Most Distant Planet Discovered and Three New Moons for Neptune

In the field of astronomy it used to be such that new discoveries were fairly far apart, perhaps one a decade or so. But in the recent decades it seems that new discoveries are coming at a faster and faster pace. Just in the past week there have been several interesting new finds including additional moons in our Solar System.

Finding planets outside of our Solar System is nothing new and it seems that it's old news these days but this new one was only the second one found by catching it in a transit of it's sun. It is also the most distant (by far) of any known extrasolar planet. A planet is said to transit it's sun when it is seen from the observer's line of sight, to pass directly in front of the star. It is rare indeed for astronomers to catch an extrasolar planet transit a star.

Named Ogle-TR-56b, it is closer to it's sun than Mercury is to our Sun, orbiting its star once every 29 hours! It is very doubtful that such a planet could sustain life of any kind that we know of because of it's close proximity to the star. This new planet is Jupiter class, large planets like the one the class is named after. This planet is about 2.6 times the size of Jupiter but is less dense than Jupiter, more like Saturn in density. This low density would normally indicate a world of frozen ice and gas, like Saturn, but being so close to it's sun that couldn't be the case. The planet is 5000 light years distant from us, 180 light years farther away than any other extrasolar planet yet discovered.

This new planet was discovered by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (Ogle) who uses a telescope in Chile to monitor a crowded starfield in the same direction as the center of our galaxy.

Also in the news: we are adding to our own Solar System family. Astronomers announced today the discovery of three previously unseen moons orbiting Neptune, bringing the total of satellites around that planet to 11.The moons are the first found at Neptune since the Voyager II mission in 1989 and the first detected from ground based telescopes since 1949 The moons are small, ranging from eighteen to twenty-four miles in diameter.

Neptune is the eighth most distant planet in our Solar System most of the time, but every few hundred years Pluto, normally the most distant planet, crosses Neptune's orbit to the inside and making Neptune the most distant planet.

Neptune takes fourth place in the moon department, headed by none other than the king of planet's itself, Jupiter with a whopping forty moons! In fact, it was only last month that Jupiter got that fortieth moon. Earlier this month astronomers at the University of Hawaii found an additional small moon orbiting Jupiter. There could be some debate over that last new moon of Jupiter's though, because additional observations indicate that it may not be a solid moon, but rather just a bunch of small debris gravitationally bound together. Even if Jupiter is in no danger of losing it's title of having the most moons. Saturn takes second place in the moon department with thirty, and Uranus comes in third with twenty one moons. And lastly in the new, publishers are busy yet again, revising astronomy textbooks!

Constellations

The Solar System