The phrase
"giant exoplanets" refers to very large planets that orbit stars outside of our solar system. They are similar to the planets in our own solar system, like Jupiter and Saturn, but are located in different star systems far away from us.
Full definition
«The large distance that separates it from its star allows it to be studied in depth with a variety of instruments, which will provide a better understanding
of giant exoplanets in general.»
GPI will produce the first comprehensive survey of
giant exoplanets in the region where giant planets exist in our solar system — from 5 to 40 astronomical units radius.
The gas
giant exoplanet orbits the binary red dwarfs at a distance of 300 million miles — approximately the distance of the solar system's asteroid belt from the sun.
Numerical simulations of stalled nondisk migration replicate the observed lack of coplanarity
for giant exoplanet pairs.
Abstract: This paper reports the discovery and characterization of the transiting
hot giant exoplanet Kepler - 17b.
The best planet - imaging project on Earth is now at ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the high desert of northern Chile, where an instrument called SPHERE uses adaptive optics and coronagraphs to snap near - infrared and visible - light pictures of bright, young,
giant exoplanets glowing red - hot from their recent formation.
The planetary bodies such as these asteroids that fall into and pollute this dying star — which, in its heyday, was three times heavier than our sun — also reveal that
giant exoplanets probably still exist in this remote and withering system.
I will discuss in particular the constraints on the distributions of
wide giant exoplanets placed by the current generation of direct imaging surveys.
«By showing astronomers where future missions such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have their best chance to
find giant exoplanets, this research paves the way to future discoveries,» said chief scientist of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program Office and study co-author Karl Stapelfeldt of JPL.
SPHERE opens new horizons in the study of young brown dwarfs and
giant exoplanets thanks to high - contrast imaging capabilities at optical and near - infrared wavelengths, as well as high signal - to - noise spectroscopy in the near - infrared from low (R ~ 30 - 50) to medium resolutions (R ~ 350).
So far the direct detection has only been able to
show giant exoplanets, several times larger than Jupiter and orbiting at great distances from their stars.
Again the difficulty lies in detecting small exoplanets at far orbits,
since giant exoplanets and close orbits exert much larger gravitational pulls over the star and create easily visible oscillations.
An international team1 led by Alexandre Santerne from Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA2), made a 5 - year radial velocity3 campaign of Kepler's
giant exoplanet candidates, using the SOPHIE4 spectrograph (Observatory of Haute - Provence, France), and found that 52,3 % were actually eclipsing binaries5, while 2,3 % were brown dwarfs6.
So, if other star systems contain
gas giant exoplanets, it stands to reason that they would have the same effect on bodies orbiting close to their star.
Young stars that are from a few million to one billion years old and appear to have a disk of dust and debris orbiting them may be the best place to look
for giant exoplanets.
So, based on our results we would expect that
most giant exoplanets will have zonal circulation; we should expect that their atmospheres are not homogeneous, structureless, but in fact should display large brightness variations in the infrared.
Closer to home, it snapped pictures of
giant exoplanets orbiting other stars, found new moons around Pluto and spied watery plumes bursting from the subsurface ocean of Jupiter's moon Europa.
When researchers observed star systems containing debris disks with
giant exoplanets in distant orbits, they noted that the star systems had similar dual dust disks analogous to the Solar System's two zones — the asteroid belt (between Mars and Jupiter) and the Kuiper Belt (beyond the orbit of Neptune).
It will also be possible to study details of exotic objects in our Solar System, such as volcanoes on Io, and the atmospheres
of giant exoplanets.
Nicolas Cowan, an astronomer at McGill University who has used Spitzer data to create thermal maps of gas -
giant exoplanets, is not sure the aging telescope is up to the task of investigating smaller worlds.
Heather Knutson, an astronomer at California Institute of Technology who pioneered Spitzer's thermal mapping of
giant exoplanets, is similarly skeptical.
«It is likely the banded structure and large atmospheric waves we found in brown dwarfs will also be common in
giant exoplanets,» Apai said.
Due to their similarity to
giant exoplanets, brown dwarfs are windows into planetary systems beyond our own.
No telescope yet exists that can take a picture of even
a giant exoplanet; astronomers compare the task to taking a picture of a firefly next to a searchlight thousands of miles away.
Perhaps there are temperate, habitable moons orbiting
some giant exoplanets.
There's also evidence to suggest that
some giant exoplanets have magnetospheres, but we have yet to see conclusive proof.
Such an arrangement can only be explained, they say, by
a giant exoplanet (just left of the star)-- which ALMA can't see — sweeping up all the material close to the star but pushing dust farther out still.
Signs of water in a gas
giant exoplanet's atmosphere suggest the world formed much closer to its star than gas giants in our solar system did
A team of researchers, following a 5 - year campaign investigating candidate alien worlds spotted by NASA's Kepler mission, found that more than half of
the giant exoplanets spotted by the orbiting telescope are not planets at all but a pair of stars orbiting each other, or a brown dwarf — or failed star (pictured)-- orbiting another star.
There may be a large number of undetected bright, substellar objects similar to
giant exoplanets in our own solar neighborhood, according to new work from a team led by Carnegie's Jonathan Gagné and including researchers from the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at Université de Montréal.
«I consider these young brown dwarfs to be siblings of
giant exoplanets.
A study finds that
giant exoplanets that orbit far from their stars are more likely to be found around young stars th... read more
Water is not only a key ingredient in supporting life, it's also a major clue as to how planets form, and NASA has found a lot of the stuff in the atmosphere of
a giant exoplanet called Wasp - 39b.
As always with brown dwarfs, the results are much more far - reaching than people often realize: brown dwarfs are excellent proxies for
giant exoplanets: often what we can not learn from giant exoplanets we learn from brown dwarfs.
This year's new haul of planets included little rocky LHS 1140b, Ross 128 b and its unusually calm star, and even
a giant exoplanet tucked at the heart of our own galaxy.
Tidal interactions between close - in, gas -
giant exoplanets and their host star should cause the orbits of the planets to decay.
Scientists have identified
a giant exoplanet with temperatures reaching 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit (4,315 Celsius), the hottest gas giant planet ever identified.
The paper suggests that when astronomers are looking for
these giant exoplanets, they should concentrate on looking at young star systems that have debris disks around them.