A University of Exeter-led team of international scientists will be focusing on the primary questions that exist in the astronomical world.
An artist's impression of the Jupiter-size extrasolar planet, HD 189733b, being eclipsed by its parent star. ESA, NASA, M. Kornmesser (ESAHubble) and STScI.
The team has obtained a huge project of approximately 200 hours on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, to answer the primary questions in astronomy, including the atmospheric conditions of exoplanets, which are planets that do not belong to our solar system.
The research team will concentrate on exoplanets called ‘Hot Jupiters’with a size almost the same as Jupiter and a temperature of 1000° higher, since their orbits are very near their corresponding stars. The Hubble Space Telescope will explore these exoplanets in order to collect more data about their atmospheric composition.
The researchers are aiming to prepare for exploring the possibility of life on the exoplanets by clearly understanding the chemical composition of the atmospheres of eight ‘Hot Jupiters’ and optimizing tough procedures required to conduct these exact measurements.
According to the lead researcher from the University of Exeter, Dr David Sing ,the research to be conducted using Hubble Space Telescope is a notable achievement as it has obtained considerable number of hours to work on one of the world’s best telescopes. He added that a large number of exoplanets exist, several of them with extreme atmospheric conditions, very different from our solar system.
The main aim of the team is to identify and study a strange gas around the exoplanets’stratospheres, which has an impact just like the Earth’s ozone layer. It is possible to identify this gas because light absorption occurs from the parent star when the planet traverses past the star.
Observations will begin in October 2011 by the research team, including scientists from other International Universities and NASA. Researchers will analyse the large amount of collected data using the tools created at the University of Exeter for the next two years.
Source: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/