“A stellar flare blasting an exoplanet”: this artist’s impression shows exoplanet HD HD189733b transiting in front of its star. The Hubble Space Telescope observed the transit in September 2010 and April 2011. The April 2011 observation took place just after a strong stellar flare (shown in the image) observed in the X-ray waveband by the Swift telescope. After the flare, the Hubble observations showed that the planet was losing over 1000 tonnes of gas per second. (In this image, the star’s surface is inspired by observations of the Sun by the Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft.) (Credit: © NASA, ESA, L. Calçada)
An international team from the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (CNRS/UPMC) and the Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG(1) — CNRS/Université Joseph Fourier — Grenoble 1) has detected meteorological variations in the atmosphere of an exoplanet (a planet outside our own Solar System). The astrophysicists made the discovery while observing the exoplanet HD 189733b with the Hubble space telescope….
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Posted on July 10, 2012
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