Sentences with phrase «star in close orbit»

Not exact matches

Justin R. Crepp, Freimann Assistant Professor of Physics, was part of the team that discovered KELT - 4Ab, a so - called «hot Jupiter» because it is a gas giant that orbits extremely close to one of the stars in its solar system.

«During the past few years our group,» says David Jones, an astrophysicist at the IAC and another of the authors on the paper, «has discovered that the planetary nebulae with the biggest discrepancies in their abundances are usually associated with binary central stars which have been through a phase with a common envelope, that is to say the process of expansion of the more massive of the two stars has meant that the other star is orbiting within its outer atmosphere, and the viscosity has brought the stars very close to one another.

But because a red dwarf is dimmer overall than our Sun, a planet in the habitable zone would have to orbit much closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun.

Because planets that are close to their stars are easier for telescopes to see, most of the rocky super-Earths discovered so far have close - in orbits — with years lasting between about two to 100 Earth days — making the worlds way too hot to host life as we know it.

But instead of orbiting sedately, hundreds of millions of kilometres from their stars, the first crop were frantically whirling round in close orbits, blistering in hellish heat.

It's tucked in very close to its star; it orbits its star every three and a half days.

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.

To begin with, they orbited close to the plane of the ecliptic in the same direction as the planets, but their orbits were deformed by the galaxy's tidal force and by interactions with nearby stars, gradually becoming more inclined and forming a more or less spherical reservoir,» Morais said.

Following its 2004 discovery in a scorching close orbit around a star 40 light - years away, astronomers dubbed the planet a «super-Earth.»

LOOK CLOSER NASA's next exoplanet hunting telescope, TESS (shown in this artist's illustration), will seek out worlds orbiting the nearest and brightest stars.

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.

After years of scrutinizing the closest star to Earth, a red dwarf known as Proxima Centauri, astronomers have finally found evidence for a planet, slightly bigger than Earth and well within the star's habitable zone — the range of orbits in which liquid water could exist on its surface.

It's likely that violent gravitational interactions between planets slingshot one of them close to the star, and then the orbit slowly circularized in some cockamamy orientation.

Kepler 36: Most Crowded One of Kepler's more surprising results is that many stars host multiple planets crammed together in weirdly close orbits.

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.

The goal of this work that I did with Berkeley astronomer Andrew Howard was to measure the fraction of stars that have small planets in close orbits.

The two main methods — measuring the wobble of stars caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet and measuring the periodic dimming of a star as a planet passes in front — both favor big planets in close orbits.

Many of the newfound worlds follow highly elliptical paths that take them close to and then far away from their star, quite unlike the nearly circular orbits typical in our solar system.

The exoplanet (a planet in another solar system) is about six times the mass of Jupiter and orbits about 40 percent closer to its star, dubbed HD 102272, than Earth does around the sun.

One possible clue was that small, cold stars tend to have close - in gas giants called hot Jupiters that stay in line, whereas bigger, hotter stars are more likely to have hot Jupiters with tilted orbits.

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

The exoplanet, discovered last year by ground - based observatories, orbits so close to its star that it completes a loop in just 2.2 days — making it a very hot Jupiter.

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.

Indeed, the few close - in brown dwarfs that have been found orbit stars that are hotter and more massive than our sun, and spin faster.

After years of scrutinizing the closest star to Earth, a red dwarf known as Proxima Centauri, astronomers have finally found evidence for a planet, slightly bigger than Earth, well within the star's habitable zone — the range of orbits in which liquid water could exist on its surface.

The planet is in a binary star system, so it might also be the case that the second star in the binary made a close approach that threw HD 20782 off a more circular orbit.

First, older stars tend not to have planets in very close orbits.

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.

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.

A bit more than half of the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way travel in pairs, nearly all of them orbiting so close that they can't be distinguished individually except by powerful telescopes.

They orbit very close to their stars, making their surface hot, and the planets tricky to study in detail without being overwhelmed by bright starlight.

«Interestingly K2 - 229b is also the innermost planet in a system of at least 3 planets, though all three orbit much closer to their star than Mercury.

Regardless, the newly discovered planet leads a turbulent existence: it orbits one star in a binary star system, with the other star close enough to disturb the planet's orbit.

Prabal and his team modelled cases where the planets are in orbit close to small red dwarf stars, much fainter than our Sun, but by far the most common type of star in the Galaxy.

One common idea suggested by the public is that a stellar - mass black hole in close orbit around Boyajian's star could block the star's light.

But then large, rocky worlds were spotted orbiting near their stars, making it more likely that hot Jupiters also formed closer in.

The planet, known as HD 189733b, is a hot Jupiter, meaning it is similar in size to Jupiter in our solar system but in very close orbit around its star.

A report in the journal Nature cites the discovery of a new planet, WASP - 18b, which challenges assumptions about tidal interactions — it's too close and orbiting too fast not to have collided with its star, according to current knowledge.

The two binary stars A and B revolve around their common centre of mass in a relatively close orbit, while the third star, Proxima Centauri, is 0.22 light years away, more than 12,500 times the distance between the Sun and Earth.

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.

GJ 273b orbits Luyten's star 12.4 light years away, and is the closest potentially habitable planet visible from the radio dish in Norway that sent the message.

From even just a few light - years away in our own little corner of the Milky Way, a planet in an orbit comparable to Earth's would be too close to its star for even the Hubble to see them as two distinct objects.

The two stars in the system — one about three times more massive than the sun and the other a little less massive — are so close to each other that one orbit takes only 3 days.

«GJ1214b is quite close to Earth, just 42 light years away, and it orbits its star in just 1.6 days.»

A larger sixth planet, closer in mass to Saturn, also appears significantly in the data at a greater distance from HD 10180, but the study's authors note that the signal could be caused by a long - term magnetic cycle on the star rather than the tug of an orbiting planet.

He pointed out that there are many close - orbiting planets around middle - aged stars that are in stable orbits, but his team doesn't know how quickly this young planet is going to lose its mass and «whether it will lose too much to survive.»

Habitable Earth - size planets might turn up sooner around smaller, cooler stars in Kepler's field of view, where water could persist on closer - orbiting planets that would complete laps around their host stars more quickly.

The prospective planet would orbit in searingly close proximity to its star, at roughly 1/50 the distance between the sun and Earth, the only definitely habitable world we know of.

Around smaller, less massive and dimmer dwarf stars, however, planets would have to orbit closer in order to sustain a surface temperature that is warm enough to keep water liquid and so the star would appear larger in the sky.