Destinations:
Currently, there are more than 230 known planets outside our solar system. It seems like almost every day that we hear about some new planet discovered around a nearby star. Astronomers tell us there could be billions of these faraway worlds, called exoplanets. An exoplanet (or extrasolar planet) is a planet orbiting a star different from our Sun. Some are cold. Some are hot. Some are stable. Some are doomed.
Astronomers first discovered gas giants not unlike Jupiter orbiting around stars outside of our solar system. One way that astronomers detect these far away planets is by noting a wobble in a star or by changes in its brightness caused by the chance passage of the planet in front of its star.
While we are still learning more about our own solar system we are also starting to learn about other solar systems orbiting other far away stars.
Missions:
Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) will be the most powerful planet-hunting space telescope ever devised to search for Earth-like planets.
COROT is the first mission capable of detecting rocky planets several times larger than Earth around nearby stars. It recently discovered a new planet, after only recently being launched and becoming fully operational in orbit.
Spitzer, a space-based telescope that searches in the infrared, has been invaluable so far in gathering information about exoplanets. Spitzer recently captured another planet's temperature profile map.
Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) is a suite of two complementary observatories that will study all aspects of planets outside our solar system.
Features:
There are unique objects that we are starting to learn more about in our solar system. They provide us clues on how to study exoplanets, such as A World on the Edge , Europa and Titan: Oceans in the Outer Solar System? and The Mountains of Saturn's Mysterious Moon Iapetus.
Fast Lesson Finder:
K-12 Activities: Search our Fast Lesson Finder to find classroom lessons related to the solar system and beyond. Some activities relevant to this month's theme include Why Do We Explore? , Building Blocks of Planets (Accretion), Changes Inside Planets and Searching for Habitable Worlds.
People:
Meet Kim Weaver : Dr. Weaver is the Program Scientist for the Spitzer Telescope program.
Other Themes
Theme image: This is the first direct image of an exoplanet. This composite shows brown dwarf 2M1207A (center) with its fainter companion discovered last year (left). Image credit: European Southern Observatory.
