Supernova May Indeed be the Stuff Planets Are Made of......

An international group of scientists, using data obtained from NASA's SOFIA, an infrared observatory, have concluded that  supernova do indeed output enough material for planetary formation.

The groups observations reveal a particular cloud produced by a supernova explosion 10,000 years ago. The cloud contains enough dust to make 7,000 Earths.  

The researchers had evidence that a supernova’s outward-moving shock wave can produce huge amounts of dust. The question was - would the dust continue to spread, after encountering the interstellar medium - or be pushed back into the relative vicinity of the supernova. 

The team found that The dust survived the initial shock waves from the supernova event and continued "flowing into the interstellar medium where it can become part of the ...  material for new stars and planets..."

Check out the complete NASA article HERE

The Solar System Was Probablly Never a Steady State

 Despite what a lot of solar system pundits would like to believe, Sol's children have not always played nice nor stayed in there own back yards. Jupiter, for instance, may have once been as close to the Sun as Mars is now!

During the formation of the solar system, the gaseous giant planets that make up the outer solar system were pulled much closer to the Sun than they are now, causing absolute chaos in the asteroid belt.

As the gas giants did their dance through the solar system, the planets, from Mercury to Neptune may have been pulled into the asteroid belt. Jupiter most likely caused the most chaos in the asteroid belt by sweeping up all but one tenth of a percent behind.

All of this disruption wasn't a bad thing however. It has long been believed that Earth's water came from asteroid ice. Very likely it was the massive stirring that Jupiter caused brought the material to Earth that was the starting point for complex life.

 View the Daily Galaxy blog for the original HERE

New Star Koi-351 Has Something Strangely Familiar Orbiting it

European Astrophysicists have uncovered something unexpected orbiting newly discovered star KOI-351.   This star has 7 planets, which in and of itself in unusual, but even more unexpected was the arrangement of these planets. 

The arrangement of planets around KOI-351 is remarkably similar to our own system with the small rocky planets close in and the gas giants in the outer orbits.

Astrophysicist Juan Cabrera commenting on the importance of the discovery said that it is a big step in the search for a twin to the Solar System (and a step closer) in finding a second Earth. 

Of course the placement of the planets is not completely ideal.  All the planets orbits fit inside of Earth own orbit with the gas giants where Earth's orbit resides in the solar system. 

Check out the Daily Galaxy article here

One in five sunlike stars harbors an Earth-size world that orbits in a "habitable zone"

Yep, that is not a typo.  The National Geographic blog writes:

• astronomers estimate that 22 percent of sunlike stars may be orbited by small, rocky planets that reside within so-called habitable zones, where they receive Earth-like levels of sunlight.

The Kepler satellite was tasked with finding  "exoplanets," using the "transits," method of the parent star to detect the planets.

At the end of it's working life, Kepler, had stared at 150,000 stars  in the direction of the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.  Out of that group of possible candidates the astronomers studied 42,000 stars that are like our sun or slightly cooler and smaller.   The results suggest that there might well be a habitable planet within 12 light years and this planet is orbiting a sun that we could see with the naked eye!

Another thing to consider is that if we look at just the Milky Way and use the same 22% of sunlike stars containing Earth like planets, then you come up with an astronomical amount of planets and stars that resemble the Earth Sol - solar system. 

Check out the complete National Geographic article HERE

Did the Solar System Have Many More Gas Giants Early In It's History?

Back when the solar system was only 600 million years old the system looked and acted much much stranger than it does today. For instance it now appears that at this early stage in the formation of the solar system there may have been more than four giant planets initially, and some were ejected into inter-stellar space. This conclusion is borne out by the fairly common occurrence of free floating planets that already exist in interstellar space.

From the Daily Galaxy article:

Dr. David Nesvorny of the Southwest Research Institute states that these conclusions:

• come from the analysis of the trans-Neptunian population of small bodies known as the Kuiper Belt, and from the lunar cratering record.

However the problem that arises from this conclusion comes from the orbit of the gas giant Jupiter which would have imparted much more kinetic energy to the inner system possibly causing Mars or Venus to collide with Earth!

There is a solution it would seem. Computer simulations of Jupiter and the other gas giants during this period of great instability have shown that Jupiter did not stay in it's present orbit but "jumped" into orbits closer to the sun plus swapping orbits with Uranus or Neptune. One weird thing kept coming up when the simulations were run with the present plants in place. When Jupiter skipped in towards the sun, it would have destabilized Uranus or Neptune's orbit ejecting them from the solar system...since that DIDN'T happen then there must have been other planets of similar size and mass that were ejected. Since free floating planets have been observed, it isn't much of a stretch to consider our own system doing something similar.

Check out the Daily Galaxy article here

Scientists Believe that Uranus Took Two Massive Impacts

There is little debate that Uranus is a strange place. It is the only planet in the solar system to be 90º off axis and quite literally rolls around the sun. This odd sideways polar position for Uranus may have been caused from not one but two giant impacts. This comes from simulations that were run by two astronomers at the Observatory of Côte d'Azur in Nice, France. To get such a huge tilt, Uranus would have to have been smashed into by another planet the size of Uranus which would have totally disrupted Uranus' system of moons. Since that is not the case, the two astronomers suggest that Uranus could have been hit by two Earth sized planets several billion years ago. Scientists also suspect that Neptune may have been impacted very much like Uranus, leading many astronomers to reconsider their models of how the outer Solar System formed.........

Check out the Dvice article here

A planet made of Diamonds?

Back in 2007, I wrote this article which dealt with the "discovery" of the largest diamond in the galaxy, which scientists concluded was the exposed core of a white dwarf star. So when I first started seeing this article making the rounds, I just figured that it was new people finding old stories. Then Tim Sayell sent me this Yahoo News item which deals not with white dwarf cores, but a very unusual planet!

Located about an eighth of the way toward the center of the Milky Way from the Earth, the strange crystalline planet is probably the remnant of a once-massive star that has lost its outer layers. Now this is at first glance the makings of a white dwarf, but the weirder thing is that even if it were the remnants of a massive star, it appears that the outer layers of the star's "atmosphere" were stripped off by a massive companion neutron star which it orbits every two hours. This orbit is so tight it would fit inside our own Sun!

It gets weirder still, carbon in a crystalline matrix...got it, diamond like material. Knowing that it is small but with the ability to crush carbon down to a crystal mean ultra-massive - scientists calculate slightly more than Jupiter, but with such a small size, something in the area of 20 times as dense. Oxygen is likely to be present at the surface, but lighter elements like hydrogen and helium are not present.

Read complete article here Wikipedia article here

What's Pluto Got That Earth Doesn't?

Well according to this article on NASA's site Three more moons is what. Now I hear ya saying, hey wait, Pluto only has 3 moons. Wrongo! Hubble just found the smallest Pluto moon so far still designated P4.

From the NASA article:

• The new moon is the smallest discovered around Pluto. It has an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles. By comparison, Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is 648 miles across, and the other moons, Nix and Hydra, are in the range of 20 to 70 miles in diameter.

The new moon is located between the orbits of Nix and Hydra and is believed to have formed by a collision between Pluto and another planet-sized body early in the history of the solar system, as were the other three Plutonian moons.

All this work is support work to support NASA's New Horizons mission, scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015.


photo computer generated from Hubble photos - complete gif and info here

Jupiter to Blame for Mars Being so Small?

It would appear that Jupiter may be to blame for the planet Mars being so low in mass, when in truth it should be somewhere between Venus and Earth in mass. Also the gas giant is most likely responsible for the unusual makeup of the asteroid belt.

Now first is the fact that we have found an inordinate amount of systems that have gas giants very close in to their primary. Instead of it being an aberration, this makeup would appear to be more normal than not.

A research team from Southwest Research Institute ran a series of simulations that demonstrated the effects of Jupiter moving in towards the Sun during the early days of the solar system.

If, shortly after Jupiter formed, was drawn in towards the sun only to reverse the inward spiral at about 1.5 times the distance of Earth's orbit by the formation of Saturn, then most of the planet building material would have been swept up except what existed inside of Earth's orbit. Limiting what was available for Mars.

The question that isn't answered so far is, does this model also explain the asteroid belt?

Dr. Kevin Walsh, leader of the Southwest Research Institute team said: (from the IO9 article)

• "...we started to do a huge number of simulations. The result was fantastic. Our simulations not only showed that the migration of Jupiter was consistent with the existence of the asteroid belt, but also explained properties of the belt never understood before."

The team's conclusions are that not only does their roving Jupiter model explain the lack of mass in Mars but also the existence and weird makeup and distribution of elements.

Nature.com link, IO9 complete article

Cassini Mission a short film by Chris Abbas

A thoroughly engrossing short film by Chris Abbas using footage captured by NASA's Cassini Imaging Science System. It is on Vimeo but I also found it on Boing Boing as well. Enjoy!

CASSINI MISSION from cabbas on Vimeo.

Habitable Planet Found?

French scientists have found a planet that they say is most likely habitable. Gliese 581d, about 20 LYs distant, circles a red dwarf star and has a stable atmosphere, comfortable temperatures, and a surface covered in liquid water.

Though Gliese 581d is about the size of two Earths and masses upwards of six times Earth mass scientists consider it to be a good candidate for habitability because of it's rocky surface, ability to maintain a robust stable atmosphere and receive enough energy from the red dwarf to maintain large bodies of liquid water.

Even so it is not likely to be a vacation spot. From the article:

• That's not to say it would necessarily be a pleasant place to live, though. Gliese 581d probably depends on a significant greenhouse effect to keep itself warm since it gets relatively little energy from its star. The atmosphere is mostly CO2, and while you'd get clouds and warm rain and oceans and stuff, the surface itself would be "in a perpetual murky red twilight."

The scientist's models also suggest that Gliese 581d may be tidally locked.

Cosmos article Dvice blog article

Messenger spacecraft set for Mercury Orbit Insertion

NASA is reporting that Messenger, the first probe ever to orbit the planet Mercury, will move into orbit around Mercury on March 17, 2011. A 14 minute burn of its main engine will slow the craft by 1,929 mph. The maneuver will place the spacecraft into a 12-hour orbit about Mercury with a 124 mile minimum altitude.

It has taken MESSENGER a convoluted trip through the solar system and six years to become the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury and only the second to send back data since the Mariner 10 mission over 30 years ago. Here is a NASA video of the orbital insertion maneuver Messenger will take March 18th.



Thanks to Dan for the update

NASA Mission Finds Earth Candidates in Habitable Zone

NASA Kepler Mission continues to pay dividends. NASA reports that Kepler has discovered its first Earth-size planet candidates and its first candidates in the habitable zone, the region around a star where water could exist on a planet's surface in liquid form. Five of the potential planets are near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of smaller, cooler stars than our sun. More investigation will be needed to determine if the bodies are indeed planets as well as more data on size and orbit.

Read the complete NASA article HERE

Pluto's Status Changes Once again.

Tim Sayell writes -First is one, then it's not....then it is one...then it's not... You know what I think? I think two scientists in white coats find an empty observatory somewhere and just flip a coin...
Anyway, Pluto might be a planet again.

Well that might be a bit hasty, but according to the Yahoo News article that Tim sent in Pluto has become the largest body in the outer solar system. It seems that with further observation, Eris (the body that caused all this trouble with Pluto.) has had it's size placed at somewhat smaller than Pluto. Not by much mind you, they are so close as to be almost the same size. That is precisely what makes many astronomers uncomfortable. With the discovery of Eris, it became clear that the outer reaches of the Solar System contain many Pluto class bodies. If Pluto was a planet then the very real possibility arose that instead of nine planets we would have literally hundreds of them. If Eris was not a planet then smaller Pluto could not be one either.

It makes sense. The smallest recognized planet in the inner system is Mercury which is only 3,000 miles in diameter, Pluto is less than half that at about 1400 miles. Also all the inner planets have basically circular orbits all in the same plane. Kuiper objects like Pluto and Eris have eccentric orbits that are tilted to the normal planetary plane.

But it is not only size that determines a planet. One of the criteria says that a planet must be able to clear all other bodies in it's orbital plane. All the planets out to Neptune have done just that. The thing is that as you move away from the sun your orbit becomes much larger. It becomes much harder, only gas giants are capable of the job that far away from Sol. The curious thing is, according to the Yahoo article, that if Earth were moved to Pluto's orbit, it could not clear it's orbit and therefor would not be a planet, which is clearly ridiculous.

So the argument still goes on it would seem. Check out the article at Yahoo News for the pros and cons of Pluto's planethood. HERE

The Planet From Another Galaxy.....

Take everything you thought you knew about planetary formation - oh - and what happens to a star's planets when it wanders off main sequence and drifts into it's expansive phase such as a red giant. OK? Now throw it all in the trash. Why? Well it all has to do with the discovery of a very odd gas giant planet orbiting an ancient red giant. Commonly held theories hold that old red giant stars do not form planets. If anything once they start to expand, these old stars absorb their satellites. Plus stars that are metal poor often lack the materials needed to even form stars.

You can understand that when astronomers discovered a planet circling an ancient, metal poor, red giant, (From an article in Science that Dan sent me, the star is called HIP 13044 and is 2000 light years away from us.
) they were fairly well perplexed. The planet's very orbit virtually assures that it would be absorbed when the star became a red giant. And you got to know that is not the weirdest thing about this pair. Oh no - here is the weird part from the IO9 article:

• This star is part of a group that was once part of a satellite galaxy apart from the Milky Way, which was ... assimilated into our galaxy several billion years ago. In all likelihood, this planet predates that merger, meaning it's technically the first planet we've discovered that's from another galaxy.

And you thought things couldn't get any weirder.....

IO9 article on extragalactic planet

Yahoo news article thanks to Tim Sayell

wiki article on Extragalactic planet

New Asteroids found in Neptune's Orbital "Dead Zones"

Here is some space trivia that I have always found fascinating. Every planet / sun combination has a few "weird" places in their orbits. These areas are for all intents gravity free zones. These places quite literally are gravity balanced places where the gravity attraction of the sun and the planet are canceled out. What is fascinating is there are not just one but five for every planet orbiting around the sun (and of course if there are moons, those too play into even more neutral areas) They exist several degrees ahead and behind the planet, 180 degrees or on the exact opposite side of the sun, between the sun and the planet and finally at a point out side the orbit of the planet where the planet and sun's gravity cancel each other out. These areas are called Lagrangian points or L points for short. The most studied are L4 just ahead of a planet and L5 behind, because they are the most stable.1 (L1 is between the planet and the sun, L2 is at the point outside the orbit with the sun & planet balancing and L3 is at 180 degrees)

L4 &5 ten to gather the most junk, but up to this point L4 & 5 points of Neptune's orbit have been very difficult to study as they are so very far away and Neptune's L5 is on direct line of sight with the bright center of our galaxy.

Scientist's have been persistent and with the recent blocking of the light from the galaxy center being blocked by dust have discovered a bonanza of large objects in Neptune's L5. These "Trojan" asteroids are about 100 kilometers in size and that there are about 150 Trojans of similar size. These Lagrangian points as so stable that these objects were most likely captured during the formation of our solar system.

What makes this discovery particularly noteworthy is best described by the article on IO9

• (the Trojan objects were likely captured)...before planets were brought onto a single orbital plane and Neptune itself revolved around the Sun in an orbit similar to that of the asteroids today. As the planets eventually locked into their current orbits, the asteroids were "frozen" in place at the points, but their eccentric orbits remained as evidence of a more chaotic time in the history of the solar system.

Now that is what I call cool stuff. Because up to this time I had assumed that there had always been a single orbital plane and the planets just cleaned up around them......Now we find that not only did some of the planets orbit off the plane but may have had non keplerian orbits to boot! Good stuff!

read complete IO9 article here

Jupiter Looses a Belt?!

Tim Sayell was noticing that there was a lot of activity in Yahoo about the planet Jupiter. Looking up what was causing all the furor he came across a really interesting article.

It seems that Jupiter is losing some of it's stripes!

Here is what the article says.

• A giant cloud belt in the southern half of Jupiter has apparently disappeared according to new photos of the planet taken by amateur astronomers.
• The new Jupiter photos, taken May 9 by Australian astronomer Anthony Wesley, reveal that the huge reddish band of clouds that make up the planet's Southern Equatorial Belt has faded from view.

Read complete CSM article here

Pluto Changing Color?!

From Yahoo News comes an article from Tim Sayell that tells about some weird goings on with the surface of Pluto. Recent photos taken of the dwarf planet, by the Hubble Space Telescope, show a dramatic shift towards the red end of the spectrum on Pluto's surface.

Hubble photos show frozen nitrogen on Pluto's surface growing and shrinking, brightening in the north and darkening in the south.

• Astronomers say Pluto's surface is changing more than the surfaces of other bodies in the solar system.

Unprecedented and surprising are words used to describe the changes, especially on a surface that has seasons lasting as long as 120 years.

From 1954 to 2000, photographs of Pluto did not change. Then in the next 2 years there was up to a 30% increase in red coloration. Scientist can explain the redness, just not why it changed so quickly. From the article:

• The planet has a lot of methane, which contains carbon and hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen gets stripped off by solar winds and other factors, leaving carbon-rich areas on the surface, which tend to be red and dark.
• Part of the difficulty in figuring out what is going on with Pluto is that it takes the dwarf planet 248 years to circle the sun, so astronomers don't know what conditions are like when it's is farthest from the sun. The last time Pluto was at its farthest point was in 1870, which was decades before Pluto was discovered.

complete article

Great wide angle shot!

Check this out! Earth AND Jupiter in the same shot! How they do that you might ask? It was snapped by the Mars Global Surveyor on May 22, 2003. And what's more, you have got to log onto the Dvice site here to check out the larger hi-rez version! Amazing photography!

Strange backward orbiting planet discovered

Tim Sayell sends in an odd article from Yahoo News. I will probably get this wrong, but let me see if I can set it up right. It is a given that planetary systems like ours are made up of interstellar dust that that condenses and becomes stars and sometimes planets. Planets orbit the primary in the same direction as the primary which is simple Newtonian physics which in this case means that any angular velocity is retained as the material of the system condenses. Which means that whatever way the primary is spinning, the planets will spin for the most part in the same direction. Whats more, the system as a whole will spin in the same direction as the original cloud's motion. So whatever way the parent star rotates, so do the planets and the planets will orbit in that very same direction.

Except for a recently discovered planet that orbits the wrong way, backward compared to the rotation of its host star. Discovered by the UK's Wide Area Search for Planets, W.A.S.P. 17, as it has been designated, is 1000 L.Y.s away, and may have had a close encounter with another huge planet that may have acted like a sling-shot, throwing WASP 17 into a retrograde orbit. Another option is that WASP 17 may have been a rogue planet that was captured by its sun in its odd orbit. It is thought that this was the case with Neptune's large moon Triton.

Post by Tim Sayell

Space.com's article