(ORDO NEWS) — News September 10-16. Astronomers have found an exoplanet at a distance of about 100 light-years from Earth.
It has a solid surface and is in the habitable zone, that is, liquid water can be on its surface, which means life.
Astronomers have proposed an explanation for one of the most beautiful phenomena in the solar system – the rings of Saturn. Astrophysicists have found a “newborn” star – it is only a million years old.
Planetology
The TESS space telescope has discovered an exoplanet near the parent star LP 890-9. The star is small, dim, about 100 light years from Earth. Then other telescopes began to look at this planet.
Everything has been confirmed. The planet rotates very close to the parent star – the period of revolution is about 2 Earth days. It turned out to be a rocky super-Earth. Mass – 15 Earth masses.
There is a hard surface. But still, it is very close to the star, and it’s a little hot there. But while considering this planet, they found another one near the same star.
But this planet is further away – its period of revolution is 8 Earth days, its mass is 25 Earth masses. And it’s in the habitable zone.
There may be liquid water on the surface. And that means life. Now this planet will be looked at very carefully.
We have long known that planets are born near parent stars from protoplanetary dust disks. Of course, we know this, but only the process of the birth of the planet has never been seen. The dust disk is practically opaque, and the newborn planet is not visible.
And now, it seems, astronomers have found such a very young planet . The ALMA telescope looked at the star LkCa 15 (about 500 light years from Earth), surrounded by a protoplanetary disk.
And it looks like he saw something. And then the astrophysicists took the data and found the planet. No, they didn’t see her.
They saw clumps of dust that form in its orbit at the Lagrange points L4 and L5. It was even possible to calculate the age of the “newborn” – from 1 to 3 million years.
If we remember that the age of such an adult planet as the Earth is 4.5 billion years, then, of course, a million years is still infancy.
Rings are the hallmark of Saturn. No planet in the solar system has such beautiful rings. More recently, astrophysicists have estimated the age of these rings.
It turned out that they were formed quite recently – from 10 to 100 million years ago. It changed everything.
If the rings had formed billions of years ago along with the planet, then everything would be pretty ordinary – just leftover material from the protoplanetary disk that the planet captured.
And if the rings were formed recently, then nothing is clear. Many hypotheses have emerged. Here’s one that’s pretty well founded. Saturn had a moon called Chrysalis.
It was about half the size of our moon. Its orbit was strongly influenced by other satellites of Saturn, especially Titan and Iapetus.
And poor Chrysalis was finally swayed by them, and he came so close to the surface of Saturn that he was torn apart by the tidal forces of the planet.
And then there were rings. Everything was carefully calculated. Everything is confirmed.
Astrogeology
There is no such science, of course. But scientists came to the conclusion that it would be nice to found it. Geologists analyzed the process of formation of the earth’s crust, and noticed that it did not grow evenly, in jolts.
And such tremors happened once every 200 million years. And these are just those moments in the life of the Earth when it passes through the arms of the Milky Way.
Inside the arms, the density of matter is many times higher than between the arms. And then a comet rain falls on the Earth, magma spills and the growth of the crust accelerates.
Not everything that happens on Earth can be explained in terms of terrestrial processes alone. So astrogeology really has something to do.
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