The much - anticipated James Webb Space Telescope — often referred to as Hubble's successor — for example, will likely only study worlds that hug their host stars, making observations of planets with
wider orbits like Mars or even Earth out of the question.
Not exact matches
Direct imaging of exoplanetary systems is a powerful technique that can reveal Jupiter -
like planets in
wide orbits, can enable detailed characterization of planetary atmospheres, and is a key step toward imaging Earth -
like planets.
Like other teams positioned in a 1500 - kilometer -
wide swath across South America, the astronomers had started out the night with one mission: They intended to measure the size of Chariklo, an icy body that circles the sun between the
orbits of Saturn and Uranus.
Having demonstrated the efficacy of the approach on
wide -
orbit planets, Serabyn says he would
like to apply the concept at larger telescopes to seek out worlds closer to their stars.
Imagine that such a black hole is
orbited by a
wide, cold disk of material —
like the rings of Saturn but larger than our entire solar system — and that this disk possesses an almost transparent outer region and a denser inner region.
The modelling suggested that a Neptune -
like planet actually formed much closer to Vega and was pushed by a Jupiter -
like planet in an inner
orbit out to its current
wide orbit around 80 AUs away from Vega over about 56 million years, sweeping many comets out with it and causing the dust disk to become clumpy (Mark C. Wyatt, 2003).
In the research of extrasolar planets, astronomers have found a
wide variety of planets such as Jupiter -
like gaseous giant planets circling around central stars in a much smaller
orbit than that of the Mercury, and planets that have a very large
orbit far beyond the Neptune's
orbit.
51 Eri b serves as «a bridge from
wider -
orbit, hotter and more massive planets to Jupiter -
like scales.»