Category Astronomy/Space

This is an illustration of this highly unusual system, which features the smallest-separation binary stars that both host planets ever discovered. Only six other metal-poor binary star systems with exoplanets have ever been found. Credit: Illustration is courtesy of Timothy Rodigas.

Carnegie scientists have discovered three giant planets in a binary star system composed of stellar ”twins” that are also effectively siblings of our Sun. One star hosts two planets and the other hosts the third. The system represents the smallest-separation binary in which both stars host planets that has ever been observed. The findings, which may help explain the influence that giant planets like Jupiter have over a solar system’s architecture, have been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal.

A comparison of visualizing galaxies with and without ZFOURGE. Credit: Texas A&M University

An international team of astronomers, including Carnegie’s Eric Persson, has charted the rise and fall of galaxies over 90% of cosmic history. FourStar Galaxy Evolution Survey (ZFOURGE) has built a multicolored photo album of galaxies as they grow from their faint beginnings into mature and majestic giants. They did so by measuring distances and brightnesses for more than 70,000 galaxies spanning more than 12 billion years of cosmic time, revealing the breadth of galactic diversity.

The team assembled the colorful photo album by using a new set of filters that are sensitive to infrared light and taking images with them with the FourStar camera at Carnegie’s 6...

In this spacecraft image of Phobos, red arrows indicate a chain of small craters whose origin researchers were able to trace back to a primary impact at the large crater known as Grildrig. Credit: ESA/Mars Express, modified by Nayak & Asphaug; copyrighted image

Some of the mysterious grooves on Mars’ moon Phobos are the result of debris ejected by impacts eventually falling back onto the surface to form linear chains of craters, according to a new study. One set of grooves on Phobos are thought to be stress fractures resulting from the tidal pull of Mars. The new study addresses another set of grooves that do not fit that explanation. “These grooves cut across the tidal fields, so they require another mechanism...

Dimitri Veras. The fates of Solar system analogues with one additional distant planet, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2016). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stw2170

The solar system could be thrown into disaster when the sun dies if the mysterious ‘Planet Nine’ exists, according to research from the University of Warwick. Dr Dimitri Veras in the Department of Physics has discovered that the presence of Planet Nine – the hypothetical planet which may exist in the outer Solar System – could cause the elimination of at least one of the giant planets after the sun dies, hurling them out into interstellar space through a sort of ‘pinball’ effect...