A hidden exoplanet found in archival data
Wednesday, April 1, 2009 - 09:56
in Astronomy & Space
A powerful, newly refined image-processing technique may allow astronomers to discover extrasolar planets that are possibly lurking in over a decade's worth of Hubble Space Telescope archival data. David Lafreniere of the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, has successfully demonstrated this new strategy for planet hunting by identifying an exoplanet that went undetected in Hubble images taken in 1998 with its Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). In addition to illustrating the power of new data-processing techniques, this finding underscores the value of the Hubble data archive, on which those new techniques can be used...