Hunt for Distant Planets Intensifies When astronomers discovered
planet GJ 1214b circling a star more than 47 light-years from
Earth in 2009, their data presented two possibilities. Either it
was a mini-Neptune shrouded in a thick atmosphere of hydrogen
and helium, or it was a water world nearly three times the size
of Earth. Along came Jacob Bean, now an assistant professor in
astronomy & astrophysics at the University of Chicago, who used
a new method called multi-object spectroscopy to analyze the
planet’s atmosphere from large, ground-based telescopes. Aided
by technology, Bean and his colleagues are surmounting the
challenge of inferring the atmospheric composition of planets
that were invisible to humans just a few years ago. “We’re
trying to distinguish whether it’s like the gas giants we know
about, or something fundamentally different from what we’ve seen
in our solar system — an atmosphere predominantly composed of
water,” Bean said. The search for exoplanets - planets beyond
our own solar system -