Space

0 new articles added today in this category until now

Astronomers Find Scaled Solar System

Newly discovered solar system has two gas giants

By Gabriel Gache, Science News Editor

28th of February 2008, 09:07 GMT

Adjust text size:

Artistic impression of the newly discovered solar system

The newly discovered solar system lies 5,000 light years away from Earth and seems to contain two gas giants slightly smaller that the two biggest planets in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, evidence that solar systems similar to our own might be more abundant in the Milky Way than previously thought.

One of the planets has about 70 percent of the mass of Jupiter, while the other has a mass of about 90 percent of that of Saturn. Both are orbiting a star with only half the mass of the Sun.

Event though the central star is not as bright or as hot as our Sun, the two planets seem to have temperatures roughly close to those of Jupiter and Saturn, as they are orbiting the star from a much closer distance. The discovery has been made by Scott Gaudi, assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, while the research has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Michael Briley of the NSF says that the discovered solar system appears to be scaled down to size in relation to our solar system, starting with the mass of the star, its brightness, the orbital trajectories of the two planets, all the way to the sunlight received.

Usually, planets around distant stars are detected by measuring the wobble determined by the gravitational pull of the planets orbiting it. In the case of this particular system, however, the two gas giants were revealed through a gravitational microlensing technique, during two months of observations, spanning from March to April 2006. Gravitational lensing and microlensing were predicted by Albert Einstein with the release of the two theories of relativity. Light travels in a straight line when unperturbed, but, when passing through the vicinity of a massive body, light is bent in a way similar to that of light refracted by optical lenses.

In this case, the passing of one of the two planets through the front of the star, was able to magnify the brightness of the star to about 500 times that of the normal. This doesn't necessarily mean that optical telescopes can observe detailed features of the distant solar system. Information is extracted only from a peak of light, which presents with valuable data related to how large is the planet or from what distance it orbits the star. Gaudi says that this is the first time when a planet with a mass comparable to that of Jupiter is discovered, it might have been pure luck, but this means that sister solar systems are more common in the galaxy than previously thought.

TAGS:

solar system | Sun | Jupiter | Saturn | Milky Way

SEARCH THE NEWS ARCHIVE :

Today's News | Yesterday's News | News Archive

User opinions:

No user comments yet.

Be the first to express your opinion using the form below!

Share your opinion:

SUBMIT PROGRAM \| ADVERTISE \| GET HELP \| SEND US FEEDBACK \| RSS FEEDS \| ENTER NEWS SITE \| ENGLISH BOARD \| ROMANIAN FORUM
© 2001 - 2008 Softpedia. All rights reserved. Softpedia™ and the Softpedia™ logo are registered trademarks of SoftNews NET SRL.	Copyright Information \| Privacy Policy \| Terms of Use \| Update your software \| Archive

NEWS CATEGORIES: