Five planets detected in a single solar system
On November 6th, Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues announced the discovery of a start system that has at least five extrasolar planets. While most extrasolar planets are detected using the Doppler effect, in this case, due to the number of planets and complexity of intermixing wavelengths of light, a technique known as Fourier analysis was applied to isolate the individual planets. Incidentally, I found an excellent wiki article titled List of stars with confirmed extrasolar planets tonight that is quite detailed. The discovery of the first extrasolar planet called 51 Pegasi b ("Bellerophon") was announced in 1992, and, since that time, there are 36 extrasolar planets of which the true mass is possible to estimate and 216 candidates of which their true masses are unknown. Note: the photo in this entry is obviously of the Milky Way and not the star system. I was just looking for a beautiful image to spice up this post. At this point in time, we do not have imaging technology powerful enough to see planets with visible light.
Since I'm a bit of an astronomy kick tonight, I'll mention that it's worthwhile to explore the PBS website mini-site Seeing in the Dark. Timothy Ferris, author of the book of the same title and writer/producer/narrator of a recent film broadcast on PBS, has created a variety of great tools and videos for those interested in astronomy. The book, by the way, is excellent and highly recommended. I had the pleasure of purchasing a signed copy at a lecture Ferris gave at the Silicon Astronomy Valley Lecture Series back in 2003. For those interested and living in the San Francisco Bay Area, the lecture series is still taking place. This Tuesday, November 13th, Jeff Moore of NASA's Ames Research Center will give a non-technical, illustrated talk on "New Horizons at Jupiter (and some Saturn News)" that sounds quite interesting.
Other things you can do to explore astronomy:
- Listen to Seth Shostak's (SETI) brilliant "Are We Alone" radio show
- Install Stellarium, an extremely useful and open source (free) astronomy application
- Watch NASA TV when shuttle launches and landings happen
- Join and support SETI
- Study up on the active NASA missions
- Compete for the Lunar X Prize
- Geek out and buy a Drake equation T-shirt
