From UCSB, Caltech & JPL
Crank up the Gustav Holst and put away that horoscope. The star-gazing crowd has lots of news zinging around about celestial objects. In Santa Barbara, scientists say they've made some head-spinning observations, finding nine new planets and seeing two of them orbiting in the opposite direction of their host star -- that finding, combined with some other recent research upsets conventional thinking about how planets form. The nine new planets, giant and gaseous, are called 'Hot Jupiters' and are termed 'exoplanets' because they're outside our solar system but within the galaxy and a mere 1,000 light years away. Over in Pasadena, they're hailing the use of relatively small, ground-based telescopes to capture images of three, gas giant planets, which previously had been sighted only with two of the globe's biggest star-viewing instruments. And they're also excited in LaCanada by the capture by NASA's Cassini spacecraft of an incidence of lightening flashing on Saturn, which they've zapped into a special-effects video presentation.
In Santa Barbara, findings that upset planetary theories
In Pasadena, how relatively small, ground-based scopes got snappy planetary views
Woohoo, here's what a lightening storm on Saturn looks like
Embedded video from
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology
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