As SIRTF looks for extra-solar planets, will it find Hot Jupiters or Terrestrial Rocky planets?
Right, that’s an excellent question. Like I was saying, SIRTF’s resolution does not allow it to see small planets individually. So we will be able to detect these hot Jupiter’s, which are sometimes called brown dwarfs. We won’t really be able to resolve them, but we’ll be able to see them as pixels in a SIRTF image. And brown dwarfs are fun; they’re kind of like still born stars. They’re stars that formed but never got enough mass to ignite nuclear reactions. And so instead they actually form an object very much like Jupiter. Jupiter in a way is one of these brown dwarfs that are actually in our solar system, and those we’ll be able to detect directly. I’m hoping that we find hundreds and perhaps thousands of them with the SIRTF telescope.
