Sentences with phrase «eccentric orbit»

This otherwise undistinguished satellite of Neptune, moderately lumpy and middling in size, travels on the most eccentric orbit of any moon in the solar system

In both, tides caused by Europa's eccentric orbit around Jupiter create internal heat that melts the base of the icy crust.

The radial - velocity variations indicate a highly eccentric orbit with a period of 153.9 days.

Led by San Francisco State University astronomer Stephen Kane, a team of researchers has spotted an extrasolar planet about 117 light - years from earth that boasts the most eccentric orbit yet seen.

An earlier observation of HD 20782 suggested that the planet might have an extremely eccentric orbit.

«The Kuiper Belt objects have a wide variety of orbits, but tend to be characterized by eccentric orbits,» he said.

It moves around the Sun at an average distance of 45.8 AUs in a mildly eccentric orbit (e ~ 0.16) and a relatively high inclination of 29.0 degrees, that takes nearly 310 years to complete.

The findings bolster previous work by other scientists that showed that six of those bodies travel on highly eccentric orbits whose long axes all point in the same direction.

Another surprise is that a number of these big planets are on fairly eccentric orbits, not circular like those of Jupiter and Earth.

HD 20782 has the most eccentric orbit known, measured at an eccentricity of.96.

Now, using the method pioneered by Sir Isaac Newton when he determined the mass of Jupiter, Brown and his colleagues have determined that Eris, a far - flung rocky mass with a wildly eccentric orbit, is 27 percent more massive than Pluto.

They suggest that the planet's slightly eccentric orbit could be caused other planets too small to be detected which tug at its orbit (Knutson et al, 2007).

The oldest stars are in the spherical bulge & stellar halo retaining their randomly - oriented eccentric orbits of the original gas cloud from which the galaxy formed about 13 billion years ago.

Every 415.5 years, the comet Thatcher circles the Sun in a highly eccentric orbit shaped almost like a cat's eye.

We show that a giant planet on a sufficiently eccentric orbit can excite extreme eccentricity oscillations in the orbit of a habitable terrestrial planet.

If it came from the Galaxy's disk, the scientists say, it would have had to receive a powerful one - sided «kick» from the supernova explosion to get into its present eccentric orbit.

The discovery of Sedna on a highly eccentric orbit beyond Neptune suggests a perplexing new population of icy bodies residing far outside the Kuiper Belt.

A portion of the dwarf planet Pluto's highly eccentric orbit brings it nearer to the Sun than Neptune, which has a nearly circular orbit.

While the mystery of KIC 8462852's brightness variations is still far from settled, a new study by a team of astronomers that has utilised NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggests that the culprit is most probably a huge swarm of cometary fragments that revolve around the star on highly elongated eccentric orbits.

Titan's eccentric orbit around Saturn generates tides that flex the moon's surface and create tidal heating, which could cause variations to develop in the thickness of the ice shell, Hemingway said.

The only known transiting planet with a comparably long orbit, called HD 80606 b, has an extremely eccentric orbit; the distance between HD 80606 b and its star varies greatly throughout the planet's orbit, driving temperature changes of several hundred degrees in a matter of hours.

For example, a mildly eccentric orbit would keep Earth in its so - called habitable zone all year long so that there is little significant change in climate.

In particular, I will focus on planets on eccentric orbits, not only because typical exoplanetary systems have been found to contain these, but also because their interactions with debris disks theoretically facilitates the transport of icy bodies within the habitable zone of planetary systems.

This pulsar is locked in an elongated and eccentric orbit of about 25 years around a star named MT91 213, which is 15 times the mass of the sun and 10,000 times brighter.

With a perihelion of 76 AU (more than twice that of Neptune), Sedna is well beyond the reach of the gas giants and unlike other Kuiper Belt Objects, could not be scattered into its highly eccentric orbit from gravitational interactions with Neptune alone.

A solitary planet in an eccentric orbit around an ancient star may help astronomers understand exactly how such planetary systems are formed.

Planet Nine could represent that fifth core, and if it got too close to Jupiter or Saturn, it could have been ejected into its distant, eccentric orbit.

There are many ways to make a planetary system, so, for example, the planets could be on eccentric orbits, or you could have the most massive planets right up next to the star, even closer than Mercury, and those might even be more common.

The suspicion is that the fractures — in some way that is not yet fully understood — connect down to a part of the moon that is being tidally heated by the globe's repeated flexing as it traces its eccentric orbit.

«When we see a planet like this that is in an eccentric orbit, it can be really hard to try and explain how it got that way,» he explained.

While the planets in our solar system have nearly circular orbits, astronomers have discovered several extrasolar planets with highly elliptical or eccentric orbits.

This unique structure might be caused by gravitational disturbances of a small moonlet in an eccentric orbit that has apparently criss - crossed the F ring for almost 9 months.

It has an eccentric orbit that is highly inclined with respect to the planets and takes it closer to the Sun than Neptune during a portion of its orbit.

Comets, after all, spend most of their time far from their star and have highly eccentric orbits, which could account for the irregularity of dimming.

The comets are thought to be traveling around the star in a very long, eccentric orbit.

Newly discovered Sedna swoops far from the sun on a highly eccentric orbit (right).

The same force can push dust into highly eccentric orbits, and even blow some of the smaller grains out of the disk entirely.

A substellar companion at that distance would imply an orbital period of around a year, or it could be in a highly eccentric orbit with a much greater average distance from Proxima.

Most important, some of the ice below appears to have been melted by tidal heating from gravitational inteeractions of its mantle and core from its eccentric orbit about Jupiter and radioactive decay to create a deep global ocean of electrically conductive liquid such as salty water that generates fluctuations in the moon's magnetic pole (Walter S. Kiefer, 2002).

The Fomalhaut team led by Paul Kalas (University of California, Berkeley) considers this circumstantial evidence that there may be other planet - like bodies in the system that gravitationally disrupted Fomalhaut b to place it in such a highly eccentric orbit.