Sentences with phrase «giant planets close»

The finding «adds to the accumulating evidence that the pathways that bring these giant planets close to their parent stars are messy and chaotic,» says planetary scientist Jonathan Fortney of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Mathematical models, combined with our understanding of how planets and comets form, suggest that the objects in the Oort cloud must have been flung there by one of the giant planets closer to the sun.

Not exact matches

They're both giant planets, and they both orbit extremely close to their host stars — so close that it only takes them about five days to complete a full orbit.

The basic architecture of our solar system, where things go in circles, and there are small rocky planets close to the sun and big massive gas giants far from the sun, is certainly not the only architecture.

While all the planets orbiting the sun closer than this tilted blue giant have been known to humans since ancient times, Uranus wasn't spotted until William Herschel saw it in 1781.

The giant planet usually features two broad dark bands close to the equator, one in each hemisphere.

After 5 years of travel, Juno will soon reach Jupiter and begin its up close investigations of the giant planet.

Several other super-Earths have been identified in systems much like our solar system, with small planets closer to the star and giants in the outer orbits.

For years, astronomers expected to see elsewhere what they saw in our own orderly solar system: rocky planets close to a star and gas giants farther away, all in neat, nearly circular orbits.

Our solar system is a case in point: the latest exoplanet research suggests that its orderly arrangement of planets is exceptionally rare, with rocky planets closer to the sun and gas giants farther out.

Unlike our solar system, the planetary types alternate: A gas giant is closest to the star, then a rocky planet, then gas, rocky, and gas.

JUPITER, MEET JUNO After 5 years of travel, Juno has reached Jupiter and will soon begin its up close investigations of the giant planet.

These are large gas giants that look a little like the planet Jupiter in our solar system, although they are much hotter as they circle their star in a very tight orbit: about a hundred times closer than our Jupiter is to the sun.

This scenario naturally produces a planetary system just like our own: small, rocky planets with thin atmospheres close to the star, a Jupiter - like gas giant just beyond the snowline, and the other giants getting progressively smaller at greater distances because they move more slowly through their orbits and take longer to hoover up material.

The first exoplanets found were gas giants orbiting close to their stars — a study suggests they could be built from collisions of several smaller planets

Crossing the asteroid belt without incident was its first achievement; then it sent us the first close - up photographs and scientific measurements of Jupiter, confirming that the giant planet is mostly gas and liquid.

Meléndez identified 15 elements that are more abundant in sun - size stars with giant planets orbiting very close to the stars.

The combined gravity of the second and third stars would have kept the gas and dust disk of the primary star at a maximum radius of 200 million kilometers — too close for the formation of giant planets.

But astronomers have always wondered about the paucity of close - in brown dwarfs: While many giant planets have been found in small orbits, whirling around their sunlike stars in just a few days, the more massive brown dwarfs appear to shun these intimate relationships.

AD Leo has a giant planet orbiting 3 million kilometres away (fifty times closer than the Earth to the Sun), and it may have Earth - sized worlds further out in its habitable zone.

The findings may mean that hot Jupiters assume their peculiar orbits after far - off giant planets kick them close to their suns.

This is because their intense magnetic activity interferes with the light emitted by the star to a far greater extent than a potential giant planet, even in a close orbit.

Then, planet hunters started finding «hot Jupiters» — giant worlds, hotter than Venus, that orbit close to their stars.

Of the alien solar systems we've spotted, many seem to have one intriguing thing in common: giant gas planets like Jupiter and Saturn orbiting very close to their parent star.

What is more, improved technology should also allow larger observatories such as Keck to move from the few giant planets already imaged — all of which orbit their host stars at relatively large distances — to closer - in worlds more like our own.

Theorists will have to refine their models of planet formation, but will still have to explain how systems like our own ended up with giant planets farther out and small planets in closer orbits.

Comet Wild - 2 used to orbit beyond the orbit of Jupiter, but it made an unusually close approach to the giant planet in September 1974 and got catapulted into the inner solar system.

While we have four inner rocky planets and four outer gas giants, many other systems have «hot Jupiters» very close to their star.

Some fragments will miss the giant planet, but may nevertheless pass close enough to be broken up.

From the spread of the fragments, astronomers have calculated that the comet passed so close to Jupiter last July that it broke into at least 17 pieces, which now orbit the giant planet about once every two years (This Week, 17 April).

The vents are narrowed or closed when at closest approach to the gas giant planet [1].

The new study suggests that the «hot Jupiter» WASP - 18b, a massive planet that orbits very close to its host star, has an unusual composition, and the formation of this world might have been quite different from that of Jupiter as well as gas giants in other planetary systems.

Closest in are two planets slightly larger than our own, then Kepler - 90i, which is the system's smallest planet, followed by three worlds a bit smaller than Neptune and two gas giants.

We were looking at hot Jupiters [giant gas planets that lie very close to their stars].

Robotic spacecraft, such as Pioneer 10 and 11 and the Voyager probes, gave us our first close - ups of the gas giant planets in the outer solar system.

This leaves plenty of elbowroom for undetected terrestrial planets to huddle close their star, just as Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars do.What's more, the gas giants could irrigate parched inner terrestrial planets with ices from comets and asteroids they perturb.

The planet is very hot due to its close proximity to its parents star, and it's a gas giant, so no solid surfaces.

Hot Jupiters - One of the most surprising findings thus far is the detection of giant, Jupiter - class planets in orbits very close to their host stars (three within the range of tidal interaction with their stars).

Then, in 1995, astronomers discovered the distant planet 51 Pegasi b, a «hot Jupiter,» or gas giant, that orbited very close to its sun.

In the first measurements of the day and night temperatures of an extra-Solar planet, infrared observations revealed that the Jupiter - class gas giant circling very close to Upsilon Andromedae A stays as hot as fire on one side while potentially remaining as cold as ice on the other.

«In order for the asteroids to pass sufficiently close to the white dwarf to be shredded, then eaten, they must be perturbed from the asteroid belt — essentially pushed — by a massive object like a giant planet,» said Farihi.

For example, 51 Pegasi, an extrasolar system found this time has a giant gas planet with a half the size of Jupiter that orbits close to the central star in only 4 days.

Many of these are much larger than Earth — ranging from large planets with thick atmospheres, like Neptune, to gas giants like Jupiter — or in orbits so close to their stars that they are roasted.

With a larger sample, planets at varying stages of atmospheric loss will be found that confirm whether or not the majority of close in rocky planets are the burnt embers leftover of gas giants who ventured to close to their host stars.

Here we report observations of the bright star HD 195689 (also known as KELT - 9), which reveal a close - in (orbital period of about 1.48 days) transiting giant planet, KELT - 9b.

Alternatively, the planet could be evidence against the migration theory, suggesting that giant planets can in fact form close in to their stars.

Tidal interactions between close - in, gas - giant exoplanets and their host star should cause the orbits of the planets to decay.

Surveys of the ice - line region by the vortex coronagraph will help answer ongoing puzzles about a class of hot, giant planets found extremely close to their stars — the «hot Jupiters» and «hot Neptunes.»

In 2005, MOST was responsible for another surprising discovery: it observed a giant planet that orbits so close to its host star that the star was forced to synchronize its rotation with that of the planet.

The smallest exoplanet hitherto discovered has... ▽ More Since the discovery of the first extrasolar giant planets around Sun - like stars, evolving observational capabilities have brought us closer to the detection of true Earth analogues.