The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article on the discovery of a number of 'exoplanets'; these are planets orbiting other stars. Scientists announced the recent discovery of 73 exoplanets. One, dubbed Kepler-16b, orbits around two separate stars. It is unique, but, surprisingly, a planet of this type was featured in "Star Wars" movies.
Kepler-16b is about as big as Saturn and completes its orbit around the two stars in 229 days. It is 200 light-years from us and its very cold (-150 Fahrenheit). Because of the way it orbits its stars, no two sunrises or sunsets are the same.
Some other interesting facts from WSJ:
Among the other unearthly wonders discovered in recent months are an exoplanet blacker than coal and a world stripped to a diamond-like core. A third newly found exoplanet is blasted by its parent star with X-ray bursts so fierce that the radiation is eroding the planet's surface at a rate of five million tons a second.
Stranger still, a star survey of the Milky Way by astronomers in Japan and New Zealand earlier this year discovered a new class of Jupiter-size planets that float free of any star at all, swimming about on their own in the dark. They estimated that there may be twice as many of these orphan planets as stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment