NASAArtist’s concept of Epsilon Eridani, the nearest extrasolar planet to our solar system.
Atronomers confirm that planets form from disks around stars, the McDonald Observatory announced.
PASADENA, Calif.—Astronomers at The University of Texas at Austin have gone a long way toward proving that planets are born from disks of dust and gas that swirl around their home stars, confirming a theory posed by philosopher Emmanuel Kant more than two centuries ago.
G. Fritz Benedict and Barbara E. McArthur have used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, in collaboration with ground-based observatories, to demonstrate that Kant and scientists were correct in predicting the source of planet formation.
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Benedict and McArthur’s observations show for the first time that a known planet orbiting the nearby sun-like star Epsilon Eridani is aligned with the star’s circumstellar disk of dust and gas. The planet’s orbit is inclined 30 degrees to Earth, the same angle at which the star’s disk is tilted. Epsilon Eridani is 10.5 light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus.
The planets in our solar system share a common alignment, evidence that they were created at the same time in the Sun’s disk. But the Sun is a middle-aged star—4.5 billion years old—and its debris disk dissipated long ago. Epsilon Eridani, however, still retains its disk because it is young, only 800 million years old.
No one tell the fundies!
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2 comments:
That larger moon looks blue and white: like maybe habitable. For humans and felines.
Could Maxx check it out with his particle accelerator?
It would be amazing to live with that red, ringed giant in the sky.
Wow, beaut! Is that you, the discoverer? I just read a really cool article about "luminous blue variables" which is what Wolf-Rayet stars are before they grow up, I guess.
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