NASA Brings Other Planets Closer To Earth

NASA announced recently that they discovered a new way to study planets in our solar system without leaving earth. The new technique was called “unprecedented”, because it will reduce by hundred of years the amount of time needed to study and discover other planets in our solar system.

The astronomers used NASA’s 30-year-old, 10-foot-diameter (3-meter) telescope at the space agency’s Infrared Telescope Facility atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Using relatively small and old telescope, astronomers were able to identify organic molecules on a planet nearly 63 light years from Earth.

“The fact that we have used a relatively small, ground-based telescope is exciting because it implies that the largest telescopes on the ground, using this technique, may be able to characterize terrestrial exoplanet targets,” said Mark Swain, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the study’s lead author.

NASA Discovers Five New Planets

Many new planets discovered by Hubble telescope in the past few years, but the new telescope launched only last year – Kepler observatory – found its first five new planets outside of our solar system.

NASA scientists are hoping that Kepler observatory can find Earth-like planets in our galaxy.

The five new planets, however, have very high temperature which would make it impossible for humans to live there. The scientists estimate the temperature to be around 1,200 to 1,650 degrees Celsius, hotter than molten lava.

In terms of the size, some of them are similar to Neptune and others similar to Jupiter, the largest in the Solar System. The scientist called them Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b and 8b.

“These observations contribute to our understanding of how planetary systems form and evolve from the gas and dust disks that give rise to both the stars and their planets,’ said Kepler’s principal investigator William Borucki.

The scientists also found many other “objects” that they are not sure what they are yet, and still analyzing and investigating their properties.

Fog On Titan Discovered

For the first time, astronomers at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) spotted fog on the surface of Titan.

Titan is is the largest moon of Saturn and described as a planet-like moon. Titan has a diameter roughly 50% larger than Earth’s moon and is 80% more massive. It is the second-largest moon in the Solar System.

Astronomer Mike Brown, said that Titan probably the only place in our entire solar system to have liquid (largely, liquid methane and ethane) sitting on its surface.

He and colleges were excited about the new discovery and they presented their work Today at the American Geophysical Union’s 2009 Fall Meeting in San Francisco.

“Fog—or clouds, or dew, or condensation in general—can form whenever air reaches about 100 percent humidity,” Brown says. “There are two ways to get there. The first is obvious: add water (on Earth) or methane (on Titan) to the surrounding air. The second is much more common: make the air colder so it can hold less water (or liquid methane), and all of that excess needs to condense.”

In 2008, Cassini confirmed liquid methane lakes in Titan’s southern hemisphere using infrared data. But it took until now to analyze the data and connect the pieces together.

Kepler Mission Close to Discovering Earth-like Planets?

Learn about the great astronomy pioneer Edwin Hubble and how his use of a 100-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California not only resolved the “Great Debate” over the scale of the universe but also provided radical evidence that the universe is expanding.

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