation is tidally locked -- one side always faces its parent star as it orbits once every 2.2 days. Using infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, this planet's temperature variations have been mapped out -- the first map...

WASHINGTON - Scientists taking their first "sniffs of air" from planets outside our solar system are a bit baffled by what they didn't find: water. One of the more basic assumptions of astronomy is that the two distant, hot gaseous planets they examined must contain water in their atmospheres. The two suns the planets orbit closely have hydrogen and oxygen, the stable building blocks of water. These planets' atmospheres — examined for the first time using light spectra to determine the air's chemical composition — are supposed to be made up of the same thing, good old H2O. But when...

Spitzer Sees Light From Faraway Worlds NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured for the first time enough light from planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, to identify signatures of molecules in their atmospheres. The landmark achievement is a significant step toward being able to detect possible life on rocky exoplanets and comes years before astronomers had anticipated. "This is an amazing surprise," said Spitzer project scientist Dr. Michael Werner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We had no idea when we designed Spitzer that it would make such a dramatic step in characterizing exoplanets." Spitzer, a...

Alien Light: Taking the spectra of extrasolar planets Ron Cowen Astronomers have for the first time recorded the spectra of light emitted by two extrasolar planets. This achievement provides a new, direct way to analyze the atmosphere of alien worlds light-years from Earth. OBSCURED ORB. Clouds may sheathe the atmosphere of some extrasolar planets, masking the presence of water vapor at lower altitudes, as in this artist's depiction. JPL-Caltech/NASA Obtained by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the infrared spectra represent a milestone in the study of distant planets, says David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. Both...

First Map of an Extrasolar Planet Cambridge, MA - For the first time, astronomers have created a rough map of a planet orbiting a distant sun-like star, employing a technique that may one day enable mapping of Earth-like worlds. Since the planet just charted is a gas giant and lacks a solid surface, the map shows cloud-top features. Using the Spitzer infrared space telescope, astronomers detected a bright hot spot that is offset from "high noon," where heating is greatest. "We are getting our first good look at a completely alien world," said Heather Knutson, a graduate student at Harvard...