NASA’s Chandra and XMM Newton detected a distant exoplanet passing in front of a star for the first time using its X-ray vision.
Scientists named the exoplanet HD 189733b which they call a hot Jupiter because of its huge size similar to the Jupiter we know in our solar system. It was found orbiting about 63 light-years away from its parent start called HD 189733 in the northern constellation Vulpecula. It orbits the star every 2.2 days.
The scientists have been studying exoplanets for the past 20 years using different methods such as detecting a slight reduction in a star’s visible brightness caused by a passing planet and identifying the slight shake in a star’s position resulting from the gravitational pull of the orbiting planet. However, this is the first time that an exoplanet’s transit was caught in x-rays.
“Thousands of planet candidates have been seen to transit in only optical light,” said Katja Poppenhaeger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the press release. “Finally being able to study one in X-rays is important because it reveals new information about the properties of an exoplanet.”
The scientists were thankful of the solar winds which have blown away the exoplanet HD 189733b that have caused the NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM Newton Observatory to detect it.
This exoplanet is the closest among its kind to Earth which sparks more interest on our scientists to know more about this exoplanet especially its atmosphere. They have used NASA’s Kepler telescope to study its optical wavelengths and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to verify that its atmosphere color is blue similar to Earth.
The details of the study will be published in the August 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.