{"id":78222,"date":"2018-05-03T10:03:14","date_gmt":"2018-05-03T17:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/the-first-exoplanet-known-to-contain-helium-is-a-truly-alien-world"},"modified":"2018-05-04T11:02:52","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T18:02:52","slug":"the-first-exoplanet-known-to-contain-helium-is-a-truly-alien-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/the-first-exoplanet-known-to-contain-helium-is-a-truly-alien-world","title":{"rendered":"The First Exoplanet Known to Contain Helium Is a Truly Alien World"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

In addition to filling balloons at birthday parties, helium can be found scattered throughout the cosmos. To date, however, scientists have struggled to detect the ubiquitous element on distant worlds, even though the gas is certain to be there. But that\u2019s now changed, thanks to the discovery of helium on a Jupiter-sized world located 200 light-years from Earth\u2014but that\u2019s only part of the story.<\/p>\n

\u201cHelium is the second-most common element in the universe after hydrogen. It is also one of the main constituents of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in our Solar System,\u201d Jessica Spake, the astronomer who made the discovery, said in a statement. \u201cHowever, up until now helium had not been detected on exoplanets\u2014despite searches for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

But now, using Wide Field Camera 3 on NASA\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope, Spake\u2019s team managed to detect this strangely elusive substance, marking the first time that helium has been detected on a planet outside of our Solar System. The key to the finding was the use of infrared spectra to study the exoplanet\u2019s atmosphere, whereas previous attempts used ultraviolet and optical wavelengths. This study now shows that the composition of exoplanetary atmospheres can indeed be studied at longer wavelengths. The details of this discovery<\/a> were published yesterday in Nature<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In addition to filling balloons at birthday parties, helium can be found scattered throughout the cosmos. To date, however, scientists have struggled to detect the ubiquitous element on distant worlds, even though the gas is certain to be there. But that\u2019s now changed, thanks to the discovery of helium on a Jupiter-sized world located 200 [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78222"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78264,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78222\/revisions\/78264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}