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Showing posts with label solar system. Show all posts
Showing posts with label solar system. Show all posts

Found planet that shouldn't exist

Posted by Esse-Jay | Posted in , , , , , | Posted on 11:34
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The find, by an international team including the University of St Andrews, is so bizarre that odds on catching it at this late stage in its life were 1000-1. The 'huge new planet', found orbiting a star 1000 light years away, was discovered by the UK's WASP project, of which St Andrews is a founding member.

Newly-christened WASP-18b, the planet is so massive and so close to its host star that it is almost certain to spiral inwards to its destruction during the lifetime of the star. Researchers from St Andrews are currently calculating the rate at which tidal interactions between star and planet will eventually cause the planet's orbit to decay completely.






St Andrews' physicist, Professor Andrew Collier Cameron said, "This is another bizarre WASP planet discovery. The situation is analogous to the way tidal friction is gradually causing the earth's spin to slow down, and the Moon to spiral away from the earth.
"In this case, however, the spin of the star is slower than the orbit of the planet - so the star should be spinning up, and the planet spiralling in."
WASP-18b is ten times the mass of Jupiter and orbits its star in less than one Earth-day. The new planet belongs to a now-common class of extrasolar planets known as 'hot Jupiters' - massive planets thought to have formed far from their host stars that migrated inwards over time.
The discovery, led by Keele University's Coel Hellier, suggests that WASP-18's parent star is about a billion years old - making the likelihood of observing WASP-18b about one in a thousand.
If the planet's remaining life is as short as predicted, its orbital decay should be measurable within a decade.
Professor Cameron continued, "We don't yet know how long the planet will survive, because we don't understand fully how tides operate on the Sun and other stars. It could be half a million years, or half a billion. But if it's spiralling in quickly, we should be able to see measurable changes in the orbit within ten years."


Provided by University of St Andrews




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Uranus

Posted by Esse-Jay | Posted in , , , | Posted on 19:29
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This planet is about 4 billion miles Pluto and as much as 1.6 billion miles from the earth. It's a beautiful pale blue fuzzy ball and very different from the other planets, it's strikingly blue and almost featureless that it seems surreal and almost like it has been created by some CGI graphic designer.

  • It has a diameter oh 31,763 miles which is 4 times that of the earth
  • It takes 84 earth years to orbit the sun
  • I day on Uranus is 17.2 earth hours
Named for the Greek god of the sky, Uranus has the most off kilter axis of any of the planets in our solar system, at an angle of 98 ⁰ the planet actually spins on its side and this means at one time only one hemisphere is facing the sun and the other hemisphere is in complete 
darkness.





**Uranus Tilted on its Axis and as seen by Voyager 2**


The cool bluish colour is as a result of Methane, the methane absorbs the red and orange wavelengths of the sun light that reaches it and reflects the blue and green and its soft appearance is due to something that us that live in big cities are very familiar with, Smog. In the outer planets there is methane that is natural gas, sunlight converts it to complex particles which forms a haze which is the reason those planets don't have a sharp but a fuzzy look to them.

Scientists speculate that Uranus and its Neighbour Neptune formed in roughly the same way, as the early proto planetary disk of gas and dust in our solar system settled, Jupiter and Saturn gathered up the most material and became the largest of the gas giants, as Jupiter and Saturn grew they destabilized the planetary system as a whole and dynamic interactions pushed Uranus and Neptune out to the edge of the solar system at an accelerated rate were they gathered icy and rocky objects. These icy materials have led some to call Uranus and Neptune the ice giants but they are not great balls of solid ice that an astronaut can walk across quite the contrary if an astronaut managed to get out there he will literary be flattened by the immense pressure before he gets a few 100 miles.

While the Gas giants Jupiter and Saturn have wild weather patterns, Uranus is rather calm in comparison, it is the only planet in our solar system doesn't have an internal heat source and is unique in this respect., Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune all have heat coming from deep within the planet which helps drive the circulation and this explains the banded structure of the clouds we see on those planets.

 Uranus was discovered by Astronomer William Herschel in 1781, at the time the only known planets were the 6, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn all of which were visible to the naked eye from earth, he first saw Uranus through a telescope and it was the first planet to be discovered using a telescope. Herschel being an armature astronomer, professional musician and an optometrist had the tools and knowledge to design the best telescopes in the world at the time.


             **Replica of the telescope with which Herschel discovered Uranus with**


In 1977 NASA's Kuiper airborne observatory made another discovery about Uranus, out to watch the passing of the planet in front of a star but as Uranus closed in, the star winked several times as it neared the planet and several more times as it emerged on the other side, this winking or flickering was actually the star passing behind 5 planetary rings features only before seen on Saturn. More observation from the ground and also from the Voyager spacecraft confirmed the rings existence [ insert ring photo here], observations made from the Hubble Space Telescope in 2005 found a 2nd set of rings orbiting twice and far away from the planet as the previously known rings. Uranus' rings are dim and thin made of dark dusty rocks and do not reflect as much sunlight as Saturn's thick icy rings.  The rings were probably formed by the impact of a meteor or a comet with one of the planets 27 moons, the inner rings may be a result of collisions between the inner moons themselves, as the 13 inner moons swarm and dash around the planet at astonishing speeds orbiting the planet in at least a day and other in about 12 hours, compare this to our moon which takes 28 days to orbit a planet 4 times smaller is quite something. Moons like Cupid and Belinda are being watched by scientists as they are expected to collide in the near future, travelling just a few hundred miles apart and at unbelievable speeds they r expected to draw closer to each other due to gravitational forced and will eventually collide, this will be bad news for the moons but good news for the rings and the debris from the collision will add more material to the existing rings or form a new set of rings.



                                             **Uranus and its Moons in orbit**

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Pluto and the Man who killed Her

Posted by Esse-Jay | Posted in , , , , , , | Posted on 18:22
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In comparison to the other planets in our solar system, Pluto has always been a bit different, much smaller than the rest and it has three moons, the largest moon is called Charon orbiting it in proportion to its size, Nix and Hydra the smaller and it also has the most inclined and eccentric orbit which is shaped like an egg which causes it to get closer to the sun at some point on the orbit and further at other point.

                                                        ** Pluto's Eccentric Orbit**

 Astronomers after discovering Neptune in 1846 were convinced there was another planet termed Planet X. This search was spear headed by Percival Lowell at the Lowell observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, he was convinced that there was another plant perturbing the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, but he passed away before he could prove his theory. The Observatory assistant Clyde Tombaugh, continued this task to locate this Planet X and in 1930 he took a picture of an object that seemed to validate Lowell's assumption, this image was shown to scientists and the object was named the 9th planet.

**Original Photo of Pluto's Discovery** 

But the questions remained was Pluto the Planet X the planet they were looking for?? Some scientists argued that Pluto does not have enough mass to perturb the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, it was later realized that it was not, as its location was predicted using inaccurate estimates of Neptune's mass, so if Pluto was not the planet that was sort can it still be called a planet?? The term planet was earlier defined as "wander of the sky", it was the things that moved relative to the stars, so to the ancients the moon was a planet so was the Sun but the Earth was not, but when it was found that the Earth moved around the Sun and the moon orbited the Earth, the definition of planet was changed and the Earth became a Planet and the Sun and Moon were out and then there were 6, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury and then Uranus and Neptune were discovered based on this new definition of planets. Although it was found to be smaller that our moon, Pluto was originally thought to be as large as Mars so Tombaugh discovery was dubbed the 9th Planet called Pluto.

  • Because of its great distance from the sun, Pluto takes its name from the Roman god of the underworld
  • At its closest orbit Pluto is 2.7billion miles from the earth
  • Its diameter is 1485 miles
  • It takes 248 earth years to orbit the sun
  • The length of a day on Pluto is 6.4earth days
Pluto is so far away that even with the Hubble space telescope we can only get images of about 4 pixles across and from what we can see some parts are dark as coal and other parts are as white as ice. Scientists believe the bright area of the planet are made of 3 types of ice, one is carbon monoxide, the 2nd is nothing which is the same as natural gas and the 3rd is nitrogen which is the same thing we have here in our atmosphere. The dark areas are most probably solid rock which contain silicates, carbon, oxygen etc not unlike our rocks here on earth. Pluto's distance from the sun makes it a very dim place because of the amount of sunlight reaching the planet another consequence the distance makes Pluto the coldest place in our solar system with an average temperature of -388⁰ F. Also because of its small size and low density its gravity in comparison to earth is far weaker as its gravity is ⅟15th that of the earth.

**Hubble's Photograph of Pluto showing the light and dark areas**


For more than 75years Pluto has held the title the 9th planet in our solar system, so what changed??

Meet Mike Brown CALTECH Astronomer and the man who killed Pluto



CALTECH astronomer equipped with the Palomar observatory 48inch telescope was looking for Pluto sized worlds at the far reaches of our solar system and in 2005 he found one, an object bigger than Pluto with its own moon both orbiting the sun. So if Pluto is a planet and has been for 75 years, why wouldn't Brown's object be a planet too?? Brown's discovery is 5% bigger than Pluto and probably made up of the same material rock on the inside and ice on the outside and a thin layer of frost on the outside which sometimes puffs up into the atmosphere and sometimes it doesn't, It has a moon the orbits it once every 16 to 17 Earth days and Pluto also has a moon that orbits it in about the same time frame, these are just some of the similarities Brown's object has with Pluto. Brown's object was named Eris after the Greek god of discord and its moon was named Dysnomia.



** Artist impression of Eris and Dysnomia. Eris is the main object, Dysnomia the small grey disk just above it. The flaring object top-left is the Sun**


Brown's object was named appropriately as it set in motion debates and arguments in the scientific community on the definition of a planet, if Eris will become our 10th planet or will Pluto sized planets be reclassified as a whole. This argument was tabled in 2006 at the International Astronomical union meeting in Prague and put to a vote and the Term planet was redefined. This definition removed Pluto and Pluto sized planets from being termed planets, this had nothing to do with Pluto becoming less important or too small the issue was pressed because more was learned about Eris and other large Kuiper belt objects. The kipper belt is a 3.5 billion mile wide region in the outer solar system near Pluto and is home to hundreds of thousands of icy objects, the first of which was discovered in 1992.

By the IAU definition " A planet is a spherical object that orbits the sun and clears out the area around its orbital path, since as the area around Pluto is filled with other Kuiper belt objects, Pluto in the instance is not classified as a planet and thus ended its 75year reign as the 9th planet in our solar system which now comprised of 8 planets and objects like Pluto and Eris are now termed dwarf planets and under this new classification Ceres the largest asteroid in our solar system is now classified as a dwarf planet.

The IAU vote was just supposed to redefine the term planet and in the process it eliminated one, there are scientists who refuse to agree with this conclusion that Pluto is no longer classified as a planet and keep trying to get back its title as planet.


[Source: The History Channel]

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