Extrasolar planet

Early speculations

In the sixteenth century, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, an early supporter of the Copernican theory that the Earth and other planets orbit the Sun, put forward the view that the fixed stars are similar to the Sun and are likewise accompanied by planets. Bruno was burnt at the stake by the Holy Inquisition.^[8]

In the eighteenth century, the same possibility was mentioned by Isaac Newton in his Principia. Making a comparison to the Sun's planets, he wrote "And if the fixed stars are the centres of similar systems, they will all be constructed according to a similar design and subject to the dominion of One".^[9]

Confirmed discoveries

The first published and confirmed discovery was made in 1988.^[10] It was finally confirmed in 2002.

In 1992, radio astronomers announced the discovery of planets around a pulsar.^[11] These pulsar planets are believed to have formed from the unusual remnants of the supernova that produced the pulsar, in a second round of planet formation. Otherwise they may be the remaining rocky cores of gas giants that survived the supernova and then decayed into their current orbits.

On October 6, 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva announced the first definitive detection of an exoplanet orbiting an ordinary main-sequence star (51 Pegasi).^[12] This discovery, made at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence, started the modern era of exoplanetary discovery. Technological advances, most notably in high-resolution spectroscopy, led to the quick detection of many new exoplanets. These advances allowed astronomers to detect exoplanets indirectly by measuring their gravitational influence on the motion of their parent stars. Additional extrasolar planets were eventually detected by watching occultations when a star becomes dimmer as an orbiting planet passed in front of it.

In May 2016 NASA announced the discovery of 1,284 exoplanets which brought the total number of exoplanets to over 3,000.^[13]

Extrasolar planets can have many different forms.

• They can be gas giants or rocky planets
  • They can possibly be dwarf planets, i.e. planets smaller and less dense than regular planets
• They can orbit several different types of stars
  • They can be free-floating or orbit a brown dwarf
• They may support life. One recently discovered exoplanet, Gliese 581g is thought to possibly support life, but the existence of this planet is not yet confirmed.

Classes of exoplanets include:

• A super-terran or super-Earth is a terrestrial planet that is bigger than Earth, but smaller than Neptune

• A water-world is a hypothetical class of planet between terrestrial and jovian. These worlds would have very very little, if any dry land.

• Hot Jupiters are gas planets orbiting closer to their stars than Mercury to the sun.

• Rogue planets orbit no stars at all.

Nearest

The nearest star with planets is Alpha Centauri. It is 4.3 light years away. Using standard rockets, it would take tens of thousands of years to get there.^[14] The nearest star similar to our Sun is Tau Ceti. It has five planets, one of which in the habitable zone, where liquid water may exist.^[15][16]

Most Earth-like

Some extrasolar planets might be Earth-like. This means that they have conditions very similar to that of the Earth. Planets are ranked by a formula called the Earth similarity index or ESI for short. The ESI goes from one (most Earth-like) to zero (least Earth-like). For a planet to be habitable it should have an ESI of at least 0.8.^[17] For comparison, the four solar terrestrial planets are included in this list.

• Planet
• List of exoplanets
• dwarf planet
• 51 Pegasi b
• 70 Virginis b

Search projects

• University of California Planet Search Project
• The Geneva Extrasolar Planet Search Programmes
• PlanetQuest distributed computing project
• Extrasolar Planets Archived 2011-05-20 at the Wayback Machine

Resources

• NASA's PlanetQuest Archived 2011-02-25 at the Wayback Machine
  • PlanetQuest 3D Atlas of extrasolar planets within 400 light years of our Solar System Archived 2006-09-29 at the Wayback Machine
  • Planetquest Flash Archived 2006-10-01 at the Wayback Machine
• German Center for Exo-Planet Research Jena/Tautenburg
• Astrophysical Institute & University Observatory Jena (AIU)
• Table of known planetary systems
• Extrasolar Planet XML Database Archived 2006-10-04 at the Wayback Machine
• Andrew Collier Cameron, Extrasolar planets, Physics World (January 2001). (See the online version.)
• searchable dynamic database of extrasolar planets and their parent stars Archived 2018-10-01 at the Wayback Machine
• List of important exoplanets
• Extrasolar Planets - D. Montes, UCM
• Extrasolar Visions Archived 2008-05-09 at the Wayback Machine

News

• 6-8 Earth-Mass Planet Discovered orbiting Gliese 876 Archived 2008-12-20 at the Wayback Machine
• Newfound World Shatters Distance Record from space.com
• Oldest Known World from space.com
• Earth Sized Planets Confirmed from space.com
• Sunshade to Look for Distant Life from news.bbc.co.uk