HARPS is not the same as the mysterious Alaskan installation known as HAARP, which is mentioned in this week’s Dreamland. HARPS, located in Chile, stands for High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher and is part of the huge ESO international telescope system, which is searching for new planets. Since it powered up 5 years ago, HARPS has discovered more than 75 new planets in 30 difference solar systems, and recently, they’ve discovered 32 more. Will some of them have intelligent life?
read more

The Kepler Space Telescope, which was launched into space 5 months ago, is designed to take direct images of planets outside of our solar system. It has stunned and delighted astronomers with a picture of a planet a thousand light years away, the first every direct photo of light from a planet not in our solar system. This system definitely holds promise for detecting planets that harbor life.

Yahoo News UK quotes Kepler astronomer William Borucki as saying that this is “the first time anyone has seen light from this planet.”

Astrophysicist Alan Boss is quoted as saying, “The real headline is Kepler works.” Boss states that, thanks to the Kepler, NASA expects to be able to say by 2012 if there are “lots of earths in our galaxy or we are alone.”
read more

The idea that gravity might pull a planet into its parent star has been predicted by computer models, but now astronomers have found evidence that this has actually happened.

Astronomer Rory Barnes says, “When we look at the observed properties of extrasolar planets, we can see that this has already happened. Some extrasolar planets have already fallen into their stars.” How does he know this? Computer models show where planets should line up in a particular star system, but direct observations show that some systems are missing planets close to the stars where models say they should be.
read more

weekend reading – A recent survey of nearby stars shows that 30% of them have versions of earth orbiting around them. Many of these are as much as 10 times larger than our own home planet.

Many of the stars that were thought to have no planets in their orbits have planets so small that they were overlooked before, but these are unlikely to harbor life. In Scientific American, J.R. Minkel quotes astronomer Didier Queloz as saying, “It turns out that a large fraction of the stars that we had believed had no planets actually have planets, but of small mass.”
read more