Sentences with word «exocomets»

Such large bodies would affect the orbits of exocomets in the Beta Pictoris system, giving astronomers clues to their presence and movement.

In contrast, exocomets in the other family stray in different orbits and directions.

One family of exocomets appears to have very similar orbits, all coming in toward the star like a string of pearls.

«There are models involving circumstellar material — like exocomets, which were Boyajian's team's original hypothesis — which seem to be consistent with the data we have.»

An artist's impression showing exocomets orbiting the star Beta Pictoris.

After analyzing archival observations that had been made with the HARPS spectrograph at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, astronomers have discovered two families of exocomets around this nearby young star.

First exocomet system was discovered in 1987 around Beta Pictoris.

The orbits of exocomets on Beta Pictoris could also help scientists trace the presence and migration of larger, undetected bodies such as gas giant planets in the planetary system, says Russel White, an astronomer at Georgia State University in Atlanta who was not involved in the study.

Scientists want to study the behaviors of exocomets, which represent the link between fully formed planets and the debris disks, but individual comets around alien suns are too dark and small to be observed directly.

So when an exocomet passes in front of the star Beta Pictoris, it changes the spectrum of the star observed by the HARPS instrument.

The exocomet family on Beta Pictoris, on the other hand, may provide similar evidence for free, she says.

Those exocomets also produce a lot more gas than typical comets do, a peculiarity that the researchers say could indicate that they have fresh icy surfaces prolifically evaporating.

The discovery still doesn't provide direct evidence of the exocomets» existence, but it could pave the way for a better understanding of comets in distant planetary systems and our own solar system.

Now, for the first time, researchers have surveyed a large population of these «exocomets» around the young star Beta Pictoris.

If the «string - of - pearls» exocomets are indeed fragments of a larger body, they could help astronomers understand the composition of their massive parent, Roberge says.

I also work on the chemistry of exocomets.

11 exocomets have been been found (2017).

To our knowledge, with the exception of $ \ beta $ Pic, our monitoring has the best time resolution at the mentioned timescales for a star with events attributed to exocomets.