PARIS Astronomers using an ultra-sensitive telescope in the Chilean desert said Wednesday they had mapped hundreds of comets orbiting a star 63 light-years from Earth. <\/p>\n
The feat marks the most complete census of so-called exocomets, or comets in other solar systems, they said. <\/p>\n
Comets shed ice, gas and dust as they near a star like our sun, creating one or more tails. <\/p>\n
Astrophysicists are keen on them for other reasons. <\/p>\n
Comets are believed to be ancient remnants left from the building of our solar system some 4.6 billion years ago. <\/p>\n
Previous work has found that other stars, too, have comets. <\/p>\n
But it has been extremely difficult to get a more detailed picture. <\/p>\n
Comets are tiny relative to the size of their star, and their tail is swamped by the starlight, which makes it hard to identify them and calculate their orbit. <\/p>\n
Reporting in the journal Nature, a French-led team pored over nearly 1,000 observations of a youthful star, Beta Pictoris, that were made over a period of eight years. <\/p>\n
The images were taken with a highly sensitive instrument, HARPS, at the European Southern Observatorys La Silla facility in Chiles bone-dry Atacama desert. <\/p>\n
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In a first, astronomers map comets around another star<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" PARIS Astronomers using an ultra-sensitive telescope in the Chilean desert said Wednesday they had mapped hundreds of comets orbiting a star 63 light-years from Earth. The feat marks the most complete census of so-called exocomets, or comets in other solar systems, they said Continue reading