#planetary disk

LHS 3154 and it's Giant Planet

Until recently, the idea that a very low mass star could create a very large planet would have raised more than eye brows amongst those who study exoplanets and how they formed, even maybe a chuckle, but the more we search out from our Solar System and see the diversity just in our own local part of the galaxy, the more it challenges these and other assumptions about how our own Solar System came to be.

LHS 3154b is a Sub Neptune planet around 13.2 times the mass of our Earth (Neptune being just over 17 times the mass), and while Sub Neptune exoplanets are turning up pretty much everywhere, this one orbiting so close around it's barely M type star, is a bit of a confusion, how did a planet that's 35% the mass of it's parent star get to exist.

For comparison, Jupiter is .1% the mass of our Star.

The amount of matter required to make this small star, would seem to negate such a large planet forming, and when we look at many M type red dwarf stars, that's what we see, smaller rocky worlds.

The team spent much time trying to model what could possibly have created it, and in the end came to the conclusion there was either a lot more mass in the disk than was expected, or that the disk was surrounded by a very large pool of material that had been sucked in during the formation.

The team ruled out the idea of capture due to the orbital pattern of the planet, expecting a much more elliptical orbit had it been so (although, there are many processes that could have changed the orbit over billions of years that M type stars exist).

It would seem most likely that our fascination with exoplanets includes our desire to see if we are alone in the Universe. Aliens will live on planets, at least when not travelling or occupying space stations, and space ships and space stations will be impossible to locate unless they broadcast signals that happen to come to us. Such signals will be highly directional to prevent attenuation over…

Coldest Brown Dwarfs Blur Lines Between Stars and Planets

http://earthchangesmedia.com/coldest-brown-dwarfs-blur-lines-between-stars-and-planets

Astronomers are constantly on the hunt for ever-colder star-like bodies, and two years ago a new class of objects was discovered by researchers using NASA’s WISE space telescope. However, until now no one has known exactly how cool their surfaces really are — some evidence suggested…

Astronomers are constantly…

Astronomical forensics uncover planetary disks in Hubble archive Phys.org > Astronomy & Space > April 24, 2014 [row 1] The two images at top reveal debris disks around young stars uncovered in archival images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. [row 2] The illustration beneath each image depicts the orientation of the debris disks. — Credit: NASA/ESA, R. Soummer, Ann Feild (STScI)

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Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have applied a new image processing technique to obtain near-infrared scattered light photos of five disks observed around young stars in the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes database. These disks are telltale evidence for newly formed planets.