planetary evolution tagged posts

A young planet whirling around a petulant red dwarf star is changing in unpredictable ways orbit-by-orbit...

These three planetary discs have been observed with the SPHERE instrument, mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The observations were made in order to shed light on the enigmatic evolution of fledgling planetary systems. The central parts of the images appear dark because SPHERE blocks out the light from the brilliant central stars to reveal the much fainter structures surrounding them. Credit: ESO

3 teams of astronomers have made use of SPHERE, an advanced exoplanet-hunting instrument on the VLT at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, in order to shed light on the enigmatic evolution of fledgling planetary systems. The explosion in the number of known exoplanets in recent years has made the study of them one of the most dynamic fields in modern astronomy...

Artist’s conception. Credit: courtesy of Robin Dienel

When a star is young, it is often still surrounded by a primordial rotating disk of gas and dust, from which planets can form. Astronomers like to find such disks because they might be able to catch the star partway through the planet formation process, but it’s highly unusual to find such disks around brown dwarfs or stars with very low masses. New work from a team led by Anne Boucher of Université de Montréal, and including Carnegie’s Jonathan Gagné and Jacqueline Faherty, has discovered 4 new low-mass objects surrounded by disks.

3 of 4 objects discovered by these researchers are quite small, somewhere between only 13 and 18 times the mass of Jupiter. The fourth has about 120 times Jupiter’s mass...

A new study suggests a planet must start with an internal temperature that is “just right” in order to support life. Credit: Michael S. Helfenbein/Yale University

The search for habitable, alien worlds needs to make room for a second “Goldilocks,” according to a Yale University researcher. For decades, it has been thought that the key factor in determining whether a planet can support life was its distance from its sun. In our solar system, for instance, Venus is too close to the sun and Mars is too far, but Earth is just right. That distance is what scientists refer to as the “habitable zone,” or the “Goldilocks zone.”
It also was thought that planets were able to self-regulate their internal temperature via mantle convection—the underground shifting of rocks caused by internal heating an...