Post by Andrei Tchentchik on Jun 24, 2019 16:08:12 GMT 2
(.#214).- Discovery of a gigantic planet nestled in the heart of the Milky Way.
Discovery of a gigantic planet nestled in the heart of the Milky Way.
By Tristan Vey - Updated on 09/11/2017 at 12:22
The galactic bulb is this very bright peanut-shaped structure located in the heart of the Milky Way. This is an artist's view. European Southern Observatory / ESO / NASA / JPL-Caltech / M. Kornmesser / R. Hurt.
Astronomers have discovered a planet thirteen times heavier than Jupiter in the "galactic bulge".
Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System, weighs 317 times the mass of the Earth for a diameter ten times larger. It's a beautiful baby in short. Imagine then a planet still 13 times heavier! This is just discovered by an international team of astronomers. Their find is the subject of a pre-publication on the site arXiv.
This new planet with the poetic name, OGLE-2016-BLG-1190Lb, is 13.4 times the mass of Jupiter precisely, more than six times the mass of all the objects that orbit around our star. There would never have been enough material in our Solar System to form such an object ... The mastodon orbit around a star similar to our Sun (it makes 90% of its mass) to two astronomical units approximately, either twice the Earth-Sun distance.
This planet is also extremely distant. It lies at the heart of our Milky Way, about 20,000 light-years away, in an area called the galactic bulge. In the shape of a peanut, this region concentrates 10 billion stars, one tenth of the total of our galaxy. OGLE-2016-BLG-1190Lb is not the first planet to be discovered in the galactic bulge, but there are not many.
3700 identified exoplanets
The two most common techniques for detecting exoplanets are to observe the micro-eclipses caused by the passage of planets in front of their star (transit method) or to flush out the small color variations of a star moving back and forth. under the effect of the gravitational attraction of its planets (method of radial velocities). This mastodon has been detected by a third technique: the gravitational microlens effect.
This method consists in observing the small luminosity of a star caused by the passage of an object in the line of sight. This is not intuitive but by diverting the light rays from the background star, the object acts as a magnifying lens, thus betraying its presence (while remaining invisible). Of the 3700 exoplanets listed in the catalog Exoplanet.eu (held by the French Jean Schneider), about sixty were discovered by this technique, including a dozen in 2017.
The boundary between planet and brown dwarf is not very clear
OGLE-2016-BLG-1190Lb is not the biggest exoplanet ever identified: the catalog exoplanet.eu lists more than a hundred, with a record at 93.6 times the mass of Jupiter! Only problem, beyond 13 masses of Jupiter, we do not know if we are dealing with a planet or a brown dwarf, kind of star aborted. "There is no very clear limit," says Jean-Philippe Beaulieu, CNRS research director at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics. "I do not think mass is the right criterion. One could define a planet as an object that forms in the debris disk that surrounds a star. I do not doubt that this is the case here. "
This observation, on the other hand, has the peculiarity of being made by two telescopes in orbit as well as observatories on the ground. "It improves the precision of the data collected on this object by a factor of two or three," says Jean-Philippe Beaulieu. The astrophysicist would like to look directly at the star around which the giant planet orbits, next summer, for example. This would be possible with one of the 10-meter telescopes on the ground, like the Keck in Hawaii.
F I N .
Discovery of a gigantic planet nestled in the heart of the Milky Way.
By Tristan Vey - Updated on 09/11/2017 at 12:22
The galactic bulb is this very bright peanut-shaped structure located in the heart of the Milky Way. This is an artist's view. European Southern Observatory / ESO / NASA / JPL-Caltech / M. Kornmesser / R. Hurt.
Astronomers have discovered a planet thirteen times heavier than Jupiter in the "galactic bulge".
Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System, weighs 317 times the mass of the Earth for a diameter ten times larger. It's a beautiful baby in short. Imagine then a planet still 13 times heavier! This is just discovered by an international team of astronomers. Their find is the subject of a pre-publication on the site arXiv.
This new planet with the poetic name, OGLE-2016-BLG-1190Lb, is 13.4 times the mass of Jupiter precisely, more than six times the mass of all the objects that orbit around our star. There would never have been enough material in our Solar System to form such an object ... The mastodon orbit around a star similar to our Sun (it makes 90% of its mass) to two astronomical units approximately, either twice the Earth-Sun distance.
This planet is also extremely distant. It lies at the heart of our Milky Way, about 20,000 light-years away, in an area called the galactic bulge. In the shape of a peanut, this region concentrates 10 billion stars, one tenth of the total of our galaxy. OGLE-2016-BLG-1190Lb is not the first planet to be discovered in the galactic bulge, but there are not many.
3700 identified exoplanets
The two most common techniques for detecting exoplanets are to observe the micro-eclipses caused by the passage of planets in front of their star (transit method) or to flush out the small color variations of a star moving back and forth. under the effect of the gravitational attraction of its planets (method of radial velocities). This mastodon has been detected by a third technique: the gravitational microlens effect.
This method consists in observing the small luminosity of a star caused by the passage of an object in the line of sight. This is not intuitive but by diverting the light rays from the background star, the object acts as a magnifying lens, thus betraying its presence (while remaining invisible). Of the 3700 exoplanets listed in the catalog Exoplanet.eu (held by the French Jean Schneider), about sixty were discovered by this technique, including a dozen in 2017.
The boundary between planet and brown dwarf is not very clear
OGLE-2016-BLG-1190Lb is not the biggest exoplanet ever identified: the catalog exoplanet.eu lists more than a hundred, with a record at 93.6 times the mass of Jupiter! Only problem, beyond 13 masses of Jupiter, we do not know if we are dealing with a planet or a brown dwarf, kind of star aborted. "There is no very clear limit," says Jean-Philippe Beaulieu, CNRS research director at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics. "I do not think mass is the right criterion. One could define a planet as an object that forms in the debris disk that surrounds a star. I do not doubt that this is the case here. "
This observation, on the other hand, has the peculiarity of being made by two telescopes in orbit as well as observatories on the ground. "It improves the precision of the data collected on this object by a factor of two or three," says Jean-Philippe Beaulieu. The astrophysicist would like to look directly at the star around which the giant planet orbits, next summer, for example. This would be possible with one of the 10-meter telescopes on the ground, like the Keck in Hawaii.
F I N .
