Tuesday, August 26, 2008

TW Hya b not a planet just star spots

Now this of interest to me - because that is what I am researching at present - looking at variable stars to work why they are variable and finding suitable candidtates to follow up with photometry to identify if they may have star spots and then the other guys can do their thing!

So back in January, astronomers announced that they had identified an infant planet which is the youngest yet to be discovered and is in a solar system that is still being formed. The researchers from Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany reported their discovery in the journal Nature.

A Spanish team of Astronomers from LAEFF-INTA have recently sumbitted a paper asserting that the radial velocity variations are due rather to a stellar spot whihc covers 7% of the sruface of the star.

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