Giant Planet Found 13,000 Light Years From Earth 

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has teamed up with a telescope on the ground to find a remote gas planet about 13,000 light-years away, making it one of the most distant planets known.

The discovery demonstrates that Spitzer – from its unique perch in space – can be used to help solve the puzzle of how planets are distributed throughout our flat, spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy. Are they concentrated heavily in its central hub, or more evenly spread throughout its suburbs?

This artist’s conception shows a planet half as massive as Jupiter located 13,000 light-years from Earth. It was detected by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope using microlensing. Spitzer provided parallax measurements that allowed scientists to determine how far away the planet is.

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Planet With Hellish Weather Found 

As part of the PlanetS National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR), astronomers from the Universities of Geneva (UNIGE) and Bern, Switzerland, have come to measure the temperature of the atmosphere of an exoplanet with unequalled precision, by crossing two approaches.

The star HD189733 is indicated by the green arrow. It is located less than 0.15 ° (equivalent to half moon) of the Dumbell Nebula

The first approach is based on the HARPS spectrometer and the second consists of a new way of interpreting sodium lines. From these two additional analyses, researchers have been able to conclude that the HD189733b exoplanet is showing infernal atmospheric conditions: wind speeds of more than 1000 kilometres per hour, and the temperature being 3000 degrees. These results open up perspectives to approach the study of exoplanet atmospheres. They were published in two journals, namely Astronomy & Astrophysics and Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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