Water Identified in Extrasolar Planet Atmosphere

The folks out at Lowell have come up with some new analysis techniques and models that would seem to indicate water vapor has been found 150 light years away on a planet called HD209458b. If I'm not mistaken this is the first report of this type of finding outside the "Sol" neighbourhood.

Clever fellow incorporated existing Hubble data with other transit observations...

Researcher Travis Barman's work has been accepted by the Astrophysical Journal for publication so I guess the academics will "have-at-it" in reviewing his methodolgy. It will be interesting to see if any other "crews" can achieve repeatability.

For those with an interest:

A SpaceRef article: www.spaceref.com...

The research submission: lanl.arxiv.org...

The Lowell Observatory: www.lowell.edu...

Cheers,

Vic

This is very interesting, it does not surprise me really, but none the less
it is cool.


Oh, and I thought I'd add a few more links to this story to compliment
the ones already linked.

Space.com article.

Yahoo! News article.

I was going to post when i just read this on a news site.
and they reckon there are more, marked for analysis.

being so close to its star, will it not dry up?
Very interesting though.

I find it to be extraordinary that for the first time we are able to detect water from a planet outside our own solar system. GO HUBBLE!!!

it's obvious life does exhist outside our solar system but there's no point gettng excited when we can't even get there. yes we will have a list of planets to visit once we get the technology but i doubt their gonna go straight for these planets. the ones first visited will probably be the closest. and odds are since there's other life we should try and be careful of who we do run into. anyone seen stargate? perfect example.