Friday, October 25, 2019

In a Distant Galaxy, Colliding Exoplanets Are Upending What We Knew About Solar System Formation

"This is a rare opportunity to study catastrophic collisions occurring late in a planetary system's history," Alycia Weinberger, a staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and author of a recent paper on the collision, said in a statement .

Clouds of dust are ubiquitous in space. Planets form when the dust particles floating around young stars clump together and grow over millions of years into large, gravitationally dense objects! In a Distant Galaxy, Colliding Exoplanets Are Upending ...are...Home News Astronomers are pretty sure they're witnessing the aftermath of two large exoplanets smashing into each other in a distant , binary s In a Distant Galaxy, Colliding Exoplanets Are Upending What We Knew About Solar System Formation | CHOCHILINO!! By the time planets settle into their orbits around a star, much of the smaller particles of dust and debris in the environment have either been pulled into the star as fuel, or swept away by solar winds into a ring of schmutz on the solar system's cold outer edges. 

Our solar system's frigid Kuiper Belt , which stretches for hundreds of millions of miles beyond the orbit of Neptune and contains thousands of rocky objects (including the dwarf planet Pluto), is a prime example of this. The dust, asteroids and planetoids out there are extremely cold, due to their distance from the sun.

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Publisher: _____
Date: 2019-10-24T20:10:25+00:00
Author: _____
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And here's another article:

Visitors from deep space are buzzing our solar system. The race is on to explore them.

Two years ago, an automated telescope in Hawaii detected 'Oumuamua , the first known object from interstellar space observed passing through our solar system! Collision of distant galaxies revealed through galactic ...www.cbsnews.com ...distant ...With a galaxy aligned like a giant magnifying glass, an international team of astronomers was able to focus on two other galaxies colliding 7 billion years ago ...the material in the distant ...!! Then in August, an amateur astronomer in Crimea found a second interstellar visitor, 2I/Borisov, suggesting that such objects come our way on a regular basis.

Now, scientists are eagerly developing plans to explore these messengers from afar and to learn their secrets.

For now, answers are trickling in slowly from observatories on the ground and in orbit around Earth, including an intriguing new image of Borisov just taken by the Hubble telescope . Come 2028, though, a European spacecraft called Comet Interceptor could be on its way to a brief encounter with another, as-yet-undetected interstellar object.

Hein and his colleagues have an even grander project in mind. They've drawn up plans for Project Lyra , a space probe that could travel fast enough to overtake either 'Oumuamua or Borisov (or another interstellar object) as it speeds its way out of the solar system, reaching either one by the mid-2040s.

Publisher: NBC News
Twitter: @NBCNews
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What Makes a Planet and How Many Are There in Our Solar System?

What makes a space object a planet? How many are there actually in our solar system? Let's find out.

How many planets are there in our solar system? 9? 8? 12? More? The answer might actually surprise you.

Here we explore the answer to this apparently simple question and take a quick tour of the main primary planets of our home solar system.

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What is a planet? An enormous chunk of stuff (rock or gas), roughly spheroidal in shape that orbits a star and may or may not have a moon, right?

While this is in part true, there are some issues with such a simple definition. What about asteroids? When does an object become large enough to be considered a planet?

Why are Venus and Mercury planets (according to current classifications) but not Pluto? As it turns out, the reasons are pretty straight forward. 

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Date: 2019-10-06T06:14:00-04:00
Twitter: @IntEngineering
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Earth-Like Planets May Be Common Outside Our Solar System, Scientists Discover - VICE

Scientists have directly observed the rocky guts of exoplanets, which are worlds from different star systems, by watching the fallout of these objects crashing into the corpses of dead stars.

This mind-boggling technique has revealed that exoplanets are similar in composition to planets in our own solar system, implying that worlds like Earth may be plentiful in our galaxy, according to a study published on Thursday in Science .

"It's pretty cool because this is really the only way to measure the geochemistry of exoplanetary bodies directly," said lead author Alexandra Doyle, a graduate student of geochemistry and astrochemistry at UCLA, in a phone call.

Co-author Edward Young, a professor of geochemistry and cosmochemistry at UCLA, added that the study represents "the first time such an advanced way of looking at the geochemistry of these bodies has been used," in the same call.

Publisher: Vice
Date: 2019-10-17T18:00:00Z
Author: Becky Ferreira
Twitter: @vice
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Check out this next:

This is the closest solar system to Earth containing multiple planets - CNN

(CNN) Just 11 light years from earth is the GJ 15 A star system with two planets orbiting a red-dwarf star. This makes it the closest solar system to Earth that contains multiple planets.

Publisher: CNN
Date: 2019-10-16T22:26:17Z
Author: Ashley Strickland CNN
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Today's Your Last Chance to Help Name an Alien Solar System-- | Space

Right now, it's a solar system known only by the designation HD 17156. Before 2019 ends, it will bear an entirely different second moniker — perhaps one suggested by you.

That's because the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which oversees all celestial nomenclature, has decided to mark its 100th anniversary by letting each country name a planetary system! Galaxies in Collision | Science Mission Directorate science.nasa.gov ...nasa /1999/ast15jul99_2 July 15, 1999: Exciting new images of more than a dozen very distant colliding galaxies have been obtained by a European-led team of astronomers using the NASA /ESA Hubble Space Telescope.These colliding objects are part of a large concentration of galaxies, a galaxy cluster. Though collisions have been observed in other clusters, this particular cluster displays by far the largest number ever ...!! The United States got HD 17156, and today (Oct. 15) is the last day for the public to submit proposed names, so get thinking.

The IAU has put some constraints on the project, of course. First, it needs two names: one for the planet , one for the star. They should be connected in some way that is open-ended enough to allow for naming other, not-yet-discovered stars or planets in the same system along the same principals.

* * *

"The proposed names should be of things, people, or places of long-standing cultural, historical, or geographical significance, worthy of being assigned to a celestial object," the IAU wrote in its guidelines . The names don't have to be related to astronomy, although they can be.

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Publisher: Space.com
Date: 2019-10-15T16:46:34+00:00
Author: https www facebook com spacecom
Twitter: @SPACEdotcom
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