AstroBlonde

Scientists seem to have found 32 new planets orbiting other stars, so called exoplanets, by using the HARPS spectrograph in La Silla, Chile. The news came out a couple of days ago and was announced on an ESO conference in Portugal. They have found planets that seem to have a lower mass than the planets we normally find. The massive exoplanets are normally easier to find because they disturb their star gravitationally at a higher rate then the less massive planets. We can more or less see the star "dancing" around in space and that indicates that there are massive planets orbiting. In some cases we can find exoplanets by looking at the light from the star. If the planet is big enough we can see the light intensity change as it passes infront of its star in our line of sight. As you can imagine the chance of that happening at the exact time you're sitting with the telescope pointed at that direction is not very high.

HARPS is therefore looking after "dancing" stars, and the instrument is impressive! It was installed in 2003 and can measure very small velocity changes, as small as 3,5 kilometers per second, which is roughly our walking velocities. The smaller velocities you can measure the higher probability that you will find smaller exoplanets. This project has been really successful with discoveries like: the first super-Earth in 2004, Neptune-alike planets around the star HD 69830 in 2006, the lightest planet ever discovered around a star in 2009, and now one planet that is believed to be covered in lava and with a density close to the Earth's.

These new findings seem to give a good insight for planetary astronomers. The last couple of years astronomers seem to think that planets are common in the Universe, and findings like this support that idea. As one of the professors, Nikolai Piskunov, here at the astrophysics department said in an interview (translated) "The findings seem to support the idea that planets are much more common in the Universe than we earlier thought. That increases the chance that there's life on other planets." But of course one has to keep in mind that there's a difference between life and intelligent life! Newspapers always seem to assume that life = aliens to talk to.

Well, very interesting findings I must say. I get impressed everytime I read about these instruments astronomers use! They are amazing and the techniques are beyond my understanding. It's a shame though, because I have an exam next week about: Observational astrophysics! I hope the techniques used for astronomy will reach my understanding until then!

This week it's Uppsala short film festival. Guess what the topic was at the lunch table here at the astrophysics department... It's funny though, the astrophysicist can't resist to somehow end up talking about old movie aliens or sci-fi movies. I don't think I have the time to watch the movies though, too much to do before going to Australia! I'm forcing myself to drink coffee this week, although I hardly ever drink it, just so I'm able to stay awake!

The computer problems with my master thesis seem to have come to an end! After changing accounts and lot of other things it finally happened: I can connect to my supervisor's computer WITHOUT crashing his computer! Yay! The amazing world of computers!