There seems to be something large lurking in the far reaches of the Solar System, messing with the orbits of some of the Kuper Belt rocks out past Neptune. Some astronomers believe it's a planet, about five times the mass of Earth . They call it Planet Nine.
But finding this potential lurker is not so simple. From here, it would appear extremely small and faint, and we don't even know where in the sky we should be looking. Astronomers are searching (and finding some other really neat stuff in the process ), but it's slow and painstaking work.
And here's another article:
Constraining The Magnitude Of Climate Extremes From Time-varying Instellation On A Circumbinary
Planets that revolve around a binary pair of stars are known as circumbinary planets. The orbital motion of the stars around their center of mass causes a periodic variation in the total instellation incident upon a circumbinary planet.
This study uses both an analytic and numerical energy balance model to calculate the extent to which this effect can drive changes in surface temperature on circumbinary terrestrial planets. We show that the amplitude of the temperature variation is largely constrained by the effective heat capacity, which corresponds to the ocean-to-land ratio on the planet.
Satellites Watched Mercury's Transit From Space, Confirming That Yes, the Sun Has At Least
Mostly they use the transit method . When a planet travels in between its star and an observer, the light from the star dims. That's called a transit. If astronomers watch a planet transit its star a few times, they can confirm its orbital period. They can also start to understand other things about the planet, like its mass and density.
* * *
Two spacecraft had excellent seats for the event: NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO,) and the ESA's Proba-2 .
Gas 'waterfalls' might be feeding atmospheres of young planets | Astronomy.com
Stars and their planetary systems are born from clouds of gas and dust that collapse into swirling disks. Astronomers can’t directly see planets forming in these disks because they’re hidden in all the debris. But in the past few years, new kinds of telescopes have started to reveal gaps in disks around young stars where planets might be forming.
Now, astronomers have seen gas flowing in toward the gaps in one of those disks, as they reported Wednesday in Nature . The finding will help astronomers understand how planets collect the gases that make up their atmospheres. It’s also a sign that those gases “waterfall” down from higher up in the disk — not just the so-called mid-plane where the planets are forming.
Quite a lot has been going on:
'Waterfalls' of gas reveal baby planets - CNN
(CNN) Astronomers spied three spots around a star that could indicate baby planets are forming and growing there, according to a new study.
Arrokoth: Nasa renames Kuiper Belt 'Nazi Dwarf Planet' Ultima Thule | Metro News
Earlier this year, astronomers triggered a lot of people by calling a tiny space rock Ultima Thule – which turned out to be the name of the Aryan race's mythical homeland.
But it caused huge anger and consternation among scientists, journalists and sensitive Twitter users.
It's now called Arrokoth – a Native American term meaning 'sky' in the Powhatan/ Algonquian language.
'The name "Arrokoth" reflects the inspiration of looking to the skies and wondering about the stars and worlds beyond our own," said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute.
NASA's CASE instrument to probe planet clouds on European mission
Scheduled for launch in 2028, CASE will be sensitive to NIR, to complement ARIEL's other IR spectrometer.
CASE packed: ESA's ARIEL spacecraft en route to Lagrange Point.
NASA is to contribute a significant optical instrument to a European space mission intended to explore the atmospheres of exoplanets, for the first time.
The instrument, called the Contribution to ARIEL Spectroscopy of Exoplanets, or CASE, will add scientific capabilities to the European Space Agency's Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (ARIEL) mission. The ARIEL spacecraft with CASE on board is expected to launch in 2028. CASE will be managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, with JPL astrophysicist Mark Swain as the principal investigator.
Frequency of Coronal Mass Ejection Impacts with Early Terrestrial Planets and Exoplanets Around
Energetic flares and associated coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from young magnetically active solar-like stars can play a critical role in setting conditions for atmospheric escape as well aspenetration of accelerated particles into their atmospheres that promotes formation of biologically relevant molecules.
We have used the observationally reconstructed magnetic field of the 0.7 Gyr-young Suns twin, k1 Ceti, to study the effects of CME deflections in the magnetic corona of the young Sun and their effects on the impact frequency on the early Venus, Earth and Mars. We find that the coronal magnetic field deflects the CMEs toward the astrospheric current sheet (ACS).
Happening on Twitter
Is there another planet in the solar system, Planet Nine, orbiting the Sun way out past Neptune? Maybe. And here'… https://t.co/j5hiviMKvN BadAstronomer (from Boulder) Thu Nov 07 16:13:48 +0000 2019
No comments:
Post a Comment