Newscenter Update: Hubble Directly Measures Rotation of Cloudy 'Super-Jupiter'

February 18, 2016 Artists' concept Get larger image formats   Find the entire Hubble News archive, image galleries, and much more at hubblesite.org Stay Connected   Hubble Directly Measures Rotation of Cloudy 'Super-Jupiter' Though nearly 2,000 planets have been found around other stars, the light from only a handful of them has ever been collected by the world's most powerful telescopes. Ironically, a lot of them are detected by the shadows they cast, as they pass in front of their parent stars. Follow-up observations measure the planet's feeble, but telltale, gravitational tug on its parent star. Now, Hubble Space Telescope astronomers have been able to pick up the faint infrared glow of a giant planet located 170 light-years away from Earth. Not only is it glowing, but also rhythmically flickering as the planet spins on its axis like a top. The interpretation is that the subtle changes in the planet's brightness are due to a variegated cloud cover of comparatively bright and dark patches coming and going. These measurements have led to an estimate of how fast the planet is spinning through direct observation — a first for exoplanet astronomers. The gaseous world completes one rotation approximately every 10 hours, which, coincidentally, is the same rotation rate as Jupiter. RELEASE LINKS: See full release More Images Fast Facts This news release and its supporting materials are permanently archived at: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2016/05/ You are receiving this email because you are subscribed to the Inbox Astronomy mailing list, which sends notices in HTML whenever there is a new Hubble Space Telescope image, product, or news update. If you would like to unsubscribe or change your email preferences, please go to: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/hubble_on_the_go/inbox_astronomy/