Slashdot Mirror
Planet Discovered with a Massive Core
helioquake writes "A collaboration of astronomers discovers possible a 'Rossetta Stone' of planetary formation study, reported by San Francisco State Univerity and Subaru Observatory. This new planet, orbiting around G-star like our Sun (HD 149026), weighs roughly equal to that of Saturn, while its size is significantly smaller in diameter. Planetary modeling suggests that the core of the planet alone must have 70 times more mass than Earth, indicating the possible existence of a metallic solid core inside the planet. Just like the rocky planet discovered earlier, the finding of this dense-core planet may lead to better understading of the formation of rockey planets in the Universe."
I'd say it's time for IPX to head out and start mining that core. There's probably quite a bit of rare minerals in it.
Its influence on the star's wobble, AFAIR.
Me (Blog)
Call me when they discover a giant planet, with a metallic core outside the planet. That's the armored base from which they keep sending us aliens like Ann Coulter and Tom Cruise. Then we just drop magnet-tipped nukes into space, and finally it's safe to watch TV again.
--
make install -not war
It's too bad that the only planets we can reliably locate at this time are the freaky-deeky ones that are too massive, too close to their primary, or are in orbits far too elliptical to give life a decent chance...each new system looks like a good example of how not to design a solar system capable of sustaining life.
Hopefully, this will change when the interferometer goes up around 2015.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Heavy Metal planets are so Hard Core.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
It's not too difficult, conceptually. The star's mass is a function of its brightness. So, you already know the mass of the star. The orbiting planet causes the star to wobble a bit. The more massive the planet, the more the star wobbles. Weight is not the same as mass, by the way. Weight is what you get when you place a mass in a gravitational field. More info on this: http://ethel.as.arizona.edu/~collins/astro/subject s/srchplanet5.html
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
AMD vows to release planet with dual massive cores by end of '05. Intel responds by renegotiating contracts with its distributors.
How much can we model to show what an environment like this is like? That planet's magnetosphere must be fierce. There must be a lot of side effects from that, both for it and any moons it may have.
1) An object travelling in a circular (or eliptical) orbit requires a certain force toward the center of the focus of the orbit, called centripetal force. It is proportional to the product of the mass times the radius of the orbiting body, and inversely proportional to the square of the period of the orbit.
2) Two massive objects will assert an attractive gravitational force on each other, proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the objects.
All astonomers do is equate one force to another. Astronomers believe that they can calculate the mass of the star by observing the star's apparent brightness, and looking at the star's spectrum to figure out what kind of star it is. Unfortunately, the observed brightness of a star is a function of its distance from Earth, and this measurement has a large degree of error for most stars.
Next, astronomers look at how quickly the star "wobbles" due to the orbit of the planet. This gives a good measure of the period of the planet's rotation.
The final step is to figure out how far the planet is from the star. After entering in all the data, you are left with the mass of the planet being a function of its distance from the star. If you apply some trickery in the form of Kepler's Laws, you can see that the period and radius of an orbit are related.
And that's it! Put all the pieces of the puzzle together, and you have an equation for the mass of the planet. If you are lucky, then the plain of the orbit is end-on when observed from Earth--this allows you to see how much of the star's light is blocked from the eclipsing planet, giving you some measure of the planet's size and composition.
/*No comment*/ #No comment
If you have no interst in the universe outside your basement you probably won't get excited. However if you happen to be an astrophysicist or even have a remote interest in new discoveries then you might just find this interesting, because we've never seen anything like this before.
The planet in question posses the largest known core of any known extrosolar planet. So what? you say, well this just happens to be the first observational evidence supporting a planetary formation theory known as core accretion. So thanks to this observation confirming the theory, we now know that there should be a lot more of these planets. And as such a little bit more about the universe around us.
But of course because we cant get there tommorow this sort of work is a waste of time.... Tell you what, why don't you return to your cave and I'll send you an email when we've invented warp drive and found another planet. Then you can go live on it and the rest of us can waste out time with these boring discoveries.