High-resolution illustration of the Roman spacecraft against a starry background. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Astronomers discovered planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, in the 1990s. We quickly went from knowing of only our own planetary system to realizing that planets likely outnumber the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy. Now, a team of scientists is finding ways to improve our understanding of planet demographics by searching for rogue worlds.
Quite a lot has been going on:
The Solar System Winked - The New York Times
When Ilana Ozernoy was a young girl growing up in the Soviet Union, her father, Leonid Ozernoy, a prominent astrophysicist in Moscow, bought her a telescope.
Ms. Ozernoy and her father, who was a scientist at the P.N. Lebedev Physics Institute in Moscow, along with her older sister and mother, would spend summers in the Baltics. They visited observatories in ancient Estonian cities like Pärnu and Tartu, where Dr. Ozernoy would research astronomical phenomena like quasars and black holes.
Could There Once Have Been Two Stars in Our Solar System? | Digital Trends
Could our sun have had a partner star during the early days of the solar system? A new study suggests our sun may have had a binary companion, like the system of the planet Tatooine from the original Star Wars movie.
A team of researchers from Harvard put forth the theory that our region of space may have had another star present during the formation of the solar system. That would explain the presence of the Oort cloud, a collection of icy bodies orbiting the sun beyond Neptune. Scientists aren’t sure exactly how this cloud formed, and the presence of another star early could help explain it.
Dragonfly Is the First Airplane Built for the Outer Solar System | airspacemag.com | Air
The friendliest place to fly in this solar system isn’t here on Mother Earth. It’s on Saturn’s moon Titan, a mysterious world hidden by a methane-rich atmosphere four times denser than Earth’s. A team of Titan watchers sees opportunity in that dense atmosphere. It will enable them to explore a much larger area on Titan than rovers ever have done on Mars.
“The idea of flying on another planet is really exciting,” says Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle, the principal investigator for the Dragonfly mission and a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). “We’ve seen in the exploration of Mars how much mobility enhances the science return and what you can learn by going from place to place,” she says.
While you're here, how about this:
Pristine Space Rock Offers Scientists Peek at Early Solar System | NASA
Animation reveals invisible center of solar system that's not the sun - Business Insider
It's common knowledge that the sun is the center of the solar system. Around it, the planets orbit — along with a thick belt of asteroids, some meteor fields, and a handful of far-traveling comets.
* * *
That center of mass, called the barycenter, is the point of an object at which it can be balanced perfectly, with all its mass distributed evenly on all sides. In our solar system, that point rarely lines up with the center of the sun.
Is our solar system shaped like a deflated croissant? | Space
Scientists have traditionally posited that the heliosphere , the huge bubble of charged particles that the sun blows around itself, has a rounded leading edge, where the solar system barrels through space, with a long tail streaming behind it. But the heliosphere's true shape is weirder and more complex, a recent study suggests — something akin to a deflated croissant.
It's tough to map out the heliosphere, because its closest edge is still a whopping 10 billion miles (16 billion kilometers) from Earth. Just two spacecraft, NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes , have directly sampled the boundary, and two data points are far from sufficient to outline the heliosphere's contours.
Shape of our solar system more like a deflated croissant than a comet's tail, NASA study shows-
Scientists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have developed a new prediction about the shape of the bubble the surrounds our solar system. The space agency has said all planets of our solar system are encased in a magnetic bubble that is created by the solar wind.
For years scientists have tried figuring out the shape of the bubble that travels through space as the Sun orbits the centre of the galaxy. While traditionally scientists thought that the heliosphere as a comet shape with a rounded leading edge and tail, new research has showed that the bubble is actually shaped like a deflated croissant, lacking a long tail.
Happening on Twitter
A Map of Every Object in Our Solar System 🔭 https://t.co/JQUyXN7aLA https://t.co/XM0UsAErkj VisualCap (from Vancouver, BC) Sun Aug 23 00:00:43 +0000 2020
It might be time to reassess whether our obsession with sending humans to Mars is causing us to ignore exploring th… https://t.co/da5fEDoWcp techreview (from Cambridge, MA) Sat Aug 22 18:09:28 +0000 2020
Did you know there are planets beyond our solar system wandering the galaxy alone? These worlds are unbound to any… https://t.co/2MQPDEEtnL NASAExoplanets (from Beyond) Fri Aug 21 17:10:11 +0000 2020
A close encounter with another star may have torn the cigar-shaped interstellar visitor 'Oumuamua from its parent b… https://t.co/pWDIyVVWYI AstronomyMag (from Our tiny corner of the cosmos) Sat Aug 22 05:30:09 +0000 2020
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