Spitzer gets first sniffs of air from alien worlds

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djd1

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<font color="yellow">NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured for the first time enough light from planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, to identify signatures of molecules in their atmospheres. The landmark achievement is a significant step toward being able to detect life on rocky exoplanets and comes years before astronomers had anticipated.<br />http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0702/21exoplanets/</font>
 
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qso1

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This is the one I'm hoping they will release an actual image of. That would be the first bonafide image of an exoplanet. Previous images that were initially reported as exoplanets were brown dwarfs or in one case, a distant background star.<br /><br />Of course, there won't be much to see, probably a few pixels at best. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>
 
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mithridates

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Yes, this is really exciting. Finding the right planet is what I consider to be the holy grail (by which I mean a discovery that will finally cause the average person to see space as more than just a black void) of astronomy, so the more planets discovered the better.<br /><br />I wonder how many years left before we discover just the right planet? And that reminds me, what observations have been made of Alpha Centauri up to now? I noticed that the Terrestrial Planet Finder has Alpha Centauri as the first place on the list to check out. Tau Ceti is right up there too. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p>----- </p><p>http://mithridates.blogspot.com</p> </div>
 
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erioladastra

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"Of course, there won't be much to see, probably a few pixels at best. "<br /><br />The data were spectra, not images so no image to release.
 
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MeteorWayne

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Yes no images. And mighty difficult to see dips in the spectra, although the authors of paper insist it is 3.5 sigma data. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080"><em><font color="#000000">But the Krell forgot one thing John. Monsters. Monsters from the Id.</font></em> </font></p><p><font color="#000080">I really, really, really, really miss the "first unread post" function</font><font color="#000080"> </font></p> </div>
 
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kdavis007

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I actually prefer the Spitzer Space Telescope over the Hubble.......
 
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