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In this 1986 file photo, Christa McAuliffe, left, and Barbara Morgan, right, laugh during training. (NASA/AP/File)
Christa McAuliffe: How her legacy lives on
Christa McAuliffe never had the chance to fulfill her dream of teaching from space and in the aftermath of the accident, her lesson plans were filed away by NASA with sadness and grief. The lessons were incomplete, unfinished, and most regrettably, they were never were taught. I wrote an article two-and-a-half years ago how NASA engineer Jerry Woodfill — the same endearing engineer from our series “13 Things That Saved Apollo 13” — had come across McAuliffe’s unfinished lesson plans by accident and worked for several months to resurrect them and give them new life with current technology. On this 25th anniversary of the Challenger accident, I wanted to remind our readers of this engaging story, and how the Challenger Centers for Space Science Education are now using McAuliffe’s lessons. The lessons are also available for any teacher, or anyone who wants to view or use them.
Also, the Challenger Centers offer a wonderful education resource and experience for young people. Please consider donating to their mission, started by the families of the Challenger astronauts lost in the accident. Your donation will honor the Challenger 7 heroes and help inspire the next generation.
Nancy Atkinson blogs at Universe Today.
View all Universe Today posts on the Monitor.
This infrared image of Uranus taken by the Hubble telescope in 1997 shows three layers of the icy planet's atmosphere, which consists mostly of hydrogen with traces of methane. British scientists have proposed a mission investigating why Uranus gives off so little heat. (Newscom/File)
Scientists plan Uranus probe
British space scientists are leading plans to send a probe to explore giant ice planet Uranus. They have put forward a detailed proposal to the European Space Agency to launch a joint mission with NASA to the distant world, 1.8 billion miles from the sun.
It would give scientists their first close-up views of Uranus since NASA’s Voyager 2 flew past and captured fleeting pictures 25 years ago.
The £400million mission is designed to go in orbit to study the rings around Uranus and answer questions such as why it gives off so little heat.
Uranus – first spotted by Sir William Herschel from Bath, England, in 1781 – also has the most powerful wind observed in the solar system, blowing at more than 500mph.
The planet is unusual because it is tilted right over on its side. Astronomers believe this was caused when Uranus was given a mighty whack by another world in a cosmic collision.
More than 160 scientists are backing the Uranus Pathfinder project which is led by Dr Chris Arridge, of University College London’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory in Surrey.
He told Skymania in an exclusive interview: “We’ve only really scratched the surface of Uranus. It is very difficult to observe from Earth because any detail is smeared out.
“Since Voyager flew by we know the rings and atmosphere have changed. We need close-up measurements. Uranus is ripe for learning a lot from. It is so different among the planets.
“We tend to group Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune as the gas giant planets. But Jupiter and Saturn are dominated by hydrogen and helium with small rocky cores.
“When you go to Uranus and Neptune you find their composition is dominated a lot more by rock and ice. There is a lot more water in their atmospheres, a lot more methane.”
He added: “One of the big mysteries about Uranus is that it doesn’t emit much heat at all. Its axis is also highly tilted to its orbit so essentially it rolls around the solar system.
“It is thought that something the size of Mars or Earth hit Uranus early in the solar system and tilted it into its side, and that may have caused a massive loss of primordial heat.”
Uranus takes 84 years to orbit the Sun which leads to extreme seasons. Dr Arridge said: “Because there is so little heat coming from inside Uranus, its atmosphere is completely driven by force of sunlight. And because it has got this large tilt in its axis one pole is continually in sunlight for 42 years while the other is in darkness and then the situation is reversed for 42 years.”
The nuclear-powered probe, which the scientists hope to launch in 2021 would take an incredible 15 years to travel the vast distance to Uranus. It will be sent zipping past other planets including Venus and Saturn to help build up speed, like a game of interplanetary snooker.
Finally it will go into orbit around Uranus to study the planet, its five main moons and other smaller natural satellites.
Uranus Pathfinder is being proposed as an M-class (medium-class) mission for ESA. But Dr Arridge said: “We see this as medium scale only in terms of price. For the amount of science you get back it is a large scale mission for quite low cost.”
• Discover space for yourself and do fun science with a telescope. Here is Skymania’s advice on how to choose a telescope. We also have a guide to the different types of telescope available. Check out our monthly sky guide too!
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Paul Sutherland blogs at Skymania News
Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope shoot a laser into the Milky Way to calibrate the telescope's optic system. (ESO/Y/Newscom/File)
Sextillion is the word with new star discovery
The chance of alien life in space got a fresh boost tonight with the announcement that astronomers have discovered there are three times as many stars in the universe than was previously thought.
Scientists revealed that they have seriously underestimated the number of other suns in other galaxies – and that means there must be many more planets orbiting them where ET might live.
Galaxies are vast star cities, each containing many billions of stars. But as well as bright stars like the sun, there are many much fainter ones called red dwarfs.
The dimmer stars are difficult enough to detect in our own Milky Way spiral galaxy. But they are harder still to spot in more distant galaxies.
Now powerful instruments on the Keck Telescope on Hawaii has been able to pick out the red dwarfs in eight massive so-called elliptical galaxies which lie at a relatively close distance of 50 million to 300 million light-years.
The astronomers were startled to discover that red dwarfs – which are between a tenth and a fifth the mass of the sun – are 20 times more common in elliptical galaxies than they had imagined.
The discovery tripled the total number of stars of all types counted together throughout the universe. And it is exciting because a red dwarf called Gliese 581 in our own galaxy is already believed to host an Earthlike planet.
Red dwarfs are also billions of years older than stars like the sun which means any life would have had much longer to evolve.
Lead researcher Pieter van Dokkum, of America’s Yale University, whose paper appears this week in Nature, said: “There are possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars.”
He added: “No one knew how many of these stars there were. Different theoretical models predicted a wide range of possibilities, so this answers a longstanding question about just how abundant these stars are.”
Colleague Charlie Conroy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said: “We usually assume other galaxies look like our own. But this suggests other conditions are possible in other galaxies. So this discovery could have a major impact on our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution.”
• Discover space for yourself and do fun science with a telescope. Here is Skymania’s advice onhow to choose a telescope. We also have a guide to the different types of telescope available. Check out our monthly sky guide too!
©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com
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Paul Sutherland blogs at Skymania News
This illustration shows the Gliese 581 planetary system, where a number of exoplanets are thought to exist. (Courtesy of European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere)
List of planets spotted outside our solar system now tops 500
It was only a little over a year ago that the 400th extrasolar planet was confirmed, but time flies when you’re discovering exoplanets. The 19th of November 2010 marked the date that over 500 exoplanets had been confirmed on The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia.
Though it’s an arbitrary number to celebrate, the fact that we’ve confirmed the existence over 500 exoplanets since their initial discovery 20 years ago is deserving of merriment. Discovery of exoplanets has really ramped up over the last few years, thanks in part to the ESA’s COROTsatellite, the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the Keck Interferometer, and the improvement of observational techniques to discover and confirm exoplanets. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has over 700 candidates for exoplanets. Only 7 planets have been confirmed after being discovered by the Kepler spacecraft so far, though.
Jean Schneider, an astrobiologist at the Paris-Meudon Observatory, keeps up a database of the confirmed exoplanetary discoveries at The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia. He posted a warning about how muddle the declaration of “the discovery of the 500th exoplanet” could be. He wrote in the warning:
“The number of exoplanets, recored for instance at http://exoplanet.eu is necessarily subject to some uncertainty for several reasons:
- the mass limit below which a substellar object is called a planet is somewhat arbitrary
- the mass measurement is always affected by some instrumental inaccuracy
- whatever this mass limit is, the true mass for most planets is subject to some uncertainty, intrinsic to the detection method (unkown inclination of the orbit, modelisation of planet atmosphere)
- some planet detections, even published in refereed papers, are sometimes retracted afterwards
For all these reasons
1/ The boundary between “confirmed”/”unconfirmed” planets is somewhat fuzzy
2/ The number of planet candidates at http://exoplanet.eu ;(collected in the survey of professional litterature, conferences or websites) is affected by an uncertainty of a few units.”
In essence, to say that there is a “500th exoplanet” is really not possible, given that there needs to be confirmation of the planet. Even after that confirmation, there could be the possible retraction of the planet from the database. 5 confirmations were posted on the 19th, all of them published in refereed papers and discovered in 2010. This kicked the total over 500. But then another was announced the next day, and it was discovered in 2007 but only recently confirmed. So, putting a number on the 500th extrasolar planet to be confirmed is pretty much impossible, arbitrary at best.
Schneider was interviewed by Scientific American on just why he is the keeper of the encyclopedia, and some of his thoughts on the discoveries made so far and the future of the field. The text of the interview is available here.
Complicating matters even further, there is another running tally of extrasolar planets maintained by the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at PlanetQuest. Their count on the 22nd of November was only 497, and today rests at 500. The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia now stands at 504.
PlanetQuest has this video that succinctly describes the history of extrasolar planet discovery, for those interested:
Even if it’s arbitrary, you can still have that “500th exoplanet” party if you’d like, complete with Kepler satellite-shaped hats. Nobody will likely stop you; if they do, there will likely be another few dozen planets discovered – or a few retracted – by then anyways, making their point rather moot.
Source: MSNBC, PlanetQuest and The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia
Nicholos Wethington blogs at Universe Today.
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Spacetime itself seems to become pixelated when you look at it very closely. Some theorize that this happens because the universe is really two dimensional. (Newscom/File)
Is the universe a big hologram? This device could find out.
During the hunt for the predicted ripples in space-time — known as gravitational waves — physicists stumbled across a rather puzzling phenomenon. Last year, I reported about the findings of scientists using the GEO600 experiment in Germany. Although the hi-tech piece of kit hadn’t turned up evidence for the gravitational waves it was seeking, it did turn up a lot of noise.
Before we can understand what this “noise” is, we need to understand how equipment designed to look for the space-time ripples caused by collisions between black holes and supernova explosions.
Gravitational wave detectors are incredibly sensitive to the tiniest change in distance. For example, the GEO600 experiment can detect a fluctuation of an atomic radius over a distance from the Earth to the Sun. This is achieved by firing a laser down a 600 meter long tube where it is split, reflected and directed into an interferometer. The interferometer can detect the tiny phase shifts in the two beams of light predicted to occur should a gravitational wave pass through our local volume of space. This wave is theorized to slightly change the distance between physical objects. Should GEO600 detect a phase change, it could be indicative of a slight change in distance, thus the passage of a gravitational wave.
While looking out for a gravitational wave signal, scientists at GEO600 noticed something bizarre. There was inexplicable static in the results they were gathering. After canceling out all artificial sources of the noise, they called in the help of Fermilab’s Craig Hogan to see if his expertise of the quantum world help shed light on this anomalous noise. His response was as baffling as it was mind-blowing. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” Hogan said.
Come again?
The signal being detected by GEO600 isn’t a noise source that’s been overlooked, Hogan believes GEO600 is seeing quantum fluctuations in the fabric of space-time itself. This is where things start to get a little freaky.
According to Einstein’s view on the universe, space-time should be smooth and continuous. However, this view may need to be modified as space-time may be composed of quantum “points” if Hogan’s theory is correct. At its finest scale, we should be able to probe down the “Planck length” which measures 10-35 meters. But the GEO600 experiment detected noise at scales of less than 10-15 meters.
As it turns out, Hogan thinks that noise at these scales are caused by a holographic projection from the horizon of our universe. A good analogy is to think about how an image becomes more and more blurry or pixelated the more you zoom in on it. The projection starts off at Planck scale lengths at the Universe’s event horizon, but its projection becomes blurry in our local space-time. This hypothesis comes out of black hole research where the information that falls into a black hole is “encoded” in the black hole’s event horizon. For the holographic universe to hold true, information must be encoded in the outermost reaches of the Universe and it is projected into our 3 dimensional world.
But how can this hypothesis be tested? We need to boost the resolution of a gravitational wave detector-type of kit. Enter the “Holometer.”
Currently under construction in Fermilab, the Holometer (meaning holographic interferometer) will delve deep into this quantum realm at smaller scales than the GEO600 experiment. If Hogan’s idea is correct, the Holometer should detect this quantum noise in the fabric of space-time, throwing our whole perception of the Universe into a spin.
For more on this intriguing experiment, read the Symmety Magazine article “Hogan’s holometer: Testing the hypothesis of a holographic universe.”
Ian O'Neill blogs at AstroEngine.
The comedy website Zug might have pulled off the most epic Rickrolling ever, at 89,000 feet above the Earth's surface. (Youtube screenshot)
Humor website conducts first Rickroll in space
Those pranksters from Zug have now gone to the edge of space, sending their own DIY satellite up to 89,000 feet above Earth, and doing a little Rickrolling along the way. They claim they have now pulled the famous prank on the entire planet. Hmmm, hopefully this wasn’t the source of the radio signals that caused ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) probe to be “blinded from interference.” Surely strains of “Never Gonna Give You Up” could never do that….
The video below is a quick look at their balloon satellite launch and their results; here’s the whole story on Zug.
This artist's rendition of the Milky Way Galaxy might have to be revised if a group of Brazilian astronomers turn out to be right. They say that our galaxy could be more of a square. (Newscom/File)
Our galaxy might actually be square, study finds
Just like being stuck inside and not being able to see what the outside of your house looks like, we’re trapped inside the Milky Way galaxy and aren’t able to see its complete structure. Most of us have this vision of a circular, spiral galaxy with gracefully curving spiral arms. Nope, says a group of astronomers from Brazil. The Milky Way might be square. Not like a box, but, in places, the spiral arms are straight rather than curved, giving the Milky Way a distinctly square look. And our solar system sits right on one the straightest parts of an outer arm.
It really IS hip to be square.
The map of the Milky Way has been redrawn several times since the first attempts in the 1950’s using radio telescopes to trace out the spiral arms of our home galaxy. However, the concept of our galaxy having square-ish arms is not so farfetched: we know of the Pinwheel Galaxy, above, that has areas of straight and squared off arms, and a 2008 study using the Very Long Baseline Array found that instead of arms neatly circling the galactic center, the stars mapped traced a more elliptical orbit. But most of the maps of the Milky Way have assumed that the material in our galaxy orbits the center in a circular fashion, so having arms stars that don’t follow this path come as somewhat of a surprise.
Jaques Lepine and his team from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil wanted to obtain the equivalent of a ”face-on” map of the spiral arms of our Galaxy, so they studied the spectra produced by clouds of carbon monosulphide, a common gas in our galaxy, rather than the usual suspect of ionized hydrogen.
They were able to determine velocity information for 870 regions of the Milky Way which is a larger number than that of previous studies based on classical HII regions, so they’ve created a new map of the galaxy with detail never seen before. “One way to improve the description of the spiral arms is to increase the number of objects used to trace them,” the team writes in their paper.
Not only did they find evidence for straight places in the arms, but they also found an additional third arm. A 2008 study by the Spitzer Space Telescope had demoted the number of arms from four to two, but other studies, including an earlier one by Levine have said three. So, yes, there is some uncertainty on the number of arms. The new arm is about 30,000 light years from thegalactic core at a longitude of between 80 and 140 degrees. This one is rounded however, “with strong inward curvature.”
“Basically, our results confirm the main aspects of the spiral structure revealed by the studies of HII regions,” said Levine and his team. “For instance if we move horizontally across the figure, to the right or to the left of the Galactic center, we find roughly 3 spiral arms on each side, like the previous works. There are departures from the pure logarithmic spirals, with segments of arms that are almost straight lines.”
Drawing a map of the Milky Way is a challenging task, since we only have an edge-on view of the galaxy in which we reside. To top it off, it’s full of dust and gas that muck up the view in the visible light spectrum. So, we have to rely on other spectra.
We may not ever know exactly what our galaxy would look like when viewed from other worlds, but we’ll keep trying.
Read the team’s paper: The spiral structure of the Galaxy revealed by CS sources and evidence for the 4:1 resonance, Levine, et al.
Additional source: Technology Review Blog
Nancy Atkinson blogs at Universe Today.
View all Universe Today posts on the Monitor.
Two Russian companies have announced plans to construct a commercial space station for use by private citizens. (YouTube screen grab)
Russian companies plan to construct commercial space station
Will there soon be another human destination in low Earth orbit, or is this a redundant pipe dream? Two Russian-based companies hope to build the first-ever commercial space station, named, fittingly, Commercial Space Station (CSS). Orbital Technologies and Rocket and Space Corporation Energia (RSC Energria) said in a press release that they will work together to build, launch, and operate the station, which they foresee as will being utilized by private citizens, professional crews as well as corporate researchers interested in conducting scientific programs.
“I am pleased to announce our intention to provide the global marketplace a commercially available orbital outpost,” said the CEO of Orbital Technologies, Sergey Kostenko. “Once launched and operational, the CSS will provide a unique destination for commercial, state and private spaceflight exploration missions. The CSS will be a valuable addition to the global base of orbital assets. We look forward to working with corporate entities, state governments and private individuals from around the world.”
The two companies provided no schedule for launches of the modules, or information about their funding or resources, except to advertise they are looking for partnerships.
A US-based company, Bigelow Aerospace, has also been planning to construct a commercial space station using expandable habitats. They launched prototypes in 2006 and 2007, and in 2011 plan to launch a larger 180,572 square ft. module, which they tout as “fully operational.”
“What competition do we see on the horizon?” said Robert Bigelow, founder and president on the Bigelow Aerospace website. “Nobody.”
This Russian space station, if it actually goes forward, would change that.
Reportedly, the CSS will be able to house up to seven people with “modules and technologies of the highest quality and reliability will be used in the construction of the station,” to “lead the private sector in the commercializing human spaceflight platforms in low Earth orbit.”
The CSS will be serviced by the Russian Soyuz and Progress spacecraft, as well other transportation systems available from other countries, enabled by a “unified docking system that will allow any commercial crew and cargo capability developed in the Unites States, Europe and China.
Having second space station in orbit will allow the crew of the International Space Station to leave the ISS “if a required maintenance procedure or a real emergency were to occur, without the return of the ISS crew to Earth,” said Alexey Krasnov, Head of Manned Spaceflight Department, Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation, allowing the ISS crew to have a safe haven in the event of an emergency.
But the main goal of the CSS is to be a hub for commercial activity, scientific research and development in low Earth orbit. Orbital Technologies said they already have several customers under contract from different segments of industry and the scientific community, representing such areas as medical research and protein crystallization, materials processing, and the geographic imaging and remote sensing industry.
“We also have proposals for the implementation of media projects,” said Kostenko. “And, of course, some parties are interested in short duration stays on the station for enjoyment.”
And for the future, the developers see the CSS as a “true gateway to the rest of the solar system,” said Kostenko. “A short stop-over at our station will be the perfect beginning of a manned circumlunar flight. Deep space manned exploration missions planned in the next decade are also welcome to use the CSS as a waypoint and a supply station.”
Source: Orbital Technologies
Related posts:
- Once Classified Russian Rockets to be Used for Commercial Space Venture
- The Faces of the “New Frontier” of NASA’s Commercial Space Flight Plan
- Boeing to Offer Commercial Flights to Space
- Study Says 11,800 Jobs to be Created Per Year by Commercial Space Flight
- Russian Progress Supply Ship is Dropped from Space Station to Burn Next Week
- Russia Wants to Build New Space Station, Extend Life of ISS to 2020
- Bigelow Speeds Up Plans for a Human Habitable Space Station
- Russian Cargo Vessel Arrives at Station
- Space Station Pictures
- Space Tourist and New Crew Arrive at the Space Station
Nancy Atkinson blogs at Universe Today.
In 2008, the US Navy successfully tested its railgun, accelerating a slug to a record-setting 2520 meters per second. NASA is considering the same technology for launching payloads into orbit. (Newscom/File)
NASA considering rail gun launch system
The idea for using a rail guns to launch objects to space has been around for years – even Isaac Newton considered the concept. But now a group of NASA engineers is seriously studying the possibility of using a rail gun as a potential launch system to the stars, and they are looking for a system that turns a host of existing cutting-edge technologies into the next giant leap spaceward. Stan Starr, branch chief of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center said that nothing in the design calls for brand-new technology to be developed, but counts on a number of existing technologies to be pushed forward. He said developing such a system would be a “major technology revolution.”
“All of these are technology components that have already been developed or studied,” he said. “We’re just proposing to mature these technologies to a useful level, well past the level they’ve already been taken.”
A rail gun utilizes a magnetic field powered by electricity to accelerate a projectile along a set of rails, similar to train rails. One early proposal from the NASA group calls for a wedge-shaped aircraft with scramjets to be launched horizontally on an electrified track or gas-powered sled. The aircraft would fly up to Mach 10, using the scramjets and wings to lift it to the upper reaches of the atmosphere where a small payload canister or capsule similar to a rocket’s second stage would fire off the back of the aircraft and into orbit. The aircraft would come back and land on a runway by the launch site.
IN PICTURES: NASA's Future of Space Exploration
The engineers, from KSC and other NASA centers, contend the system, with its advanced technologies, will benefit the nation’s high-tech industry by perfecting technologies that would make more efficient commuter rail systems, better batteries for cars and trucks, and numerous other spinoffs.
For example, electric tracks catapult rollercoaster riders daily at theme parks. But those tracks call for speeds of a relatively modest 100 kpm (60 mph) — enough to make the ride exciting, but not nearly fast enough to launch something into space. The launcher would need to reach at least 10 times that speed over the course of two miles in Starr’s proposal.
The good news is that NASA and universities already have done significant research in the field, including small-scale tracks at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and at Kennedy. The Navy also has designed a similar catapult system for its aircraft carriers.
As far as the aircraft that would launch on the rail, there already are real-world tests for designers to draw on. The X-43A, or Hyper-X program, and X-51 have shown that scramjets will work and can achieve remarkable speeds.
The group sees NASA’s field centers taking on their traditional roles to develop the Advanced Space Launch System. For instance, Langley Research Center in Virginia, Glenn Research Center in Ohio and Ames Research Center in California would work on different elements of thehypersonic aircraft. Dryden Research Center in California, Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and Marshall would join Kennedy in developing the launch rail network. Kennedy also would build a launch test bed, potentially in a two-mile long area parallel to the crawlerway leading to Launch Pad 39A.
Because the system calls for a large role in aeronautic advancement along with rocketry, Starr said, “essentially you bring together parts of NASA that aren’t usually brought together. I still see Kennedy’s core role as a launch and landing facility.”
The Advanced Space Launch System is not meant to replace the space shuttle or other program in the near future, but could be adapted to carry astronauts after unmanned missions rack up successes, Starr said.
The studies and development program could also be used as a basis for a commercial launch program if a company decides to take advantage of the basic research NASA performs along the way. Starr said NASA’s fundamental research has long spurred aerospace industry advancement, a trend that the advanced space launch system could continue.
For now, the team proposed a 10-year plan that would start with launching a drone like those the Air Force uses. More advanced models would follow until they are ready to build one that can launch a small satellite into orbit.
A rail launcher study using gas propulsion already is under way, but the team is applying for funding under several areas, including NASA’s push for technology innovation, but the engineers know it may not come to pass. The effort is worth it, however, since there is a chance at revolutionizing launches.
IN PICTURES: NASA's Future of Space Exploration
Source: NASA
Artists impression shows the planetary system around the Sun-like star HD 10180. (L. Calçada/ESO/AP)
Exoplanets - as many of seven of them - spotted in newfound star system
There is another Sun-like star out there with an intriguing family of planets orbiting about and it could be the closest parallel to our own solar system that astronomers have found yet. European astronomers discovered a planetary system containing at least five planets, orbiting the star HD 10180, with evidence that two other planets may be present. If confirmed, one of those would have the lowest mass ever found.
“We have found what is most likely the system with the most planets yet discovered,” says Christophe Lovis, who led the team. “This remarkable discovery also highlights the fact that we are now entering a new era in exoplanet research: the study of complex planetary systems and not just of individual planets. Studies of planetary motions in the new system reveal complex gravitational interactions between the planets and give us insights into the long-term evolution of the system.”
To make this system even more intriguing, the team also found evidence that the distances of the planets from their star follow a regular pattern, as also seen in our Solar System. “This could be a signature of the formation process of these planetary systems,” said team member Michel Mayor.
HD 10180, is located 127 light years away in the southern constellation of Hydrus. The five confirmed planets are large, about the size of Neptune — between 13 and 25 Earth masses —with orbital periods ranging from between six and 600 days. The planets’ distances from the star ranges from 0.06 and 1.4 times the Earth–Sun distance.
“We also have good reasons to believe that two other planets are present,” said Lovis. One would be a Saturn-like planet (with a minimum mass of 65 Earth masses) orbiting in 2200 days. The other would be the least massive exoplanet ever discovered, with a mass of about 1.4 times that of the Earth. It is very close to its host star, at just 2 percent of the Earth–Sun distance. One “year” on this planet would last only 1.18 Earth-days.
“This object causes a wobble of its star of only about 3 km/hour— slower than walking speed — and this motion is very hard to measure,” says team member Damien Ségransan. If confirmed, this object would be another example of a hot rocky planet, similar to Corot-7b.
The team used the planet-finding HARPS spectrograph, attached to ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla, Chile, and made observations of HD 10180 for six years.
The newly discovered system of planets around HD 10180 is unique in several respects. First of all, with at least five Neptune-like planets lying within a distance equivalent to the orbit of Mars, this system is more populated than our Solar System in its inner region, and has many more massive planets there. Furthermore, the system probably has no Jupiter-like gas giant. In addition, all the planets seem to have almost circular orbits.
With this new announcement, the total number of exoplanets found is 472.
The team’s paper was submitted to Astronomy and Astrophysics (“The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets. XXVII. Up to seven planets orbiting HD 10180: probing the architecture of low-mass planetary systems” by C. Lovis et al.).
Source: ESO
Related posts:
- Other Solar System
- First Image of Another Multi-Planet Solar System
- Similar Solar System Discovered
- Researchers Find a Planet, Right Where They Expected
- Diagram of the Solar System
- Three Neptunes Orbiting Another Star
- New Planetary System has Familiar Feel
- Beyond the Solar System
- Second Smallest Exoplanet Found
- Metal Poor Star Found With Planets
Nancy Atkinson blogs at Universe Today.
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