Saturday, April 14, 2007

Alien planet with water

Dry, gaseous, Jupiter-like planet HD 209458b somewhere in Pegasus, 150 light years from Earth, ...



... is the first exoplanet known to have water in its atmosphere according to indirect evidence based on spectral bumps found in computer simulations and compared with observations.

I leave it up to you to decide how far it is from the previous picture of the constellation to the following picture:



See preprint accepted for publication in ApJ or news.google.com.

An even better planet: possibly habitable Gliese 581c.