ногу интересно джурналистическо откритие. разбира се, не са компютри а компоти и не са изнесени а са ги врънали, както винаги
Absence of Water in Distant Planet's Atmosphere Surprises Astronomers
Cambridge, MA - A team of astronomers led by Carl Grillmair (Spitzer Science Center) and David Charbonneau (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) announced today that they have directly measured the first spectrum from a known planet orbiting a distant star. Two other teams made a similar measurement of a different extrasolar planet. Taken together, this pioneering work opens a new field of planetary exploration, allowing astronomers to directly analyze the atmospheres of worlds beyond our solar system.
"In a sense, we're getting our first sniffs of air from an alien world," said Charbonneau. "And what we found surprised us. Or more accurately, what we DIDN'T find surprised us."
"We expected to see common molecules like water, methane, or carbon dioxide," explained Grillmair. "But we didn't see any of those. The spectrum was flat, with no molecular fingerprints that we could detect."
The planet studied by Charbonneau and his colleagues is known as HD 189733b. It orbits a star slightly cooler and less massive than the Sun located about 60 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Vulpecula. It is the closest known "transiting" planet to Earth.
HD 189733b is a type of planet known as a "hot Jupiter." It orbits very close to its star, completing one revolution every 2.2 days. Its mass and physical size are both slightly larger than Jupiter. At a distance of only three million miles from its star, HD 189733b is heated to a broiling temperature of 1700 degrees Fahrenheit.
HD 189733b was selected for study because it periodically crosses in front of and behind its star. When transiting in front, the planet partially eclipses the star and blocks a small portion of the star's light. Similarly, the system dims slightly when the planet disappears behind its star since the star blocks the planet's light. By observing this "secondary eclipse," astronomers can tease out the faint signal of the planet from the overwhelming light of the nearby star.
The team studied HD 189733b using the Infrared Spectrograph instrument aboard NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Spitzer detects infrared light, or light beyond the red end of the visible light spectrum.
When light is split into a rainbow-like spectrum, certain atoms or molecules can leave "fingerprints" in the spectrum. Those fingerprints tell astronomers what molecules are there, just as crime scene investigators use real fingerprints to determine what person was in the area.