NIBIRU & OUR 10th PLANET X NOW TOTALLY CONFIRMED!!!
Astronomers Discover Beginnings of 'Mini' Solar
System
02.07.05
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted a dusty disc of planet-building material around an extraordinarily low-mass brown dwarf, or "failed star." The brown dwarf, called OTS 44, is only 15 times the mass of Jupiter. Previously, the smallest brown dwarf known to host a planet-forming disc was 25 to 30 times more massive than Jupiter.
Image right: This artist's
concept shows a brown dwarf surrounded by a swirling disc of
planet-building dust. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope spotted such a disc
around a surprisingly low-mass brown dwarf, or "failed star." The
brown dwarf is only 15 times the size of Jupiter, making it the smallest
brown dwarf known to host a planet-forming, or protoplanetary disc.
Astronomers believe that this unusual system will eventually spawn
planets. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. + Related animation: brown dwarf surrounded by a swirling disk of planet-building dust (no audio).
The finding will ultimately help astronomers better understand how and where planets – including rocky ones resembling our own – form.
"There may be a host of miniature solar systems out there, in which planets orbit brown dwarfs," said Dr. Kevin Luhman, lead author of the new study from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass. "This leads to all sorts of new questions, like 'Could life exist on such planets?' or 'What do you call a planet circling a planet-sized body? A moon or a planet? '"
Brown dwarfs are something of misfits in the astronomy world. These cool orbs of gas have been called both failed stars and super planets. Like planets, they lack the mass to ignite and produce starlight. Like stars, they are often found alone in space, with no parent body to orbit.
"In this case, we are seeing the ingredients for planets around a brown dwarf near the dividing line between planets and stars. This raises the tantalizing possibility of planet formation around objects that themselves have planetary masses," said Dr. Giovanni Fazio, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a co-author of the new study.
Image above: This artist's conception shows the relative size of a hypothetical brown dwarf-planetary system (below) compared to our own solar system. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
The results were presented today at the Planet Formation and Detection meeting at the Aspen Center for Physics, Aspen, Colo., and will be published in the Feb. 10th issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Planet-forming, or protoplanetary, discs are the precursors to planets. Astronomers speculate that the disc circling OTS 44 has enough mass to make a small gas giant planet and a few Earth-sized, rocky ones. This begs the question: Could a habitable planet like Earth sustain life around a brown dwarf?
"If life did exist in this system, it would have to constantly adjust to the dwindling temperatures of a brown dwarf," said Luhman. "For liquid water to be present, the planet would have to be much closer to the brown dwarf than Earth is to our Sun."
"It's exciting to speculate about the possibilities for life in such as system, of course at this point we are only beginning to understand the unusual circumstances under which planets arise," he added.
Brown dwarfs are rare and difficult to study due to their dim light. Though astronomers recently reported what may be the first-ever image of a planet around a brown dwarf called 2M1207, not much is understood about the planet-formation process around these odd balls of gas. Less is understood about low-mass brown dwarfs, of which only a handful are known.
OTS 44 was first discovered about six months ago by Luhman and his colleagues using the Gemini Observatory in Chile. The object is located 500 light-years away in the Chamaeleon constellation. Later, the team used Spitzer's highly sensitive infrared eyes to see the dim glow of OTS 44's dusty disc. These observations took only 20 seconds. Longer searches with Spitzer could reveal discs around brown dwarfs below10 Jupiter masses.
Other authors of this study include Dr. Paola D’Alessia of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico; and Drs. Nuria Calvet, Lori Allen, Lee Hartmann, Thomas Megeath and Philip Myers of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Artist's conceptions and additional information about the Spitzer Space Telescope are available at http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
2005-022
Planet-Like Body Discovered at Fringes of Our Solar System
03.15.04
Image above: These three panels show thefirst
detection of the faint distant object dubbed "Sedna." Imaged onNovember
14th from 6:32 to 9:38 Universal Time, Sedna was identified bythe
slight shift in position noted in these three pictures taken atdifferent
times. Image courtesy:
NASA/Caltech.The object is three times farther away from Earth than Pluto, making it the most distant known in the solar system.
"The Sun appears so small from that distance that you could completelyblock it out with the head of a pin," said Dr. Mike Brown, Caltechassociate professor of planetary astronomy and leader of the researchteam. The object, unofficially named "Sedna," is 13 billion kilometers(8 billion miles) away from Earth.
This is likely the first detection of the long-hypothesized "Oortcloud," a faraway repository of small icy bodies that supplies thecomets that streak by Earth.
Image right:
An artist's concept of thenewly discovered planet-like object, dubbed
"Sedna." The Sun appears asan extremely bright star instead of a large,
warm disc observed fromEarth. In the distance is a hypothetical small
moon, which scientistsbelieve may be orbiting this distant body. Image
courtesy:NASA/JPL-Caltech.Other notable features of Sedna include its size and reddish color; itis the second reddest object in the solar system, after Mars. At anestimated size of three-fourths the size of Pluto, it is likely thelargest object found in the solar system since Pluto was discovered in1930.
Brown, along with Drs. Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory inHawaii and David Rabinowitz of Yale University, New Haven, Conn., foundthe "planetoid" on November 14, 2003, using the 48-inch Samuel OschinTelescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory near San Diego. Within days,the object was observed by telescopes in Chile, Spain, Arizona andHawaii, and soon after, NASA's new Spitzer Space Telescope looked forit.
Sedna lies extremely far from the Sun, in the coldest known region ofour solar system, where the temperature never rises above minus 240degrees Celsius (minus 400 Fahrenheit).
The planetoid is usually even colder, because it approaches the Sunthis closely only briefly during its 10,500 year orbit around the Sun.At its most distant, "Sedna" is 130 billion kilometers (84 billionmiles) from the Sun. That is 900 times Earth's distance from the Sun.
Scientists used the fact that even the Spitzer telescope was unable todetect the heat of the extremely distant, cold object to determine thatit must be no more than 1,700 kilometers (about 1,000 miles) indiameter, smaller than Pluto. By combining all available data, Brownestimates the size at about halfway between that of Pluto and Quaoar,the planetoid discovered by the same team in 2002. Until "Sedna" wasdetected, Quaoar was the largest known body beyond Pluto.
Image left: The artist's rendition
shows"Sedna" in relation to other bodies in the solar system,
includingEarth and its Moon; Pluto; and Quaoar, a planetoid beyond Pluto
thatwas until now the largest known object beyond Pluto. Image
courtesy:NASA/JPL-Caltech.The extremely elliptical orbit of Sedna is unlike anything previouslyseen by astronomers; however, it resembles that of objects predicted tolie in the hypothetical Oort cloud. The cloud is thought to explain theexistence of certain comets. It is believed to surround the Sun andextend outward halfway to the star closest to the Sun. But Sedna is 10times closer than the predicted distance of the Oort cloud. Brown saysthis "inner Oort cloud" may have been formed by gravity from a roguestar near the Sun in the solar system's early days.
Brown explained, "The star would have been close enough to be brighterthan the full Moon, and it would have been visible in the daytime skyfor 20,000 years." Worse, it would have dislodged comets farther out inthe Oort cloud, leading to an intense comet shower that could havewiped out any life that existed on Earth at the time.
Rabinowitz says there is indirect evidence that "Sedna" may have amoon. The researchers hope to check this possibility with NASA's HubbleSpace Telescope.
Trujillo has begun to examine the object's surface with one of theworld's largest optical/infrared telescopes, the 8-meter (26-foot)Frederick C. Gillett Gemini Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. He said,"We still don't understand what is on the surface of this body. It isnothing like what we would have predicted or what we can currentlyexplain.
"Sedna" will become closer and brighter over the next 72 years beforeit begins its 10,500-year trip to the far reaches of the solar systemand back again. "The last time "Sedna" was this close to the Sun, Earthwas just coming out of the last ice age; the next time it comes back,the world might again be a completely different place," said Brown.
More information and images are available at http://spitzer.caltech.edu.Caltech owns and operates the Palomar Observatory. The Spitzer SpaceTelescope is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,Calif. JPL is a division of Caltech.
Brown Dwarf Comparison
11.17.09
NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, will uncovermany "failed" stars, or brown dwarfs, in infrared light. This diagramshows a brown dwarf in relation to Earth, Jupiter, a low-mass star andthe sun.
Stars with less mass than the sun are smaller and cooler, and hencemuch fainter in visible light. Brown dwarfs are the smallest andcoolest of stars. They have less than eight percent of the mass of thesun, which is not enough to sustain the fusion reaction that keeps thesun hot. These cool orbs are nearly impossible to see in visible light,but stand out when viewed in infrared. Their diameters are about thesame as Jupiter's, but they can have up to 80 times more mass and arethought to have planetary systems of their own.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages theWide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science MissionDirectorate, Washington. The mission's principal investigator, EdwardWright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA'sExplorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center,Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space DynamicsLaboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace& Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and dataprocessing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center atthe California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPLfor NASA.
More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCB
› Full resolution jpeg (75 Kb)
Astronomers think there are roughly as many brown dwarfs as regularstars like our sun, but brown dwarfs are often too cool to find usingvisible light. These tiny orbs are similar to stars but they are coolerand less massive. They lack the mass to fuse atoms at their cores andshine with starlight. Using infrared light, NASA's Wide-field InfraredSurvey Explorer (WISE), will find many dozens of brown dwarfs within 25light years of the sun.
These two pictures show simulated data before and after the WISEmission (stars are not real). The simulated picture on the left showsknown stars (white and yellow) and brown dwarfs (red) in our solarneighborhood. The picture on the right shows additional brown dwarfsWISE is expected to find. One of these newfound brown dwarfs could evenbe closer to us than our closest known star, Proxima Centauri, which isfour light-years away.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages theWide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science MissionDirectorate, Washington. The mission's principal investigator, EdwardWright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA'sExplorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center,Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space DynamicsLaboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace& Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and dataprocessing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center atthe California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPLfor NASA.
More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu.
Image credit: AMNH/Caltech/UCB
› Full resolution jpeg (92 Kb)
Illustration
of the “Oort Cloud,” a vast region of comets thought to extend a light
year beyond our Sun.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Donald K. Yeoman
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Donald K. Yeoman
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