NEWS OF THE AWESOME: New Planets!!!
Oh, this is exciting!
For as long as we’ve realized that the stars were just other suns, much farther away, people have wondered if there are planets orbiting those stars. It seemed logical; we have no reason to believe that there is anything special or unique about our solar system, so why couldn’t an untold number of them have formed in more or less the same way, all across the universe?
But realizing that something is logically true and knowing it to actually be true are two different things. And unlike stars, planets don’t give off light, which makes them really hard to spot at the kind of distances we’re talking about when discussing even our own arm of the Milky Way.
A few years ago astronomers were able to determine that several nearby stars did have planets orbiting them, by measuring the way the stars wobbled as the gravity of the moving planets pulled them back and forth, but we still couldn’t see them. It was comforting to know for sure that they were there, but rather unsatisfying.
Well, brothers and sisters, 2008 can now be remembered for (among many other reasons) being the year that we first saw, actually saw and photographed, an extra-Solar planet. More than one, actually. Christian Marois and a team from British Columbia found three planets around one of the stars in the constellation Pegasus, called HR 8799, about 130 light years away.
130 light years is pretty serious business on a human scale, but cosmically speaking this star is right down the street. But even better, there’s a star named Formalhaut which is only 25 light years away from us; in galactic terms, we’re practically roommates. Formalhaut is sleeping on our sofa, basically. It is a very young star, still surrounded by the cloud that planets form out of. And in May, Paul Kalas and a team of astronomers from UC-Berkeley found a planet floating in that cloud.
The new planet is about three times the size of Jupiter, and it’s close enough to Earth that our radio signals have been reaching it for nearly a century. Unfortunately, we can be pretty sure there isn’t any intelligent life there (the system is only about 60 million years old; when Earth was that old it still didn’t even have a solid crust), but it’s pretty awesomely cool anyway.
In fact, I’d like to suggest a name for as-yet-unnamed planet: Coolestthingevertopia. Or how about Terra Fabulousica? I wonder who you submit ideas like that to. To all readers: submit your choice of name now, and we’ll send them all in together.