Monthly Archives: June 2017

June 5, 2017 Artist's illustration of star KELT-9 and its super-heated planet KELT-9b. Credit: Robert Hurt / NASA/JPL-Caltech

Imagine a planet like Jupiter zipping around its host star every day and a half, superheated to temperatures hotter than most stars and sporting a giant, glowing gas tail like a comet.

That is what an international research team led by astronomers at Ohio State and Vanderbilt universities think they have found orbiting a massive star they have labeled KELT-9, located 650 light years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.

The discovery is described this week in a paper titled "A giant planet undergoing extreme-ultraviolet irradiation by its hot massive-star host" published by the journal Nature and in a presentation at the spring meeting of American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.

With a day-side temperature peaking at 4,600 Kelvin (more than 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit), the newly discovered exoplanet, designated KELT-9b, is hotter than most stars and only 1,200 Kelvin (about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than our own sun. In fact, the ultraviolet radiation from the star it orbits is so brutal that the planet may be literally evaporating away under the intense glare, producing a glowing gas tail.

The super-heated planet has other unusual features as well. For instance, it's a gas giant 2.8 times more massive than Jupiter but only half as dense, because the extreme radiation from its host star has caused its atmosphere to puff up like a balloon.

Because it is tidally locked to its staras the moon is to Earththe day side of the planet is perpetually bombarded by stellar radiation and, as a result, it is so hot that molecules such as water, carbon dioxide and methane can't form there.

"It's a planet by any of the typical definitions based on mass, but its atmosphere is almost certainly unlike any other planet we've ever seen just because of the temperature of its day side," said Scott Gaudi, professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University and one of the lead authors of the study.

The reason the exoplanet is so hot is because the star it orbits is more than twice as large and nearly twice as hot as our sun. "KELT-9 radiates so much ultraviolet radiation that it may completely evaporate the planet. Or, if gas giant planets like KELT-9b possess solid rocky cores as some theories suggest, the planet may be boiled down to a barren rock, like Mercury," said Keivan Stassun, Stevenson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt, who directed the study with Gaudi.

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On the other hand, the planet's orbit is extremely close to the star so if the star begins to expand it will engulf it. "KELT-9 will swell to become a red giant star in about a billion years," said Stassun. "The long-term prospects for life, or real estate for that matter, on KELT-9b are not looking good."

While Stassun and Gaudi spend a lot of time developing missions, such as the NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, designed to find habitable planets in other solar systems, the scientists said there's a good reason to study worlds that are unlivable in the extreme.

"The astronomical community is clearly focused on finding Earthlike planets around small, cooler stars like our sun. They are easy targets and there's a lot that can be learned about potentially habitable planets orbiting very low-mass stars in general. On the other hand, because KELT-9b's host star is bigger and hotter than the sun, it complements those efforts and provides a kind of touchstone for understanding how planetary systems form around hot, massive stars," Gaudi said.

Stassun added, "As we seek to develop a complete picture of the variety of other worlds out there, it's important to know not only how planets form and evolve, but also when and under what conditions they are destroyed."

How was the new planet found?

"We were pretty lucky to catch the planet while its orbit transits the face of the star," said co-author Karen Collins, a post-doctoral fellow at Vanderbilt. "Because of its extremely short period, near-polar orbit and the fact that its host star is oblate, rather than spherical, we calculate that orbital precession will carry the planet out of view in about 150 years, and it won't reappear for roughly three and a half millennia."

In 2014 astronomers spotted the exoplanet using one of two telescopes specially designed to detect planets orbiting bright starsone in the northern and one in the southern hemispherejointly operated by Ohio State, Vanderbilt and Lehigh universities. The instruments, "Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescopes" or KELTs, fill a large gap in the available technologies for finding extrasolar planets. They use mostly off-the-shelf technology to provide a low-cost means of planet hunting. Whereas a traditional astronomical telescope costs millions of dollars to build, the hardware for a KELT telescope runs less than $75,000. Where other telescopes are designed to look at very faint stars in small sections of the sky at very high resolution, KELTs look at millions of very bright stars at once, over broad sections of sky, at relatively low resolution.

"This result demonstrates that even 'extremely little' telescopes can play an important role in discovery," commented James Neff, astronomical sciences program director at the National Science Foundation, which partially funded the research.

Using the KELT-North telescope at Winer Observatory in Arizona, the astronomers noticed a tiny drop in the star's brightnessonly about half of one percentwhich indicated that a planet may have passed in front of it. The brightness dipped once every 1.5 days, which means the planet completes a "yearly" circuit around its star every 1.5 days. Subsequent observations confirmed that the signal was caused by a transiting planet and revealed that it was what astronomers call a "hot Jupiter"an ideal kind of planet for the KELT telescopes to spot.

The astronomers hope to take a closer look at KELT-9b with other telescopesincluding Spitzer, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and eventually the James Webb Space Telescope after it launches in 2018. Observations with HST would enable them to see if the planet really does have a cometary tail and allow them to estimate how much longer the planet will survive its current hellish condition.

Explore further: New 'styrofoam' planet provides tools in search for habitable planets

More information: B. Scott Gaudi et al, A giant planet undergoing extreme-ultraviolet irradiation by its hot massive-star host, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature22392

Journal reference: Nature

Provided by: Vanderbilt University

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I notice that there is not the usual mention of how this planet formed - could it be that at least some notion of honesty is being entered into by acknowledging that hot jupiters are simply inexplicable challenges for the nebular paradigm? No amount of forming elsewhere and then drifting inwards is going to account for the huge number of these enigmas discovered so far.

The planet's temperament is not dependent on the star's star temperature. From: http://www.svemir...Universe Planet.. Mass of Jupiter ..Temperature K ....Distance AU GQ Lupi b ................ 1-36 ...... 2650 100 ........ 100 ROXs 42Bb .................. 9 ..... 1,950-2,000 ....... 157 HD 106906 b ............... 11 ...... 1.800 ............... ~ 650 DH Tauri b ................... 12 ...... 2.750 ................. 330 CT Chamaeleontis b.10.5-17...2.500 ............... 440 HD 44627 ................. 13-14 ...... 1.600-2.400 ..... 275 1RXS 1609 b .............. 14 ........ 1.800 ................ 330 USCENT 108 b ........ 14 ........ 2.600 ................ 670 Oph 11 B ..................... 21 ........ 2.478 ................ 243

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Extreme exoplanet: Astronomers discover alien world hotter than ... - Phys.Org

Asteroid Apophis is going to have a close encounter with Earth in 2029 and astronomers arent the only ones preparing for the event.

20 students at MIT are designing a space mission to get close to the asteroid as it comes within about 21,770 miles (35,040km) from Earth. The mission will get more information on the asteroid, as well as measure the effects of Earth and other planetary bodies on it.

MIT faculty members Richard Binzel, professor of planetary sciences, and David Miller, the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, are advising the students as they design their missions.

The approaching asteroid is about 1,066 feet (325m) across and weighs 20 million metric tons. An asteroid passing this close to Earth is a rarity, so the students are working hard to get their calculations just right.

Binzel said in a press release that this project is the kick-starter that he hopes will encourage space agencies to study the asteroid.

There have been plenty of missions to comets and asteroids, so why is this unique? Binzel said. Apophis is coming so close that Earths gravity is going to tug and redirect its path. The Earth is going to give it a big thunk.

The proposed spacecraft would carry instruments to study Apophis shape, size, density, surface topography, rotation rate, and spin rate. The craft will have to launch by August 2026 to cross paths with the asteroid in March 2028, and then follow it until the missions end in 2033.

The students presented their work to NASA scientists and engineers, who asked direct questions that will help shape a future proposal for the mission. NASA Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson said the students made a really good effort and stated that the project is almost ready for a NASA proposal.

While China and the European Space Agency are both considering missions to Apophis, should this proposal remain in budget and successfully beat out other competition, theres a real chance it could be approved for an official NASA mission.

Excerpt from:

MIT students propose Apophis asteroid mission | Astronomy.com - Astronomy Magazine

Howard Trottiers day job concerns the teeny-tiniest stuff in the universe.

His night gig takes in the whole cosmos.

From the subatomic to the big, Trottier, a physics professor at Simon Fraser University, said. Theyre intricately linked, as it turns out.

He is a theoretical subatomic physicist by training research interests include lattice quantum chromodynamics and heavy-flavour physics but his passion is the night sky.

Intrigued as a boy by the experiments carried out by his older brother,Lorne, who built a crystal radio before Trottier was even born, he was always fascinated by science.

Lorne, 11 years Trottiers senior, still has a huge influence. Co-founder of a Montreal tech company, Lorne donated $2.7 million of the $4.4-million cost in effect, fronting the capital cost of the two-year-old Trottier Observatory and Science Courtyard at SFU.

He was my inspiration, hes the biggest science nerd Ive ever met, Trottier said. Theres enough of an age gap that when I was younger we didnt hang around together a whole lot, but I could see what he was doing. He was always in the basement soldering together stuff.

When Trottier was growing up in Montreal, around 11 years old, and on an overnight camping trip in the Laurentians outside Quebec City, a camp counsellor introduced him to the night sky.

He took 30 of the nerdiest kids to look at the stars and thats what really pushed me into astronomy. I had never seen the night sky like that or had any understanding of it before that.

I went home and had to buy a telescope. I used my paper route to save money and bought a telescope. When I saw the rings of Saturn I was screaming in the street, Oh my gosh, look at the rings!

This is really what pushed me forward.

Howard Trottier is a physics professor at Simon Fraser University, where hes pictured at the Trottier Observatory and Science Courtyard on June 2. Jason Payne / PNG

Trottiers enthusiasm carries over into public outreach, bringing the joys and wonders of the cosmos to children, youth and adults. Starry Nights is a public-participation event held on clear Friday nights that Trottier initiated a decade ago.

I went into university thinking I was going to be an astronomer, but thats not what I ended up doing, he said.

Astronomy when Trottier was an undergrad was not, shall we say, what it is today. Particle physics, meanwhile, was in its heyday.

If you know (the TV show) the Big Bang Theory, think Sheldon, same general area (theoretical physics), only Im not remotely as smart as he is, but I have better social skills, he said.

If I was going into science now, it would be astronomy and astro physics, without a doubt. Were in this golden age of discovery in all areas of science, but nowhere more so than in astronomy.

Put it this way: When Trottier was a grad student, Pluto was still a planet and for all we knew, it was the farthest planet from Earth. Now we have this survey that tells us there are millions of terrestrial planets in our galaxy.

The Trottier Observatory and Science Courtyard is tucked beautifully into what for 50 years was sacred empty space because SFU architect Arthur Erickson didnt build on it. Today, its an award-winning plaza (best Canadian small-scale, public landscape).

Trottier also has his Cabin in the Sky Observatory, a little private place on a hill overlooking Osoyoos.

The 27-inch SFU telescope can peer back about two billion years. His much smaller telescope in Osoyoos can see almost as far in the absence of Vancouvers light pollution, he said.

We go to the cabin, I never get over how many stars are in the sky. They crush down on you.

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Starry, starry, nights: Amateur astronomer, whose day job is lattice quantum chromodynamics, has introduced ... - Vancouver Sun