Hubble Discovers Red Giant Ejecting Mars Sized Gas Blobs

Hubble Space Telescope has detected superhot blobs of gas, each twice as massive as the planet Mars, being ejected NEAR a dying star called V Hydrae, a red giant. The plasma balls are moving fast enough to travel the distance from Earth to the moon in thirty minutes. Astronomers estimate that this has continued once every 8.5 years for at least the past 400 years.

These fireballs are puzzling to astronomers, because the ejected material could not have been shot out by the host star, called V Hydrae. 

From the article:

The current best explanation suggests the plasma balls were launched by an unseen companion star. According to this theory, the companion would have to be in an elliptical orbit that carries it close to the red giant's puffed-up atmosphere every 8.5 years. As the companion enters the bloated star's outer atmosphere, it gobbles up material. This material then settles into a disk around the companion, and serves as the launching pad for blobs of plasma, which travel at roughly a half-million miles per hour.

for complete article press HERE

The Sun WILL eventually Bake the Earth Lifeless

Yes, we have all heard of the scenario where the sun brightens, or even when the sun become a red giant, in either case Earth becomes a cinder of its former self.   This little gem of good news has been postulated as early as 600 million years, based on how fast the sun is brightening, about 1% every 100 million years or so.

But before you invite yourself to the world's biggest fish fry, here is something to consider.  It would seem that the model above was based on incomplete or erroneous information.  The conclusions were based on how  evaporating water and heat would be trapped in the earth's atmosphere, quickly raising the temperature and making life on the surface hellish. 

It would seem though that the model  wasn't complicated enough.  , Recent studies however have  added in cloud coverage and regional temperature differences.  Some studies now estimate that the inevitable will occur closer to 1 billion to 1.5 billion years from now.  It will still happen, but much later than previous studies had suggested. 

The original Popular Science article can be found HERE

Evidence Found of a Red Giant Devouring a Planet

In a recent post on the IO9 blog, astronomers from the from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland have released data concerning red giant BD+48 740 that shows evidence of absorbing one of its close in planets.

This evidence takes the for of elements that are usually not found in start, especially older ones, due to the heat and pressure, that destroys many of the less stable elements, in this case lithium, which shows up in unusually high concentrations.

Also other massive planets in the same system have erratic, elliptical orbits, which seems to indicate a missing planet.

For more, read the IO9 article 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