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Spitzer Spies Hot and Cold Planet
For the first time, astronomers have measured the temperature on the day and night sides of an extrasolar planet. Joe Harrington of the University of Central Florida used Spitzer Space Telescope to discover a giant hot spot on the side of the planet Upsilon Andromedae b that faces its parent star. The temperature difference between the planet’s day and night sides is a scorching 2,550 degrees Fahrenheit (1,400 C). The gas giant planet orbits close to its star with a period of just 4.6 days, and is tidally locked with it so that one side is always hot, the other always cold.

Small Scopes Find 'Planet Lite'
Using a network of small robotic telescopes, Smithsonian astronomers have to found an unexpectedly large extrasolar planet. The planet HAT-P-1 has a radius 1.38 times that of Jupiter, yet weighs only half as much. It circles one star of a binary pair every 4.5 days. Gasper Bakos of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics designed the HAT telescope network, which searches for extrasolar planets by observing the dip in light output from stars when a planet passes in front of them. Bakos’ group says that HAT-P-1 and another planet discovered by this “transit” method are larger than theory predicts, and may signal that something may be missing from today’s planet-formation theories.

Snowstorms Could Spawn Super-Earths
Grant Kennedy of Australia’s Mount Stromlo Observatory and a team of astronomers have calculated how a few “super-Earths” known to orbit dim red dwarf stars could have formed. A “super-Earth” is an extrasolar planet made of ice and rock with a mass five to 15 times Earth’s. Kennedy’s team says that in their early history, red dwarf stars grow dimmer as they evolve, and the inner region of their surrounding planet-forming disk starts to freeze. This makes water and other gasses condense into snowflakes and ice pellets. These ices help build up any planets already forming in the inner disk. Kennedy’s group theorizes that such a “cosmic snowstorm” completely envelops the forming planet and lasts millions of years. -- Rebecca Johnson