* Astronomy

Hidden alien moons that could harbour life can be revealed by the wobbles of their planets.
Almost all the 30 known exoplanets that sit within the habitable zone of their stars are gas giants.

"But they might have rocky, possibly Earth-like moons" - David Kipping of University College London.

His calculations, which will appear in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, show that such moons would reveal their presence when the planet passes in front of its star as viewed from Earth. A moon would induce a wobble in the planet's orbit, so the planet's position and velocity would differ slightly on each transit. Existing telescopes could detect an Earth-mass moon around a Neptune-mass gas planet.

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Exoplanets finally come into view
The list of more than 300 exoplanets now includes actual pictures, two groups report in the journal Science.
The first visible-light images of an exoplanet have been taken of a planet 25 light-years away.
The planet is believed to be the coolest, lowest-mass object ever seen outside our own galactic neighbourhood.
In a separate study, an exoplanetary system, comprising three planets, has been directly imaged, circling a star in the constellation Pegasus.

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Habitable worlds may hide in gas giants' wake
Habitable planets may be lurking in the wake of Jupiter-like planets as they orbit distant stars.
When a gas giant coalesces from the swirling nebula of gas and dust surrounding a young star, the planet's gravity forms a wake ahead and behind it, concentrating enough matter there for it to clump together and form smaller, rocky planets like Earth. That's according to simulations led by Wladimir Lyra of the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in Sweden. Objects born in Jupiter's wake may have merged to form the planet Saturn, which was then nudged into its current position by the gravity of other planets, the team says

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Computer simulations of the atmospheric circulation on Jupiter-like planets around other stars can explain temperature observations of these planets and shed light on the exotic weather experienced by these far-away worlds.
Approximately 300 planets have been discovered around other stars, and for most of those planets, scientists know little more than the mass and orbital properties of the planet. However, for a handful of the brightest planets, temperatures have been inferred from observations carried out with spacebased platforms such as NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Those observations and the computer simulations used to explain them, hint at weather patterns truly alien to our Earth-based experience.
Adam Showman of The University of Arizona led a study explaining how a global atmospheric circulation driven by the dayside heating and nightside cooling can drive weather on the so-called "hot Jupiters" Jupiter-like gaseous giant planets that orbit extremely close to their stars.

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