Latest Planetary systems Stories
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, in collaboration with ground-based observatories, has provided definitive evidence for the existence of the nearest extrasolar planet to our solar system. The Jupiter-sized world orbits the Sun-like star Epsilon Eridani, which is only 10.5 light-years away (approximately 63 trillion miles). The planet is so close it may be observable by Hubble and large ground-based telescopes in late 2007, when the planet makes its closest approach to Epsilon Eridani during its...
With the VISIR instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have mapped the disc around a star more massive than the Sun. The very extended and flared disc most likely contains enough gas and dust to spawn planets. It appears as a precursor of debris discs such as the one around Vega-like stars and thus provides the rare opportunity to witness the conditions prevailing prior to or during planet formation. "Planets form in massive, gaseous and dusty proto-planetary discs that...
More than one-third of the giant planet systems recently detected outside our solar system may harbor Earth-like planets covered in deep global oceans that offer abundant potential for life, according to a new study by scientists associated with NASA's Astrobiology Institute. The study focuses on planetary systems that contain "Hot Jupiters": gas giant planets that orbit extremely close to their parent stars -- even closer than Mercury to our own sun. Hot Jupiters are believed to...
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has for the first time identified the parent star of a distant planet discovered through gravitational microlensing. Microlensing occurs when a foreground star amplifies the light of a background star that momentarily aligns with it. The particular character of the light magnification can reveal clues to the nature of the foreground star and any associated planets. However, without conclusively identifying and characterizing the foreground star, a unique...
The steady discovery of giant planets orbiting stars other than our sun has heightened speculation that there could be Earth-type worlds in nearby planetary systems capable of sustaining life. Now researchers running computer simulations for four nearby systems that contain giant planets about the size of Jupiter have found one that could have formed an Earth-like planet with the right conditions to support life.A second system is likely to have a belt of rocky bodies the size of Mars or...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When you're young and single, it's easy to dance fast. But when little ones are on the way, the dance tends to slow down. And so it seems to be with stars and the planet-forming disks that orbit them. Scientists have long reckoned that the disks of gas and dust that can turn into planets might be putting the brakes on young stars, which can spin around in half a day or less if nothing tugs on them, researchers said on Monday. "We knew that something must be...
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revealed not one but two dust disks circling the nearby star Beta Pictoris. The images confirm a decade of scientific speculation that a warp in the young star's dust disk may actually be a second inclined disk, which is evidence for the possibility of at least one Jupiter-size planet orbiting the star.The disk is fainter than the star because, at the visible wavelengths measured, its dust only reflects light. To see the faint disk, astronomers used Hubble's...
Scientists using NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, or FUSE, have discovered abundant amounts of carbon gas in a dusty disk surrounding a young star named Beta Pictoris. The star and its emerging solar system are less than 20 million years old, and planets may have already formed. The abundance of carbon gas in the remaining debris disk indicates that Beta Pictoris' planets could be carbon-rich worlds of graphite and methane, or the star's environs might resemble our own solar...
Astronomers from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario find that "dead zones"- which typically extend out to 13 astronomical units from the central star of an extrasolar planetary system - can significantly slow planetary migration so that planets are not lost to the systems. This release summarizes work to be described in a press conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Calgary, Alberta on June 5, 2006, and in an invited talk at a scientific session during the...
By Deborah Zabarenko WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Too lightweight to be stars but bigger than most planets, a handful of hot young free-floating objects have the raw materials to make their own mini-planetary systems, astronomers reported on Monday. Just like some young stars, these so-called planemos have disks of cosmic dust and gas circling them. These kinds of disks contain the ingredients for planets; astronomers believe Earth and the other planets in our solar system were forged from...
Latest Planetary systems Reference Libraries
Cosmogony -- Cosmogony is the study of the origins of celestial objects. It is most commonly used to refer to the study of the origin of the solar system. Currently, the most widely accepted theory is that the solar system was formed roughly 5 billion years ago with the collapse of a nebula of gas and dust, likely caused by shock waves generated by a nearby supernova. The solar system would have formed as a member of a star cluster, now long-since dispersed throughout the Milky Way...
Solar Nebula -- In astronomy, the solar nebula is the gaseous cloud from which, in the so-called nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system, the Sun and planets formed by condensation. In 1755 the German philosopher Immanuel Kant suggested that a nebula in slow rotation, gradually pulled together by its own gravitational force and flattened into a spinning disk, gave birth to the Sun and planets. A similar model, but with the planets being formed before the Sun, was proposed...
Extrasolar Planet -- An extrasolar planet is a planet orbiting around a star other than the Sun. Extrasolar planets were first discovered in the 1990s as a result of improved telescope technology, CCD and computer-based image processing which allowed far more accurate measurements of stellar motions. The first extrasolar planets were reported by the astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan in 1993, orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12. Subsequent investigation has determined that they are only planets...
Asteroid Belt -- The Asteroid belt is a region of the solar system falling roughly between the planets Mars and Jupiter where the greatest concentration of asteroid orbits can be found. It is believed that, during the first million years of the solar system history, planets formed by accretion of planetesimals. Ripetute collisions led to the familiar rocky planets and to the gas giant's cores. However, in this zone of the system the strong gravity of Jupiter inhibited the final stages...
Epsilon Eridani -- Epsilon Eridani is a main-sequence star in the constellation of Eridanus (the river). It is often used in science fiction because it is extremely sunlike, and in the fictional Star Trek universe it is the home sun of the planet Vulcan which is home to Mr. Spock. It is the third closest star visible without a telescope. It has 85% of the Sun's mass, almost that much of its diameter, and 28% of its luminosity. It is 10.5 light years from Earth. Its spectrum is...
