Hell has an address: 55 Cancri-e is the first alien planet to have some of its surface features directly observed. And it’s no tropical paradise.
For some time 55 Cancri-e has been considered “strange.” Some felt it may be made of diamond. Others suggested it was covered in exotic fluids.
So an international team of astronomers headed up by the University of Cambridge has examined data captured by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope about this 40 light-year-distant “super-Earth.”
Sounds great — as long as we don’t call it a Moon Village. That sounds inane.
The director general of ESA, Johann-Dietrich Woerner, believes that the world should collaborate to create a permanent lunar base for “science, business, tourism or even mining.” Plans to use robotics and 3D printing for building the base have been discussed.
Planet 9, if indeed it’s out there, may have been stripped from one of our Sun’s stellar siblings, very early in the life of our solar system. The idea is that the Sun’s original birth cluster of at least a 1000 stars was pretty crowded and there was ample opportunity to gravitationally strip a planet from a stellar brother or sister. But guess stars don’t get jealous, eh?
A possible super-earth lying on our solar system’s outer fringes may have been captured from a star in our Sun’s original stellar birth cluster, Alexander James Mustill, an astronomer at Lund University in Sweden, tells me.
Even though Planet 9’s existence still remains up for debate, a growing body of evidence for nearly decade now indicates the presence of a planet some 10 times the mass of Earth that orbits the Sun at a distance of up to 900 astronomical units (or Earth-Sun distances).
Mustill says that depending on how long the Sun stayed in proximity with its stellar siblings, indeed, Planet 9 may have been captured within the first 100 million years of our star’s formation. As Mustill notes, evidence suggests that the Sun was born into a large open cluster of at least a thousand stars.
Back in January, the astronomer who led the charge to have Pluto demoted to dwarf planet status announced that he’d just found evidence that a huge, icy planet could be lurking on the edge of the Solar System, just past Neptune.
Mike Brown, a planetary astronomer at Caltech University, estimated that the hypothetical ‘Planet Nine’ appears to be circling the Sun on a super-elongated orbit that takes an incredible 10,000 to 20,000 years to complete. And now, thanks to a newly detected Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) that’s acting really strange, Brown says the case for Planet Nine just got a whole lot stronger.
“Hey Planet Nine fans, a new eccentric KBO was discovered. And it is exactly where Planet Nine says it should be,” Brown tweeted over the weekend.
Posted in particle physics, space
