constellation Taurus tagged posts

Astrophysicists discover the closest and oldest ultracool dwarf binary ever observed. Northwestern University and the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego) astrophysicists have discovered the tightest ultracool dwarf binary system ever observed.

The two stars are so close that it takes them less than one Earth day to revolve around each other. In other words, each star’s “year” lasts just 17 hours.

The newly discovered ...

This false-color image from a sub-millimeter interferometric telescope shows the circumstellar disk of gas and dust that surrounds star CI Tau. Credit: Stephane Guilloteau/University of Bordeaux

Jupiter-like ‘CI Tau b’ orbits 2 million-year-old star in constellation Taurus. In contradiction to the long-standing idea that larger planets take longer to form, US astronomers today announced the discovery of a giant planet in close orbit around a star so young that it still retains a disk of circumstellar gas and dust.

“For decades, conventional wisdom held that large Jupiter-mass planets take a minimum of 10 million years to form,” said Christopher Johns-Krull. “That’s been called into question over the past decade” CI Tau b is at least 8X larger than Jupiter, ~450 light years from Earth...