Mar. 18, 2016

New estimate of the water abundance in a planetary mass object spatially resolved from its host star. Dr. Kamen Todorov of ETH led a team that modelled the spectrum of Kappa And b. We hope to coordinate our efforts in this area through the NCCR PlanetS
and apply similar techniques to other directly imaged planets.

Image: The “super-Jupiter” Kappa Andromedae b, shown here in an artist’s rendering, circles its star at nearly twice the distance that Neptune orbits the sun. With a mass about 13 times Jupiter’s, the object glows with a reddish color.