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local news - astronomy edition
2021-Nov-10, Wednesday 04:44 pmAstronomers have found a bizarre star system 150 light years away (which is extremely close to us, in astronomical scales) where its planets orbit perpendicular to each other. That's very cool, but there's something even better in the news.
A while back, I explained to someone that I wanted to become an astronomer who focused on "local" stuff. I want to find what's in our stellar backyard, so to speak. Not just our own star system but also those objects within a radius of only 100 light years or so. There's plenty to keep me busy in our own celestial neighborhood. Especially, I mentioned, I want to look around the nearby sky in infrared radiation, because anything too dark to appear in the usual wavelengths should still be warm enough to detect from the heat it emits simply by existing out there in space.
Sure enough... I saw a tweet yesterday that brought attention to someone who was reviewing infrared data. That scientist was looking for so-called "Planet 9", the theorized extra planet far out in our solar system, something that affects the orbits of our known outer planets.
This mass is smaller and this distance is nearer to the us than what astronomers were estimating. If the find is confirmed by others, then people will start calculating if it's sufficient to account for Neptune's orbit deviation, or is there also a "Planet 10" out there waiting to be found too? And if this suspected Planet 9 is there, what does it look like? It would be the first mid-sized planet in our system. It's much larger than our terrestrial planets like Earth, while much smaller than our gaseous planets like Neptune.
Cool stuff! Now I want to sell my house, move north, and go to college. This is exactly the kind of thing that I'd like to be doing. :)
A while back, I explained to someone that I wanted to become an astronomer who focused on "local" stuff. I want to find what's in our stellar backyard, so to speak. Not just our own star system but also those objects within a radius of only 100 light years or so. There's plenty to keep me busy in our own celestial neighborhood. Especially, I mentioned, I want to look around the nearby sky in infrared radiation, because anything too dark to appear in the usual wavelengths should still be warm enough to detect from the heat it emits simply by existing out there in space.
Sure enough... I saw a tweet yesterday that brought attention to someone who was reviewing infrared data. That scientist was looking for so-called "Planet 9", the theorized extra planet far out in our solar system, something that affects the orbits of our known outer planets.
"A single candidate for Planet 9 survives which satisfies the requirements for detected and non-detected HCON passes. A fitted orbit suggest a distance of 225+-15 AU and a mass of 3-5 earth masses."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.03831, from the PDF linked there
https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.03831, from the PDF linked there
This mass is smaller and this distance is nearer to the us than what astronomers were estimating. If the find is confirmed by others, then people will start calculating if it's sufficient to account for Neptune's orbit deviation, or is there also a "Planet 10" out there waiting to be found too? And if this suspected Planet 9 is there, what does it look like? It would be the first mid-sized planet in our system. It's much larger than our terrestrial planets like Earth, while much smaller than our gaseous planets like Neptune.
Cool stuff! Now I want to sell my house, move north, and go to college. This is exactly the kind of thing that I'd like to be doing. :)