An international team of astronomers used two of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world to create more than three hundred images of planet-forming disks around very young stars in the Orion Clouds. These images reveal new details about the birthplaces of planets and the earliest stages of star formation.
Most of the stars in the universe are accompanied by planets. These planets are born in rings of dust and gas, called protoplanetary disks. Even very young stars are surrounded by these disks. Astronomers want to know exactly when these disks start to form, and what they look like. But young stars are very faint, and there are dense clouds of dust and gas surrounding them in stellar nurseries.
In case you are keeping track:
What planets are visible in Toledo? | wtol.com
TOLEDO, Ohio — Conditions don't get much better than this for viewing the stars and planets in the night sky.
For best viewing, try to get away from city lights. And, make sure to bundle up! Lows are expected to be in the teens overnight.
The good news is, cold winter nights like this one tend to have the best visibility for astronomy because of low haze and humidity.
Early Wednesday after sunset, you will be able to look to the west and see Venus. It will look just like a bright star. And, right above the horizon, star-gazers can observe the planet Mercury.
The Most Distant World We've Ever Explored Just Shed Light on How Planets Are Born
In the far reaches of the Solar System, a small rock is showing us how giant planets get their start. Arrokoth - the most distant and most primordial world ever visited by a human spacecraft - now spills its secrets in three new papers.
Those findings could resolve some debate about how planetesimals - the small rocky 'seeds' that grow into planets - are formed. And the process appears to be a lot more gentle than previously thought.
"Arrokoth is the most distant, most primitive and most pristine object ever explored by spacecraft, so we knew it would have a unique story to tell," said Alan Stern from the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado and New Horizons Principal Investigator.
New Horizons May Have Solved Planet-Formation Cold Case - Scientific American
Not that long ago, it seemed the glory days of NASA’s New Horizons mission were in the rearview mirror, left behind with its historic Pluto encounter in 2015. Then, early last year, the spacecraft streaked by Arrokoth, a bit of flotsam drifting through the Kuiper Belt—the diffuse ring of primitive icy bodies beyond Neptune, of which Pluto is the largest member.
“I never expected that our encounter with Arrokoth would be shoulder to shoulder with the Pluto flyby in terms of its importance,” says New Horizons principal investigator and study co-author Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. “I didn’t expect to make an earth-shattering discovery about planet formation in the Kuiper Belt, and yet we have. At Arrokoth, we stumbled onto maybe the biggest prize of the entire New Horizons mission.
Quite a lot has been going on:
Sub-Neptune sized planet validated with the habitable-zone planet finder -- ScienceDaily
A signal originally detected by the Kepler spacecraft has been validated as an exoplanet using the Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF), an astronomical spectrograph built by a Penn State team and recently installed on the 10m Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas.
The planet, called G 9-40b, is about twice the size of the Earth, but likely closer in size to Neptune, and orbits its low mass host star, an M dwarf star, only 100 light years from Earth. Kepler detected the planet by observing a dip in the host star's light as the planet crossed in front of -- or transited -- the star during its orbit, a trip completed every six Earth days.
Reach for the Stars: How old is the oldest known planet? As old as Methuselah - masslive.com
An illustration of the Spitzer Space Telescope passing in front of the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, which appears bright yellow and red in this infrared view. NASA powered down the telescope on Jan. 30. "One of Spitzer's greatest contributions was its discoveries about exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system. Although exoplanet study was not Spitzer's primary task, the telescope made some incredible planetary finds," according to Elizabeth Howell, a writer for Space.com.
* * *
At 12.7 billion years old, planet Psr B1620-26 B is almost three times the age of Earth, which formed some 4.5 billion years ago. This exoplanet, the oldest ever detected in our Milky Way galaxy, has been nicknamed "Methuselah" or the "Genesis planet" on account of its extreme old age.
Michael Guillen: Why is Pluto no longer a planet?
Four4Four Science: Scientists want to restore Pluto's planet status; UAE eyes city on Mars, facial-recognition software could save lemurs, New Mexico's ancient matriarchy
Pluto was a planet in good standing for seventy-six years when in 2006, out of the blue, it was demoted and booted from our solar system’s family of planets. The stunning event – still hotly debated among astronomers – reveals more about astronomy’s messy subjectivity than Pluto’s stature.
New Horizons Reveals Full Picture of Arrokoth...and How Planets Form - Sky & Telescope
New Horizon's flyby of Arrokoth reveals a pristine object untouched since the solar system's origin. Its shape and geology show that planetesimals form more gently than previously thought.
Fourteen months have elapsed since New Horizons flew by the Kuiper Belt object named Arrokoth, the most distant world ever visited by a spacecraft – it lies 4.1 billion miles (6.6 billion km, or 44 astronomical units) away from Earth. Now, the spacecraft has returned enough data to Earth for scientists to fully assess what they saw, and they're concluding that our current idea of how planetesimals form is due for an update.
Happening on Twitter
How newborn #stars prepare for the birth of planets @AAS_Publishing https://t.co/cFhl8jxool physorg_com Thu Feb 20 17:15:24 +0000 2020
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