Scientists detect water around a hot Jupiter

Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) are part of a research team that has detected water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system. The team, including scientists from California Institute of Technology, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Pennsylvania State University, and University of Arizona, applied a sophisticated Doppler technique to the infrared to directly detect the planet and demonstrate the presence of water in its atmosphere. The discovery is described in the March 10, 2014 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The planet, named tau Boo b, orbits the nearby star tau Boötis and belongs to a class of exotic planets called "hot Jupiters" that are not found in our solar system. A hot Jupiter is a massive extrasolar planet that orbits very close to its parent star. Unlike our Jupiter, which is fairly cold and has an orbital period of about 12 years, tau Boo b orbits its star every 3.3 days and is heated to extreme temperatures by its proximity to the star. Under these conditions, water will exist as a high temperature steam. While hot Jupiters are found to be relatively common in the Galaxy, the origin and nature of these planets remain the subject of intense research.

The research team studied data collected at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, using the Near Infrared Echelle Spectrograph instrument. Because a hot Jupiter is too close to its star to separate the planet's light from that of the star, the researchers adapted a Doppler technique previously used to detect low mass-ratio spectroscopic binary stars. Application of this method to tau Boo b, however, posed a huge challenge, because the infrared radiation from the star is more than 10,000 times greater than that of the planet. The analysis software to extract this minute planetary signal was developed by Chad Bender, a Penn State member of the team, while he was a National Research Council Associate at NRL.

By comparing the molecular signature of water to the combined light spectrum of the planet and star, the scientists were able to measure the motion of the planet as it orbits the star and establish the presence of water vapor in the planet's atmosphere. The team also determined that the planet is six times more massive than Jupiter.

Dr. John Carr, a researcher in NRL's Remote Sensing Division and co-author on the paper, said, "The detection of water vapor in tau Boo b is an exciting and important step in understanding the composition of these exotic planets. Our result also demonstrates the power of this technique for measuring water and other molecules in the atmospheres of planets, giving us a new tool to study the nature and evolution of extrasolar planets."

Prior to this, scientists have reported detections of water for just a few other extrasolar planets. Most of these used the transit method, which requires a special orientation that causes the planet's orbit to pass in front of its star, as viewed from Earth. Alternatively, if a planet is sufficiently far away from its parent star, imaging techniques can be used to measure the composition of the atmosphere. However, most extrasolar planets do not fit into these two categories. The development of this new technique for exoplanets provides a means to learn about the atmospheres of this population of planets.

This work is ongoing, with plans to further examine the physical properties and composition of this hot Jupiter's atmosphere. The research team is also applying this technique to search for water and other molecules in several other hot Jupiter exoplanets.

Source: Phys.org

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Big Bang: Einstein's relativity theory backed by new-wave discovery

In the first moment following the Big Bang, scientists believe the universe got very big, very quickly.

On Monday, US astronomers said they had peered further back in time than ever before and detected compelling evidence of this dramatic and rapid expansion, a theory known as ''cosmic inflation''.

''It is somewhat of a mad theory, which was introduced in the 1980s to solve a lot of issues with the way the universe looked,'' said University of Melbourne cosmologist Alan Duffy.
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''This discovery is really the first confirmation that a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang the universe grew enormously,'' he said. ''We're all pretty ecstatic about this result.''

The announcement is also significant because it provides proof for Einstein's final prediction, the theory of general relativity, which predicts a violent event such as the rapid expansion of the universe would create ripples in space-time called gravitational waves.

After using a radio telescope at the South Pole, a team from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics said it had detected very specific patterns of light, known as B-modes, which were almost certainly caused by very early gravitational waves as a result of cosmic inflation.

''We're very excited to present our results because they seem to match the prediction of the theory so closely,'' said John Kovac, the leader of the BICEP project.

While strong circumstantial evidence existed for gravitational waves, no one had observed them directly, which was why the detection of light patterns left by primordial gravitational waves had astronomers so excited.

If the result was verified it promised to be one of the biggest advances in cosmology in 20 years, comparable to Australian Nobel prize winner Brian Schmidt discovering the expansion of the universe was accelerating. It also had implications for scientist's understanding of quantum mechanics.

University of Sydney astrophysicist Bryan Gaensler said normally the effect of gravitational waves was so small it was extremely difficult to detect.

But the rapid and violent expansion caused by inflation would have set the whole universe ringing with them, he said.

And although these early waves had long disappeared, the theory of inflation predicted they would leave behind a very specific and subtle imprint in the form of B-modes.

Professor Gaensler said scientists had been looking for B-modes for years, but the radio signal they emitted was very faint and travelled from the edge of the universe.

''It's like looking through a really dirty window at something that's thousands of kilometres away,'' he said.

University of Melbourne cosmologist Katie Mack said while the detection of primordial gravitational waves in the early universe was a ''really big deal'' and was consistent with the theory of inflation, their presence alone was not direct evidence of the theory.

''We can't say for sure that those gravitational waves were produced by inflation,'' she said.

But she said their detection was evidence that gravity had quantum mechanical properties, like particles, something physicists suspected but had not seen evidence of.

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Counting Craters: YOU Can Help Map the Moon

Left two panels are the full NAC areas analyzed in this study with markings overlaid. Top image shows expert markings, bottom shows volunteer data. Color circles are the individual markings and the white, thicker circles are results from a clustering algorithm. On the right side, four example craters are shown in detail with expert markings (left) and volunteer data (right); the craters are in order of increasing modification / degradation. Captioned below each pair is the number (N) of persons who marked that crater and the mean diameter (D) with standard deviation. Values in parentheses are relative standard deviations.
Crowdsourcing is the 21st century way of solving big problems. We crowdsource answers to our computer problems, funding for our start ups, and even science itself. A new study comparing the accuracy of crater counting from thousands of volunteers with that of experts shows that crowdsourcing science works.

Citizen science is the practice of everyday people helping with science research. It has a long and storied history, from the first people to ask “why?” through the natural philosophers of Newton’s time to the avid amateur astronomers and birders of today. With the advent of new online tools, however, participating in a citizen science project has never been easier.
CosmoQuest is a citizen science website that is building a community of people learning and doing science. It provides a web-interface that allows anyone with an internet connection to explore data from several NASA spacecraft of three worlds in our solar system: the moon, Vesta, and Mercury. As people mark craters and surface features, they all want to know, are we doing a good job?

Stuart Robbins of CU Boulder led the study of crater-counting by the citizen scientists of CosmoQuest and eight expert crater counters with varying levels of experience. Crater counting, it turns out, really is a subjective process, and the experts differ quite a bit from each other when analyzing the same patch of surface with their favorite tools. This gives insight into the history of this science and demonstrates the level of uncertainty in such measurements.

Then, the results of citizen scientists were aggregated and compared to the average of the experts’ counts. Turns out, the volunteers do just as well as the experts! There is an advantage, however, in the nature of crowd-sourcing. A lot of volunteers can map the moon a lot faster than a few researchers.
Why is counting craters so important, anyway? The relative ages of planetary surfaces can be determined by crater counts where, generally, older surfaces have more craters per unit area than younger surfaces. The Moon, unlike Earth, has undergone very little geologic change in its history, so the impact history has been preserved even while most of Earth’s has been erased.

Though the moon is so familiar to us, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has given us new and deeper insight than we ever had before. The LRO images being analyzed by volunteers have the highest precision available, such that you could see a really tall person making a snow angel! Citizen scientists are mapping craters 35 feet (11 meters) in diameter and larger.

There is still a LOT of moon to cover with over 500 million craters estimated visible on the surface. So really, the science is just getting started over at CosmoQuest. In addition, there are still the asteroid Vesta and the planet Mercury to map there, too, thanks to data from Dawn and MESSENGER.

It doesn’t take a PhD to do science, just as it doesn’t take one to think scientifically about problems in everyday life. For this specific science, all you have to do is watch a short tutorial video and get started. There are deeper levels of involvement, from Hangouts to forums and lesson plans for teachers. And CosmoQuest is just one of many, many citizen science projects out there that range from cosmology to microbiology. It’s a darn big Universe, so it’s good to know that we can explore it together.

Check out the video explainers for this paper: short version | long version

This work is published in the journal Icarus and a preprint will be available soon fromarXiv.org.

Source DNEWS

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There's No Planet X

There's no evidence for the existence of Planet X, despite a NASA space telescope’s best efforts to track it down.

The hypothetical world that may or may not be orbiting the sun beyond the orbit of Pluto has inspired many a doomsday theory. In the run-up to the much anticipated “Mayan Doomsday” of Dec. 21, 2012, the marauding Planet X was scheduled to make a inner-solar system dash, sparking gravitational mayhem, triggering civilization-ending solar flares. Some doomsayers held onto the crackpot notion that Planet X could be the fictional planet “Nibiru” that is inhabited by theAnnunaki, an alien race hellbent on re-claiming Earth as their own.

15 months later, we all know how that alien invasion went — apparently we won.

Top Doomsday Predictions Gone Bust

All this doomsday nonsense to one side, the hunt for “Planet X” actually has roots in real science. In the mid- to late-19th Century, astronomers were tracking the gravitational perturbations of the gas giant planets in an effort to track down an undiscovered world in the outermost reaches of the solar system — this hypothetical massive planet was dubbed “Planet X.” However, this fascinating trail of discovery ended at the discovery of tiny Pluto in 1930. Lacking the gravitational oomph to explain the gravitational perturbations, it turned out that Pluto wasn’t the Planet X astronomers thought it would be. After the realization that the gravitational perturbations observed were more likely observational error, Planet X became a story of legend.

The idea that the sun may have a stellar partner has also been investigated — perhaps there’s a brown dwarf (a failed star) going unnoticed out there. Nicknamed “Nemesis,” this binary partner could be evading detection.

A few oddities in the outer solar system have given astronomers pause to think that something massive might be lurking out there, however, whether it be a massive planet or sub-standard star. One strong piece of evidence laid in the discovery of the “Kuiper Cliff,” a sudden drop-off of Kuiper Belt objects in the region just beyond Pluto. Could the Cliff be caused by a previously overlooked world? Also, geological record has suggested there’s a regularity to mass extinctions on Earth linked to comet impacts — could a distant orbiting body be perturbing comets, sending them our way on a cyclical basis?

“The outer solar system probably does not contain a large gas giant planet, or a small, companion star,” said Kevin Luhman of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State University, University Park, Pa.

Luhman and his team have analyzed data from NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a space telescope that carried out a detailed infrared survey of the entire sky from 2010 to 2011. If something big is lurking out there, WISE would easily have spotted it. Alas, WISE has turned up no Planet X candidate. Previous observations by WISE have also ruled out the Planet X-comet perturbation theory.

According to a NASA news release, “no object the size of Saturn or larger exists out to a distance of 10,000 astronomical units (AU), and no object larger than Jupiter exists out to 26,000 AU. One astronomical unit equals 93 million miles. Earth is 1 AU, and Pluto about 40 AU, from the sun.”

However, the modern search for a Planet X was never WISE’s prime mission. In a second study, the discovery of 3,525 stars and brown dwarfs within 500 light-years of the sun are detailed. In cosmic distances, these objects are right on our galactic doorstep. Both studies have been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

“Neighboring star systems that have been hiding in plain sight just jump out in the WISE data,” said WISE principal investigator Ned Wright of the University of California, Los Angeles.

During its prime mission, WISE was able to capture two full scans of the infrared sky approximately 6 months apart. By comparing the positions of objects in the two scans, astronomers are able to deduce how much the objects have moved. The greater the positional shift, the closer the object is to Earth. This is known as the parallax effect and provides astronomers with a valuable tool to detect how close a celestial object is to Earth.

When WISE’s cryogenic helium ran dry, its primary mission came to an end, but late last year, the space telescope was rebooted to continue to search for the infrared signals of near-Earth objects and renamed NEOWISE.

Published at DNEWS

Source NASA

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Hubble Witnesses Mysterious Breakup of Asteroid

Hubble has observed some weird things since it was launched in 1990, but this is probably one of the strangest.
In September 2013, the Catalina and Pan-STARRS sky surveys spotted a mysterious object in the asteroid belt, a region of rocky debris that occupy the space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Follow-up observations by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii resolved three separate objects within the fuzzy cloud. It was so strange that Hubble mission managers decided to use the space telescope to get a closer look.
And what they saw has baffled and thrilled astronomers in equal measure.

Hubble resolved the slow-moving debris of an asteroid that is in the process of breaking up. The asteroid, designated P/2013 R3, hasn’t hit anything, as the fragments are moving too slow — it just seems to be falling apart. This is unprecedented, never before has an asteroid been seen disintegrating to this degree in the asteroid belt.
“This is a rock. Seeing it fall apart before our eyes is pretty amazing,” said David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the investigation.

Comets are often seen fragmenting in this way, particularly when they drift too close to the sun; ices sublimate, creating a violent out-gassing of vapor, causing the cometary structure to rupture and break apart. A recent example of a cometary breakup is that of Comet ISON that got shredded by the sun’s extreme heating and powerful tidal forces during Thanksgiving last year.
While analyzing Hubble data, Jewitt’s team could actually see ten separate chunks of asteroid slowly drifting apart — at only 1.5 kilometers per hour (the speed of a slow walk). Four of the largest chunks are around 400 meters wide, roughly four times the length of a football field.

“This is a really bizarre thing to observe — we’ve never seen anything like it before,” said co-author Jessica Agarwal of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany, in a Hubble news release. “The break-up could have many different causes, but the Hubble observations are detailed enough that we can actually pinpoint the process responsible.”

So what could possibly be causing this asteroid to just fall apart?

With the collision scenario already eliminated, could the break-up be down to ices trapped in the rock heating up and outgassing, causing fragmentation in a similar way to how comets disintegrate? This is unlikely, as there isn’t a significant heat source in the asteroid belt and the asteroid is far away from the sun.

The leading theory for the breakup of P/2013 R3 is a bizarre Yarkovsky–O’Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack (YORP) effect. As the sun’s radiation heats up one side of a space rock, that heat is radiated away as the asteroid rotates. The infrared radiation that is emitted from the dark side of the asteroid gives the asteroid a tiny kick. Over millions of years, this tiny acceleration effect can cause the asteroid to “spin up.” Should the spinning become faster than the structure of the asteroid can hold itself together, centrifugal forces can literally rip it apart.
As many asteroids are believed to be loose collections of rocks and dust — known as “rubble piles” — the impact of the YORP effect can be pretty dramatic, as P/2013 R3 can attest.

“This is the latest in a line of weird asteroid discoveries, including the active asteroid P/2013 P5, which we found to be spouting six tails,” says Agarwal. “This indicates that the sun may play a large role in disintegrating these small solar system bodies, by putting pressure on them via sunlight.”

This recent asteroid belt oddity comes hot on the heels of another disintegrating space rock, P/2013 P5, that was observed to have very comet-like qualities. The dusty three six tails of P/2013 P5 is also strong evidence for the YORP effect causing the asteroid to spin up and eject material from its equator.

While observing the expanding mass of debris, astronomers have estimated that there are 200,000 tons of material expanding to a volume the size of Earth.

As Hubble continues to study these strange findings in the asteroid belt, we are finding that a little solar heating over thousands to millions of years can have a dramatic impact on large asteroids, once again proving that our solar system is a dynamic and fascinating place.
Published at DNEWS

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Stunning Auroras Seen Over Swedish Mountains: Photos

The northern lights dance in a breathtaking display in these stunning images from an aurora video recently sent to Space.com.
Night sky photographer Chad Blakley captured these intense auroras grooving over several Swedish Lapland locations, including a small hotel high in the Swedish mountains, on Feb. 21. The result: aspectacular video of Sweden's northern lights display.

"This display was one of the best of the year and we are hopeful that the final four weeks of the season will continue to impress," Blakley wrote Space.com in an email. "The show started as soon as the sun went down and continued well into the night — long after my cameras had frozen and all of my batteries had died." (See more amazing aurora by Blakley and other stargazers).

Published at DNews

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Researchers claim Mojave Crater on Mars is source of Mars rocks found on Earth

A trio of researchers, two from France and one from Norway, has published a paper in the journal Science where they claim to have found sufficient evidence to identify a specific crater on Mars as the origin of Mars rocks found on the Earth's surface. In their paper Stephanie Werner, Anouck Ody and François Poulet describe their extensive research and how they came to their conclusions.

Scientists have known for many years that some of the meteorites that strike the Earth came from Mars. Such rocks are ejected from the surface of Mars when struck by meteorites themselves. Mars rocks have been classified into three main categories depending on their chemical makeup: chassignites, nakhlites and shergottites. The latter make up roughly three quarters of all such rocks found and have been studied extensively over the years. In this new effort, the researchers contend that all shergottites come from a single source on Mars: Mojave Crater.

To establish Mojave Crater as the source, the researchers combined several types of data, each of which suggest the crater as a likely suspect, though there is one, the estimated age of the rocks, that is not quite as clear-cut as the others.

The researchers began by analyzing imagery of Mars surface taken by various spacecraft over the years—they were looking for reasonably recent formation, a large size and rays leading away from the crater indicating a blast capable of sending rocky debris into space. Mojave Crater stood out as one of the best candidates for further study. The team next examined data gathered by spacecraft that have orbited the Red Planet over the years, specifically those that had taken mineral scans (measures of wavelengths of light bounced back off of them) of the Mojave Crater and the area around it. Analysis showed that the mineral composition of rocky material on the lip of the crater matched closely with the Mars rocks found on Earth. The team also sought to determine the age of the crater by studying the surface area around it—the number of craters around it and their size allows for a model to be made based on techniques developed with the Apollo moon project. Their study showed that the crater was likely formed approximately three million years ago. Finally, prior research has shown that the Martian rocks likely were in transit on average less than five million years, based on cosmic ray exposure.

Prior research has shown that the plateau in which Mojave Crater exists is approximately 4.3 billion years, which suggests that rocks blasted from its surface should be near the same age. Unfortunately, that's where things don't match as well. Most studies of Mars rocks have found them to be only 150 to 600 million years old. The researchers suggest this anomaly can be explained by events (shock waves, etc.) that transpired on Mars that set their age clock back.

Published at PHY.ORG

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WISE survey finds thousands of new stars, but no 'Planet X'

After searching hundreds of millions of objects across our sky, NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has turned up no evidence of the hypothesized celestial body in our solar system commonly dubbed "Planet X."

Researchers previously had theorized about the existence of this large, but unseen celestial body, suspected to lie somewhere beyond the orbit of Pluto. In addition to "Planet X," the body had garnered other nicknames, including "Nemesis" and "Tyche."

This recent study, which involved an examination of WISE data covering the entire sky in infrared light, found no object the size of Saturn or larger exists out to a distance of 10,000 astronomical units (au), and no object larger than Jupiter exists out to 26,000 au. One astronomical unit equals 93 million miles. Earth is 1 au, and Pluto about 40 au, from the Sun.

"The outer solar system probably does not contain a large gas giant planet, or a small, companion star," said Kevin Luhman of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State University, University Park, Pa., author of a paper in the Astrophysical Journal describing the results.

But searches of the WISE catalog are not coming up empty. A second study reveals several thousand new residents in our Sun's "backyard," consisting of stars and cool bodies called brown dwarfs.

"Neighboring star systems that have been hiding in plain sight just jump out in the WISE data," said Ned Wright of the University of California, Los Angeles, the principal investigator of the mission.

The second WISE study, which concentrated on objects beyond our solar system, found 3,525 stars and brown dwarfs within 500 light-years of our Sun.

"We're finding objects that were totally overlooked before," said Davy Kirkpatrick of NASA's Infrared and Processing Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. Kirkpatrick is lead author of the second paper, also in the Astrophysical Journal. Some of these 3,525 objects also were found in the Luhman study, which catalogued 762 objects.

The WISE mission operated from 2010 through early 2011, during which time it performed two full scans of the sky—with essentially a six-month gap between scans. The survey captured images of nearly 750 million asteroids, stars and galaxies. In November 2013, NASA released data from the AllWISE program, which now enables astronomers to compare the two full-sky surveys to look for moving objects.

In general, the more an object in the WISE images appears to move over time, the closer it is. This visual clue is the same effect at work when one observes a plane flying low to the ground versus the same plane flying at higher altitude. Though traveling at the same speed, the plane at higher altitude will appear to be moving more slowly.

Searches of the WISE data catalog for these moving objects are uncovering some of the closest stars. The discoveries include a star located about 20 light-years away in the constellation Norma, and as reported last March, a pair of brown dwarfs only 6.5 light-years away—making it the closest star system to be discovered in nearly a century.

Despite the large number of new solar neighbors found by WISE, "Planet X" did not show up. Previous speculations about this hypothesized body stemmed in part from geological studies that suggested a regular timing associated with mass extinctions on Earth. The idea was that a large planet or small star hidden in the farthest reaches of our solar system might periodically sweep through bands of outer comets, sending them flying toward our planet. The Planet X-based mass extinction theories were largely ruled out even prior to the new WISE study.

Other theories based on irregular comet orbits had also postulated a Planet X-type body. The new WISE study now argues against these theories as well.

Both of the WISE searches were able to find objects the other missed, suggesting many other celestial bodies likely await discovery in the WISE data.

"We think there are even more stars out there left to find with WISE. We don't know our own sun's backyard as well as you might think," said Wright.

WISE was put into hibernation upon completing its primary mission in 2011. In September 2013, it was reactivated, renamed NEOWISE and assigned a new mission to assist NASA's efforts to identify the population of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects. NEOWISE will also characterize previously known asteroids and comets to better understand their sizes and compositions.

Published at PHY.ORG

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ALMA sees icy wreckage in nearby solar system: Possible hidden planet causing rapid-fire cometary collisions Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-03-alma-icy-wreckage-nearby-solar.html#jCp

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope have discovered the splattered remains of comets colliding together around a nearby star; the researchers believe they are witnessing the total destruction of one of these icy bodies once every five minutes.

The "smoking gun" implicating this frosty demolition is the detection of a surprisingly compact region of carbon monoxide (CO) gas swirling around the young, nearby star Beta Pictoris.

"Molecules of CO can survive around a star for only a brief time, about 100 years, before being destroyed by UV radiation," said Bill Dent, a researcher at the Joint ALMA Office in Santiago, Chile, and lead author on a paper published in the journal Science online at the Science Express website. "So unless we are observing Beta Pictoris at a very unusual time, then the carbon monoxide we observed must be continuously replenished."

Comets and other icy bodies trap vast amounts of CO and other gases in their frosty interiors. When these objects collide, as is common in the chaotic environment around a young star, they quickly release their stored gases. If these collisions were occurring randomly in this system, then the CO would be more or less evenly distributed.

But the new images from ALMA show something else: a single compact clump of CO approximately 13 billion kilometers (8 billion miles) from the star—or about three times the distance of Neptune to the Sun. "This clump is an important clue to what's going on in the outer reaches of this young planetary system," says Mark Wyatt, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and coauthor on the paper.

Earlier observations of Beta Pictoris with other telescopes revealed that it is surrounded by a large disk of dusty debris and harbors at least one planet orbiting approximately 1.2 billion kilometers (750 million miles) from the star.

The new ALMA data suggest, however, that there may be a second, as-yet-undetected planet orbiting much farther out. The gravity from such a planet would shepherd millions of cometary bodies into a relatively confined area. A similar phenomenon is seen in our own solar system where the planet Jupiter keeps a group of so-called Trojan asteroids in a confined orbit around the Sun.

"To get the amount of CO we observed—which is equal to about one-sixth the mass of Earth's oceans—the rate of collisions would be truly startling, with the complete destruction of a large comet once every five minutes," noted Aki Roberge, an astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and coauthor on the paper. "To get this number of collisions, this would have to be a very tight, massive swarm."

The astronomers propose an alternate possibility for the origin of this swarm of icy bodies; two Mars-size icy planets smashing together within the past million years could have produced the compact, cometary debris around the star. Such an occurrence, however, would be rare and there is a low likelihood that it could have occurred recently enough for the remnants to still be so concentrated.

Both possibilities, however, give astronomers reason to be optimistic that there are many more planets waiting to be found around Beta Pictoris, which is located a relatively nearby 63 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Pictor.

ALMA's unprecedented resolution and sensitivity enabled the astronomers to detect the faint millimeter-wavelength light emitted by both the dust grains and CO in the system.

"And carbon monoxide is just the beginning; there may be other more complex pre-organic molecules released from these icy bodies," adds Roberge.

The astronomers hope that further observations with ALMA will shed more light on this system and help us understand what conditions were like during the formation of our own solar system.

Published at: PHY.ORG

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