• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
Saturday, March 25, 2023
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News

Astronomers discover dark past of planet-eating ‘Death Star’

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
December 15, 2016
in Science News
Reading Time: 4 mins read
0
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram
IMAGE

Credit: Illustration byGabi Perez / Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

An international team of scientists, including researchers from the University of Chicago, has made the rare discovery of a planetary system with a host star similar to Earth's sun. Especially intriguing is the star's unusual composition, which indicates it ingested some of its planets.

"It doesn't mean that the sun will 'eat' the Earth any time soon," said Jacob Bean, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UChicago and co-author of an Astronomy & Astrophysics article on the research. "But our discovery provides an indication that violent histories may be common for planetary systems, including our own."

Unlike the artificial planet-destroying Death Star in the movie "Star Wars," this natural version could provide clues about how planetary systems evolve over time.

Astronomers discovered the first planet orbiting a star other than the sun in 1995. Since then, more than two thousand exoplanets have been identified. Rare among them are planets that orbit a star similar to Earth's sun. Due to their extreme similarity to the sun, these so-called solar twins are ideal targets for investigating the connections between stars and their planets.

Bean and his colleagues studied star HIP68468, which is 300 light years away, as part of a multi-year project to discover planets that orbit solar twins. It's tricky to draw conclusions from a single system, cautioned Megan Bedell, a UChicago doctoral student who is co-author of the research and the lead planet finder for the collaboration. She said the team plans "to study more stars like this to see whether this is a common outcome of the planet formation process."

Computer simulations show that billions of years from now, the accumulated gravitational tugs and pulls between planets will eventually cause Mercury to fall into the sun, said Debra Fischer, a professor of astronomy at Yale University who was not involved in the research. "This study of HIP68468 is a post-mortem of this process happening around another star similar to our sun. The discovery deepens our understanding of the evolution of planetary systems."

Two planets discovered

Using the 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile, the research team of scientists from several continents discovered its first exoplanet in 2015. The more recent discovery needs to be confirmed, but includes two planet candidates–a super Neptune and a super Earth. Their orbits are surprisingly close to their host star, with one 50 percent more massive than Neptune and located at a Venus-like distance from its star. The other, the first super Earth around a solar twin, is three times the Earth's mass and so close to its star that its orbit takes just three days.

"These two planets most likely didn't form where we see them today," Bedell said. Instead, they probably migrated inward from the outer parts of the planetary system. Other planets could have been ejected from the system — or ingested by their host star.

HIP68468's composition points to a history of ingesting planets. It contains four times more lithium than would be expected for a star that is 6 billion years old, as well as a surplus of refractory elements–metals resistant to heat and that are abundant in rocky planets.

In the hot interior of stars like HIP68468 and the sun, lithium is consumed over time. Planets, on the other hand, preserve lithium because their inner temperatures are not high enough to destroy the element. As a result, when a star engulfs a planet, the lithium that the planet deposits in the stellar atmosphere stands out.

Taken together, the lithium and the engulfed rocky planet material in the atmosphere of HIP68468 is equivalent to the mass of six Earths.

"It can be very hard to know the history of a particular star, but once in a while we get lucky and find stars with chemical compositions that likely came from in-falling planets," Fischer said. "That's the case with HD68468. The chemical remains of one or more planets are smeared in its atmosphere.

"It's as if we saw a cat sitting next to a bird cage," she added. "If there are yellow feathers sticking out of the cat's mouth, it's a good bet that the cat swallowed a canary."

The team continues to monitor more than 60 solar twins, looking for more exoplanets. Beyond that, the Giant Magellan Telescope under construction in Chile, for which UChicago is a founding partner, will be capable of detecting more Earth-like exoplanets around solar twins.

"In addition to finding Earth-like planets, the Giant Magellan Telescope will enable astronomers to study the atmospheric composition of stars at even greater detail than we can today," Bean said. "That will further reveal the histories of planetary systems that are subtly imprinted on their host stars."

###

Citation: "The Solar Twin Planet Search. V. Close-in, low-mass planet candidates and evidence of planet accretion in the solar twin HIP68468," by Megan Bedell and Jacob Bean (University of Chicago); first author Jorge Meléndez, Sylvio Ferraz-Mello, Jhon Yana-Galarza, Leonardo dos Santos, Marcelo Tucci Maia and Lorenzo Spina (Universidade de Sao Paulo); Alan Alves-Brito (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul); Ivan Ramirez (University of Texas Austin); Martin Asplund and Luca Casagrande (Australian National University); Stefan Dreizler (University of Göttingen); Hong-Liang Yan and Jian-Rong Shi (Chinese Academy of Sciences); Karin Lind (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy); and TalaWanda Monroe (Space Telescope Science Institute). The paper is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.09067

Funding: São Paulo Research Foundation, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and Australian Research Council

Media Contact

Greg Borzo
[email protected]
312-636-8968
@UChicago

http://www-news.uchicago.edu

############

Story Source: Materials provided by Scienmag

Share12Tweet7Share2ShareShareShare1

Related Posts

Picture1.png

Is early rhythm control in atrial fibrillation care cost-effective?

March 25, 2023
Transitions of low and high-entropy metal tellurides.

“Glassiness” and “blurriness” might explain the behavior of high-entropy superconductors

March 25, 2023

Illinois Tech Assistant Professor Ren Wang receives prestigious National Science Foundation Award

March 24, 2023

New type of entanglement lets scientists ‘see’ inside nuclei

March 24, 2023
Please login to join discussion

POPULAR NEWS

  • ChatPandaGPT

    Insilico Medicine brings AI-powered “ChatPandaGPT” to its target discovery platform

    65 shares
    Share 26 Tweet 16
  • Northern and southern resident orcas hunt differently, which may help explain the decline of southern orcas

    44 shares
    Share 18 Tweet 11
  • Skipping breakfast may compromise the immune system

    43 shares
    Share 17 Tweet 11
  • Insular dwarfs and giants more likely to go extinct

    35 shares
    Share 14 Tweet 9

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

Is early rhythm control in atrial fibrillation care cost-effective?

“Glassiness” and “blurriness” might explain the behavior of high-entropy superconductors

Illinois Tech Assistant Professor Ren Wang receives prestigious National Science Foundation Award

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 48 other subscribers
  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In