Astronomers Find A Potential ‘Major Planet’ Orbiting A Dead Star That Can Support Life For At Least 1 Billion Years Into The Future

It turns out that the existence of life on planets orbiting stars like our sun does not require those stars to be vibrant and powerful. 

A potential "major planet" that orbits a dying sun and could support life in the future has been found by scientists.

The “surprising” discovery was made by researchers from University College London while watching a white dwarf, the burning remnants of a star that ran out of hydrogen fuel. It is about 117 light-years away from us. This star, known as WD1054-226, has a ring of planetary rubble in its orbital habitable zone, also known as the Goldilocks zone, where temperatures should enable the planet to have liquid water on its surface.

If the newfound planet is proved to be a life-sustaining world, it will be the first time a life-sustaining planet has been identified around a dying sun.

Scientists made the discovery while monitoring the light from the white dwarf and reported their results in the Royal Astronomical Society’s Monthly Notices. They discovered strong dips in light that matched to 65 uniformly distributed clouds of debris that orbited WD1054-226 every 25 hours, according to their findings.

Jay Farihi, the lead author of the study and professor at UCL Physics and Astronomy, said: “The moon-sized structures we have observed are irregular and dusty (e.g. comet-like) rather than solid, spherical bodies”

He described the structures as a “mystery we cannot explain,” but suggested one possible and “unexpected” explanation: a nearby planet.

He said: “”An exciting possibility is that these bodies are kept in such an evenly-spaced orbital pattern because of the gravitational influence of a nearby planet. Without this influence, friction and collisions would cause the structures to disperse, losing the precise regularity that is observed. A precedent for this ‘shepherding’ is the way the gravitational pull of moons around Neptune and Saturn help to create stable ring structures orbiting these planets. We were not looking for this.”

The idea of a “major planet” in the star’s habitable zone is thrilling, but he emphasises that such a planet has yet to be proven. Farihi stated that his team still requires further proof, which may be tough to get due to the inability to directly view the planet. To gain a clearer explanation, they may have to depend on computer models along with additional observations of the star and its circling debris.

The team anticipates that, if a planet exists, it was just recently formed — and that it would be habitable for at least 2 billion years, including at least 1 billion years in the future.

Their finding may also aid scientists in developing a better knowledge of our solar system, as more than 95% of all stars, including our sun, will ultimately become white dwarfs.

Updated version of the previous article.

Reference(): Royal Astronomical Society’s Monthly Notices

Astronomers Find A Potential ‘Major Planet’ Orbiting A Dead Star That Can Support Life For At Least 1 Billion Years Into The Future

It turns out that the existence of life on planets orbiting stars like our sun does not require those stars to be vibrant and powerful. A potential "major planet" that orbits a dying sun and could support life in the future has been found by scientists.

The “surprising” discovery was made by researchers from University College London while watching a white dwarf, the burning remnants of a star that ran out of hydrogen fuel. It is about 117 light-years away from us. This star, known as WD1054-226, has a ring of planetary rubble in its orbital habitable zone, also known as the Goldilocks zone, where temperatures should enable the planet to have liquid water on its surface.

If the newfound planet is proved to be a life-sustaining world, it will be the first time a life-sustaining planet has been identified around a dying sun.

Scientists made the discovery while monitoring the light from the white dwarf and reported their results in the Royal Astronomical Society’s Monthly Notices. They discovered strong dips in light that matched to 65 uniformly distributed clouds of debris that orbited WD1054-226 every 25 hours, according to their findings.

Jay Farihi, the lead author of the study and professor at UCL Physics and Astronomy, said: “The moon-sized structures we have observed are irregular and dusty (e.g. comet-like) rather than solid, spherical bodies”

He described the structures as a “mystery we cannot explain,” but suggested one possible and “unexpected” explanation: a nearby planet.

He said: “”An exciting possibility is that these bodies are kept in such an evenly-spaced orbital pattern because of the gravitational influence of a nearby planet. Without this influence, friction and collisions would cause the structures to disperse, losing the precise regularity that is observed. A precedent for this ‘shepherding’ is the way the gravitational pull of moons around Neptune and Saturn help to create stable ring structures orbiting these planets. We were not looking for this.”

The idea of a “major planet” in the star’s habitable zone is thrilling, but he emphasises that such a planet has yet to be proven. Farihi stated that his team still requires further proof, which may be tough to get due to the inability to directly view the planet. To gain a clearer explanation, they may have to depend on computer models along with additional observations of the star and its circling debris.

The team anticipates that, if a planet exists, it was just recently formed — and that it would be habitable for at least 2 billion years, including at least 1 billion years in the future.

Their finding may also aid scientists in developing a better knowledge of our solar system, as more than 95% of all stars, including our sun, will ultimately become white dwarfs.

Updated version of the previous article.

Reference(): Royal Astronomical Society’s Monthly Notices

Astronomers Find A Potential ‘Major Planet’ Orbiting A Dead Star That Can Support Life For At Least 1 Billion Years Into The Future

It turns out that the existence of life on planets orbiting stars like our sun does not require those stars to be vibrant and powerful. A potential "major planet" that orbits a dying sun and could support life in the future has been found by scientists.

The “surprising” discovery was made by researchers from University College London while watching a white dwarf, the burning remnants of a star that ran out of hydrogen fuel. It is about 117 light-years away from us. This star, known as WD1054-226, has a ring of planetary rubble in its orbital habitable zone, also known as the Goldilocks zone, where temperatures should enable the planet to have liquid water on its surface.

If the newfound planet is proved to be a life-sustaining world, it will be the first time a life-sustaining planet has been identified around a dying sun.

Scientists made the discovery while monitoring the light from the white dwarf and reported their results in the Royal Astronomical Society’s Monthly Notices. They discovered strong dips in light that matched to 65 uniformly distributed clouds of debris that orbited WD1054-226 every 25 hours, according to their findings.

Jay Farihi, the lead author of the study and professor at UCL Physics and Astronomy, said: “The moon-sized structures we have observed are irregular and dusty (e.g. comet-like) rather than solid, spherical bodies”

He described the structures as a “mystery we cannot explain,” but suggested one possible and “unexpected” explanation: a nearby planet.

He said: “”An exciting possibility is that these bodies are kept in such an evenly-spaced orbital pattern because of the gravitational influence of a nearby planet. Without this influence, friction and collisions would cause the structures to disperse, losing the precise regularity that is observed. A precedent for this ‘shepherding’ is the way the gravitational pull of moons around Neptune and Saturn help to create stable ring structures orbiting these planets. We were not looking for this.”

The idea of a “major planet” in the star’s habitable zone is thrilling, but he emphasises that such a planet has yet to be proven. Farihi stated that his team still requires further proof, which may be tough to get due to the inability to directly view the planet. To gain a clearer explanation, they may have to depend on computer models along with additional observations of the star and its circling debris.

The team anticipates that, if a planet exists, it was just recently formed — and that it would be habitable for at least 2 billion years, including at least 1 billion years in the future.

Their finding may also aid scientists in developing a better knowledge of our solar system, as more than 95% of all stars, including our sun, will ultimately become white dwarfs.

Updated version of the previous article.

Reference(): Royal Astronomical Society’s Monthly Notices

Chorus of black holes emits X-rays

The blue dot in this image of galaxies, known as the COSMOS field, shows galaxies that surround supermassive black holes producing high-energy X-ray. They were discovered by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Array or known as NuSTAR, which spotted 32 such black holes in this COSMOS field and has detected hundreds across the whole sky so far. The other colored dots are galaxies that host black holes producing lower-energy X-rays and were discovered by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Chandra data show X-rays with energies between 0.5 to 7 kilo-electron volts while NuSTAR data show X-rays between 8 to 24 kilo-electron volts. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Super-massive black holes do not emit any of their own light, hence the word "black" in their name.

Though, many black holes pull in, or accrete, close material, and give off great bursts of X-rays. Together, these active black holes all over the sky can be supposed of a cosmic choir, singing in the language of X-rays. Their "song" is what scientists call the cosmic X-ray background.

To date, NASA's Chandra mission has achieved to identify many of the different black holes donating to the X-ray background, but the ones that emit high-energy X-rays, those with the maximum-pitched "voices" have stayed elusive. NuSTAR, has, for the first time, begun to find large numbers of the black holes emitting the high-energy X-rays. More precisely, NuSTAR has made important progress in solving the high-energy X-ray background.

Fiona Harrison, Benjamin M. Rosen Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Caltech, the principal investigator of NuSTAR, and lead author of a new study explaining the discovery in an upcoming topic of The Astrophysical Journal says, "We have gone from resolving just 2% of the high-energy X-ray background to 35%. We can see the most unnoticed black holes, hidden in dense gas and dust."

The consequences will finally help astronomers study how the development patterns of supermassive black holes change with the passage of time, an important factor in the development of black holes and the galaxies that host them. For example, the supermassive black hole at the middle of our Milky Way galaxy is inactive now, but at some point in the past, it would have tapped the gas and bulked up in size.

As black holes develop, their strong gravity pulls matter toward them. The matter heats up to enormously high temperatures and particles get triggered to close to the speed of light. Together, these methods make the black hole surroundings spark with X-rays. A supermassive black hole with a plenty supply of fuel, or gas, will emit more high-energy X-rays. NuSTAR is the first telescope which has the capability of aiming these high-energy X-rays into sharp pictures.

Harrison says, "Before NuSTAR, the X-ray background in high-energies was just one distortion with no resolved bases. To untie what is going on, you have to find and count up the individual causes of the X-rays."

Co-author Daniel Stern, the project researcher for NuSTAR at JPL says, "We knew this cosmic choir had a tough high-pitched part, but we still don't know if it comes from a lot of lesser, quiet singers, or a few with loud voices. Now, cheers to NuSTAR, we are achieving a better understanding of the black holes and beginning to address these questions."

High-energy X-rays can expose what lies around the most covered supermassive black holes, which are else hard to see. In the same way that medical X-rays can travel through your skin to take images of bones, NuSTAR can see through the gas and dust around black holes, to get a deeper sight of what is going on inside. With NuSTAR's more complete picture of supermassive black hole populations, scientists can begin to problem together how these objects develop and change over time. When did they start and stop increasing? What is the scattering of the gas and dust that both feed and hide the black holes?

The scientists assume that over time, NuSTAR will be capable of resolving more of the high-energy X-ray background, and better translate the X-ray song of the universe's black holes.