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Tag: exoplanets

  • Hungry Rogue Planet Is Gobbling Gas and Dust at 6 Billion Tons per Second

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    Rogue planets live by their own rules, freely floating through the cosmos without being bound to a star. With no stellar supervision, those isolated planetary bodies can often behave in unusual ways. Astronomers discovered a rogue planet experiencing a rather unusual growth spurt, bingeing on its surrounding gas and dust at an unprecedented rate.

    The rogue planet is located approximately 620 light-years away in the Chameleon constellation. It’s still in its early formation process and is feeding off a surrounding disc of gas and dust, the leftovers from its birthing process. Using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope, the team of scientists behind the recent discovery revealed that the planet, officially named Cha 1107-7626, is eating the material at a record-breaking rate of 6 billion tons per second.

    The discovery is detailed in a paper published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, detailing the strongest growth rate ever observed in any planetary body.

    Feeding time

    Rogue planets can form in two ways. They are either born around a star and later evicted from their cosmic home by interacting with other bodies in the system, or they form independently in the aftermath of the collapse of a cloud of gas and dust. The free-floaters still have discs of material around them, the remnants of their formation process. While still in their growing phase, planets typically feed on the gas and dust found in the protoplanetary disc surrounding them in a process called accretion.

    For Cha 1107-7626, the rate at which it is accreting material is not steady. By observing the planet over time, the astronomers behind the new study found that by August, it had started accreting material around eight times faster than it was just a few months earlier.

    “This is the strongest accretion episode ever recorded for a planetary-mass object,” Víctor Almendros-Abad, an astronomer at the Astronomical Observatory of Palermo, National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), and lead author of the new study, said in a statement. “People may think of planets as quiet and stable worlds, but with this discovery we see that planetary-mass objects freely floating in space can be exciting places.”

    Although still young, the planet is already a big boy with a mass five to 10 times that of Jupiter’s. The team of astronomers also discovered that its unusual growth may be attributed to its magnetic activity, causing material to fall into the disc at a remarkably high rate.

    The chemistry of the disc surrounding the planet seems to have also changed during its accretion, with the team detecting water vapor during the process but not before. This type of activity has only ever been observed on stars, suggesting that even planetary objects with lower mass can have strong enough magnetic fields to drive their accretion.

    “The idea that a planetary object can behave like a star is awe-inspiring and invites us to wonder what worlds beyond our own could be like during their nascent stages,” Amelia Bayo, ESO astronomer and co-author of the study, said in a statement.

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    Passant Rabie

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  • Astronomers Discover Planet Orbiting Nearest Single Star to the Sun

    Astronomers Discover Planet Orbiting Nearest Single Star to the Sun

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    The single nearest star to the Sun—which is to say, the closest star moving independent from a star system—has at least one exoplanet, according to a team of astronomers that recently scrutinized the heavenly body.

    The team’s research—published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics—describes conclusions made from five years of observational data taken with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at Chile’s Paranal Observatory.

    The little world orbits Barnard’s star, a red dwarf about six light-years from Earth. Barnard’s star is a dim, cool star about one-seventh the mass of our Sun. Unlike the nearest star to the Sun (Proxima Centauri, a little over four light-years away in the Alpha Centauri star system), Barnard’s star zips through the cosmos alone. As EarthSky points out, Barnard’s star is much less powerful than the Sun; if we orbited that star instead of the Sun, life as we know it would not be possible.

    The same could be said for the spunky exoplanet, but in the opposite direction as a thermometer reads. The star—dubbed Barnard b—is about twenty times closer to its host star than Mercury is to our Sun, and whips around Barnard’s star in just over three Earth days. Given its celestial proximity, the exoplanet is understandably piping, with a surface temperature around 257° Fahrenheit (125° Celsius).

    “Barnard b is one of the lowest-mass exoplanets known and one of the few known with a mass less than that of Earth,” said Jonay González Hernández, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain and the study’s lead author, in an ESO release.

    Barnard’s star was previously suspected to host exoplanets in its orbit—there was promising evidence in 2018, but no certain confirmation—until now.

    The team was looking for exoplanets orbiting Barnard’s star that may exist within the habitable (or “Goldilocks”) zone, a distance from a host star where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface. It does not, so life as we know it can’t exist on the exoplanet.

    “The discovery of this planet, along with other previous discoveries such as Proxima b and d, shows that our cosmic backyard is full of low-mass planets,” said study co-author Alejandro Suárez Mascareño, a researcher also at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, in the same release.

    In its new paper, the team also stated that there is evidence of at least three more exoplanet candidates around Barnard’s star, though more observations will be necessary to confirm whether any of those candidates are actual exoplanets.

    The next-generation Extremely Large Telescope, alongside missions like the Webb Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will hopefully yield more discoveries of these not-so-distant alien worlds.

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    Isaac Schultz

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  • The Science Platform Capeia Introduces a Novel Scoring Algorithm for Monitoring the Impact of Articles

    The Science Platform Capeia Introduces a Novel Scoring Algorithm for Monitoring the Impact of Articles

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    Press Release
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    updated: May 25, 2017


    Vienna, Austria, May 25, 2017 (Newswire.com)
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     The newly launched science platform Capeia not only seeks to stimulate discussion but is also committed to spreading the information and ideas that are expressed on this website into the depths of the World Wide Web. So much so that it provides an extra crowdfunding scheme to collect funds with which to provide a reward on a monthly basis for the scientist whose contribution attracts the most attention.

    For accurately determining an article’s attention, Capeia has conceived an algorithm that not only covers conventional parameters such as views and shares but also measures whether an article is read entirely or dropped halfway through. Furthermore, significant weight is put onto whether visitors’ comments or inquiries are addressed by the author in due time. Capeia, therefore, does not define impact merely through the response an article draws by the community but explicitly observes the attention it gets by its author following publication.

    Rüdiger Schweigreiter, Editor: “Capeia does not support a ‘Fire and Forget’ publishing policy. Impact is not a one-way street. We do not limit the definition of impact to the attention an article receives from the audience but extend it to the post-publication attention it gets from its author. Taking into account both the audience and the author for metric analysis lives up to Capeia’s mission to strengthening the relationship between scientists and the interested public.”

    Capeia is proud to put this scoring algorithm into use with an article on exoplanets by SETI scientist Franck Marchis. In this essay, Dr. Marchis expounds the state of the art of exoplanet detection and outlines future technological possibilities. A simulation, which is shown here for the first time, illustrates what exoplanets might look like when viewed through the next generation of telescopes that are currently under construction.

    Media Contact: Rüdiger Schweigreiter, PhD; rschwei@capeia.com; +43-650-6441971

    Source: Capeia

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