Free Republic

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...

With this method, astronomers watch for small dips in a star's brightness produced when a planet passes in front of it and blocks some of its light. Because astronomers can track the planet's progress and measure how much light it blocks, they can determine its mass, size and orbit precisely. But this relies on the planet passing in front of its host star, as seen from Earth – an alignment that is surprisingly rare... [R]esearchers led by Francis O'Donovan at Caltech, US... discovered it using a network of amateur-sized telescopes called the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey (TrES)... The planet orbits a...

Two of the most common materials found in Tempel 1 are an iron-silicon mineral called ferrosilite and a glassy form of a magnesium-iron mineral called olivine, which make up 33% and 17% of the comet, respectively, according to observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope. However, these minerals are entirely absent from the Wild 2 samples analysed so far... It is not clear how to explain this difference, says Stardust mission leader Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington in Seattle, US. But he says one possibility is that the material on Tempel 1 was chemically modified by ancient collisions --...

A new analysis of 'cool' spots in the cosmic microwave background may cast new doubts on a key piece of evidence supporting the big bang theory of how the universe was formed. Two scientists at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) looked for but couldn't find evidence of gravitational "lensing" where you might expect to find it, in the most distant light source in the universe -- the cosmic microwave background. Results of this research by Dr. Richard Lieu, a UAH physics professor, and Dr. Jonathan Mittaz, a UAH research associate, were published Monday in the "Astrophysical Journal." In...

Scientists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope say they have detected light that may be from the earliest objects in the universe. If confirmed, the observation provides a glimpse of an era more than 13 billion years ago when, after the fading embers of the theorized Big Bang gave way to millions of years of pervasive darkness, the universe came alive. This light could be from the very first stars or perhaps from hot gas falling into the first black holes. The science team, based at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., describes the observation as seeing the...

Scientists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered and directly imaged a small brown dwarf star, 50 times the mass of Jupiter... The discovery concerns a class of the coldest brown dwarfs, called T dwarfs... Luhman's team also discovered a second brown dwarf that is smaller yet, about 20 times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting another star... could be the youngest T dwarf known, offering scientists a snapshot of early brown-dwarf development. The two T dwarfs are the first to be imaged by Spitzer... Spitzer also discovered a T dwarf that is floating through space by itelf rather than orbiting...

The star Υ Andromedae is orbited by three known planets, the innermost of which has an orbital period of 4.617 days and a mass at least 0.69 that of Jupiter. This planet is close enough to its host star that the radiation it absorbs overwhelms its internal heat losses. Here, we present the 24-micrometer light curve of this system, obtained with the Spitzer Space Telescope. It shows a variation in phase with the orbital motion of the innermost planet, demonstrating that such planets possess distinct hot substellar (day) and cold antistellar (night) faces.

The researchers used Spitzer to determine the temperature variation in the atmosphere of a nearby planet called Upsilon Andromedae b. This "hot-Jupiter" planet is a gas giant similar to Jupiter, but it orbits very close to its scorching star, circling the star once every 4.6 days. Scientists believe the planet is tidally locked to its star. This means it is rotating slowly enough that the same side always faces the star, just as the same side of Earth's tidally locked moon always faces toward us, hiding its "dark side." However, since this planet is made of gas, its outer atmosphere...

Thus, over a period of five years -- 1989 to 1994 -- the two major space agencies had rejected a total of four major proposals for large radiatively cooled telescopes operating at infrared/sub-millimeter wavelengths. Nonetheless, the paradigm had shifted. For the first time large infrared telescopes seemed possible and the L2 Lagrangian point became the preferred location for missions of all kinds. Although proposals for a large-aperture radiatively-cooled infrared telescope would never win either an ESA or a NASA competition, "conventional wisdom" had moved on from cryogenic cooling. In 1996, the Dressler Committee’s "HST & Beyond" identified Edison and High-Z...

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have found evidence that dusty disks of planet-forming material tug on and slow down the young, whirling stars they surround. Young stars are full of energy, spinning around like tops in half a day or less. They would spin even faster, but something puts on the brakes. While scientists had theorized that planet-forming disks might be at least part of the answer, demonstrating this had been hard to do until now... Stars begin life as collapsing balls of gas that spin faster and faster as they shrink, like twirling ice skaters pulling in their...

For Release: April 5, 2006 NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has uncovered new evidence that planets might rise up out of a dead star's ashes. The infrared telescope surveyed the scene around a pulsar, the remnant of an exploded star, and found a surrounding disk made up of debris shot out during the star's death throes. The dusty rubble in this disk might ultimately stick together to form planets. This is the first time scientists have detected planet-building materials around a star that died in a fiery blast. "We're amazed that the planet-formation process seems to be so universal," said Dr....

Where there's smoke, there's fire - even in outer space. A new infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows a burning hot galaxy whose fiery stars appear to be blowing out giant billows of smoky dust. The galaxy, called Messier 82, or the "Cigar galaxy," was previously known to host a hotbed of young, massive stars. The new Spitzer image reveals, for the first time, the "smoke" surrounding those stellar fires. "We've never seen anything like this," said Dr. Charles Engelbracht of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "This unusual galaxy has ejected an enormous amount of dust to cover...

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has observed a rare population of colliding galaxies whose entangled hearts are wrapped in tiny crystals resembling crushed glass. The crystals are essentially sand, or silicate, grains that were formed like glass, probably in the stellar equivalent of furnaces. This is the first time silicate crystals have been detected in a galaxy outside of our own. "We were surprised to find such delicate, little crystals in the centers of some of the most violent places in the universe," said Dr. Henrik Spoon of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. He is first author of a paper on the...

PASADENA – The Spitzer Space Telescope has detected evidence of two mega solar systems – giant stars enveloped by what appear to be huge disks of planet-forming dust, scientists reported Wednesday. The appearance of cloudy disks around stars are believed to represent current or future planetary systems. Our sun is surrounded by the Kuiper Belt, a disk containing dust, comets and other bodies. Astronomers say the latest findings were surprising because such massive stars are thought to be inhospitable to the formation of planets. “Our data suggest that the planet-forming process may be hardier than previously believed, occurring around even...

Partial Ingredients For DNA And Protein Found Around Star NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered some of life's most basic ingredients in the dust swirling around a young star. The ingredients - gaseous precursors to DNA and protein - were detected in the star's terrestrial planet zone, a region where rocky planets such as Earth are thought to be born. The findings represent the first time that these gases, called acetylene and hydrogen cyanide, have been found in a terrestrial planet zone outside of our own. "This infant system might look a lot like ours did billions of years ago,...

Astronomers have found a debris disk around a sun-like star that may be forming or has formed its terrestrial planets. The disk -- a probable analog to our asteroid belt -- may have begun a solar-system-scale demolition derby, where the rocky remains of failed planets collide chaotically. "This is one of a very rare class of objects that may give us a glimpse into what our solar system may have looked like during the formation of our terrestrial planets," said Dean C. Hines of the Space Science Institute, a leader of the team that discovered the rare objects with NASA's...

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - A dazzling photo taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows colossal pillars of cool gas and dust, giving scientists an intimate look at the star-forming process. The image released Wednesday shows the columns stretching out like fingers similar to an iconic photo taken of the Eagle Nebula by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995. While the Hubble visible-light image was dubbed "Pillars of Creation," NASA describes the Spitzer infrared image as "cosmic mountains of creation." The image reflects a region in space known as W5, in the constellation Cassiopeia 7,000 light years away, which is dominated...

PASADENA, Calif. - A NASA telescope has detected for the first time the building blocks of planets around brown dwarfs, suggesting that such failed stars probably undergo the same planet-building process. Until now, the microscopic crystal building blocks that eventually collide to form planets have only been seen around stars and comets - considered the remnants of the solar system. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope recently spotted the tiny crystals and dust grains circling five brown dwarfs located 520 light years away in the Chamaeleon constellation. The crystals, composed of a green mineral commonly found on Earth known as olivine, are...

The Milky Way is not a perfect spiral galaxy but instead sports a long bar through its centre, according to new infrared observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Galaxies come in a wide variety of shapes usually thought to be produced by gravitational interactions with nearby objects. Some spiral galaxies look like pinwheels, with their arms curving out from a central bulge, while others have a straight bar at their centres. Radio telescopes detected gas that hinted at a bar at the heart of the Milky Way in the late 1980s. A decade later, observations with the near infrared survey...

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - A NASA telescope has spotted galaxies that hold the ingredients for life dating back to when the universe was very young. Using the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists at the California Institute of Technology detected organic molecules in galaxies when the universe was a quarter of its current age of 14 billion years old, NASA said Thursday. These complex molecules, composed of carbon and hydrogen, are commonly found on Earth and are thought to be responsible for planet and star formation. Spitzer scientists found the organic building blocks in galaxies where intense star formation took place...