Hubble detects 16 new Extrasolar planets in Milky Way

The central region of Milky Way galaxy has 16 more planets orbiting a variety of distant stars, NASA scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have announced on Wednesday.

Hubble Space Telescope’s find has lead NASA scientists to arrive at a logical conclusion that there are believably billions of planets spread all through the galaxy.

The new planets were identified during a Hubble survey called the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search (SWEEPS). Astronomers were busy in identifying the planets outside Earth’s solar system for the last 15 years and so far they have found more than 200 planets there.

The new planet boom is at least ten times as far from Earth, the scientists reported in their finding published in British weekly science journal Nature.

The astronomers, led by Dr Kailash Sahu, from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, US, wrote in the report, “Discovering the very short-period planets was a big surprise,” adding that “Our discovery also gives very strong evidence that planets are as abundant in other parts of the galaxy as they are in our solar neighborhood.”

Speculations that planets can be found at the center of the galaxy, as well as near solar system, has boosted NASA researchers’ confidence that they are probably everywhere. If these speculations become the fact, then the possibility of other Earth-like planets becomes greater.

Based on the data provided by Hubble the scientists estimated, that as many as six billion Jupiter-size planets exist in the Milky Way.

According to the astronomers, this time Hubble has mapped farther than ever it has successfully been searched before for extrasolar planets. Hubble intensively looked at 180,000 stars in the crowded central bulge of the galaxy 26,000 light-years away or one-quarter the diameter of the Milky Way's spiral disk.

Of the newly discovered 16 planets, only two could be definitively described as planets so far due to the distance and faintness of these systems, and that is why they were introduced yesterday as mostly "candidates".

However, Mario Livio, head of the science program at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which oversees Hubble operations and Kailash Sahu asserted that the chances are good that some, or even all, of the 16 will ultimately meet all the criteria to be called planets.

Five of the newly found planets represent a new extreme type of planet not discovered in any nearby searches. Entitled as Ultra-Short-Period Planets (USPPs), these planets spin around their respective parent stars in less than one Earth day.

SWEEPS-10 is the name given to the planet candidate with the shortest orbital period which swirls around its star in 10 hours. It is located only about 1.19 million km from its star and is among the hottest ever detected, having an estimated temperature of nearly 1650 degrees Centigrade. "This star-hugging planet must be at least 1.6 times the mass of Jupiter, otherwise the star's gravitational muscle would pull it apart," said Livio. "The star's low temperature allows the planet to survive so near to the star."

The astronomers, though, distinguish faraway planets by finding solar transits but they measure and confirm a planet's status by examining the slight wobble in a star's motion that transpires when the planet orbits.