Latest news with #Sun-like
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Birth of a Solar System Witnessed in Spectacular Scientific First
Around a Sun-like star just 1,300 light-years away, a family of planets has been seen in its earliest moments of conception. Astronomers analyzed the infrared flow of dust and detritus left over from the formation of a baby star called HOPS-315, finding tiny concentrations of hot minerals that will eventually form planetesimals – the 'seeds' around which new planets will grow. It's a system that can tell us about the very first steps of planet formation, and may even contain clues about how our own Solar System formed. "For the first time, we have identified the earliest moment when planet formation is initiated around a star other than our Sun," says astronomer Melissa McClure of Leiden University in the Netherlands. Related: The Oldest Known Material on Earth Is Officially Older Than The Solar System By studying other stars at different stages of the process, we more or less know how planets are born. Stars themselves form from dense clouds of molecular gas and dust in space; when a clump of material in these clouds is dense enough, it collapses under gravity to form the seed of a star. As the baby star spins, the material around it coalesces into a disk that whirls around and feeds the star's growth. When the star grows large enough, its protostellar winds push the material out of reach, where it continues to orbit, cooling and clumping together. This is the beginning of the planet formation process. Astronomers have seen baby planets forming in these protoplanetary disks, leaving noticeable gaps in the material as they travel, gravitationally clearing the path of their orbit. However, the planets in these systems were already pretty well formed. HOPS-315 represents the earliest stage at which we've ever seen the process of planet formation. The observations were made using JWST for infrared wavelengths, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) for radio wavelengths, two of the most powerful telescopes humanity has produced. McClure and her colleagues identified wavelengths of light associated with warm silicon monoxide gas and grains of crystalline silicate minerals – a signature associated with silicon cooling from a gas into a solid state. "This process has never been seen before in a protoplanetary disc – or anywhere outside our Solar System," says astrophysicist Edwin Bergin of the University of Michigan in the US. The newborn planet signature was located at a distance of about 2.2 astronomical units from the host star. That's a distance similar to the distance of the Solar System's asteroid belt from the Sun, in the space between Mars and Jupiter. We can only study the formation of our own Solar System based on material in its existing state. Sometimes that involves finding ancient minerals that have survived intact since the system was born 4.5 billion or so years ago; sometimes it involves studying asteroids and comets that have not undergone as much change as the planets have. Either way, it takes detailed detective work. An orange dwarf just 60 percent of the mass of the Sun, HOPS-315 is still growing, fed by flows of hot gas. In one million years, it should be about the same mass as our own star. There's enough similarity between the two that HOPS-315 may help us understand the early years of our Solar System. "We're seeing a system that looks like what our Solar System looked like when it was just beginning to form," says physicist and astronomer Merel van 't Hoff of Purdue University in the US. "This system is one of the best that we know to actually probe some of the processes that happened in our Solar System." At this point, HOPS-315 is just one datapoint in a whole galaxy. Whether other systems undergo the same processes in the same way is yet to be discovered – but now we know, with ever more powerful telescopes bursting onto the scene, that finding them is within our grasp. The research has been published in Nature. Related News Record-Sized Collision Between Black Holes Detected by Astronomers A 400-Year-Old Mystery About The Sun May Finally Be Solved Mars Seen Up Close in Stunning World First 60 Years Ago Today Solve the daily Crossword
Time of India
15-06-2025
- Science
- Time of India
Astronomers discover high-altitude clouds darkening skies in the YSES-1 system
Source: Astronomers observe thick slab clouds in the YSES-1 system, darkening the planet's skies. These clouds are primarily mineral dust, probably containing iron. When the clouds break, iron could rain down. Experts are studying this strange phenomenon to understand the composition and atmosphere. The discovery sheds light on the complex weather patterns in distant worlds, offering insights into the formation and behavior of exoplanetary atmospheres . Further study could reveal more about the planet's potential habitability and the role of mineral clouds in shaping its climate and surface conditions. The young planet YSES-1 gets covered by clouds According to The Guardian, the star YSES-1 is a newbie by cosmic standards, just 1 million years old, compared with the 4.6-billion-year-old Sun. The star is circled by two gas giants, both still forming and larger than Jupiter, the biggest planet in the solar system. As the astronomers studied the young star system, which lies 307 light-years away in the deep southern sky, they spotted the formation of high-altitude clouds around the planet. They were surprised to find both planets in the telescope's field of view, giving them information on two worlds. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Giao dịch vàng CFDs với sàn môi giới tin cậy IC Markets Tìm hiểu thêm Undo The outer planet, YSES-1c, is the smaller of the two worlds and about six times the mass of Jupiter. The telescope revealed high-altitude clouds consisting of magnesium silicate dust grains and some iron in the planet's atmosphere. The astronomers described the observations as the first direct detection of such clouds on a planet circling a Sun-like star. The data revealed a disc of material made up of trillions of tonnes of dust particles around the larger inner world, YSES-1b, about 14 times the mass of Jupiter. Researchers' view on the discovery of the young planet Dr. Kielan Hoch , an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, said, 'There's a small handful of multiplanet systems that have been directly imaged, and they are a unique laboratory to test planet formation theories as they formed in the same environment.' She added, 'Both planets are still forming, which is why they are still bright enough for us to detect. The light we are seeing is from their formation as they begin to shrink and condense.' An added mystery is why a 16-million-year-old planet still has a disk of material swirling around it. Astronomers' theories of planet formation suggest that any encircling dust should have settled after the first 5 million years. Also read | Strange X - shaped structures discovered in Earth's upper atmosphere by NASA
NDTV
03-06-2025
- General
- NDTV
James Webb Telescope Detects Frozen Water In Young Star System For The First Time
For decades, scientists have been fascinated by the mystery of how life originated on Earth and where our water came from. One long-standing theory suggests that water was present around our star, particularly in the outer reaches of the solar system in its early days. Recently, NASA researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope made a groundbreaking discovery that lends credence to this theory. They've found water ice in the debris disk that orbits HD 181327, a Sun-like star 155 light-years from Earth. According to Science Alert, the star system, just 23 million years old, is significantly younger than our 4.6-billion-year-old Solar System. This youthful system is still in its formative stages, with a protoplanetary disk surrounding the star that hasn't yet coalesced into planets. Chen Xie, an assistant research scientist at JHU and the study's lead author, said in a recent NASA press release, "Webb unambiguously detected not just water ice, but crystalline water ice, which is also found in locations like Saturn's rings and icy bodies in our Solar System's Kuiper Belt. The presence of water ice helps facilitate planet formation. Icy materials may also ultimately be 'delivered' to terrestrial planets that may form over a couple of hundred million years in systems like this." Using the James Webb Space Telescope's near-infrared spectrograph (NIRSpec), researchers detected water ice in the debris disk surrounding HD 181327. The water ice was predominantly found in the outer debris ring, making up over 20% of its mass, in the form of "dirty snowballs", a combination of ice and fine dust particles. The amount of water ice decreased closer to the star, with only 8% of the material consisting of ice halfway in from the disk's edge, and virtually none near the centre. This decrease is likely due to vaporisation from the star's ultraviolet radiation or potentially locked up in rocks and planetesimals. "When I was a graduate student 25 years ago, my advisor told me there should be ice in debris disks, but before Webb, we didn't have instruments sensitive enough to make these observations. What's most striking is that this data looks similar to the telescope's other recent observations of Kuiper Belt objects in our own Solar System," said Christine Chen, an associate astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and co-author on the study. Analysing these actively forming planetary systems will enhance our understanding of planet formation models and provide fresh insights into the origins of our own Solar System.
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Scientists Startled by Discovery of Small Star Swimming Through Outer Layers of Another Larger Star
A team of researchers in China have discovered a stunning binary system in which a stellar object known as a pulsar orbited inside the outer layers of its companion star — which it accomplished after stripping its host's innards and dispersing them into space. The findings, detailed in a new study published in the journal Science, are an incredibly rare example of a "spider star" that preys on its companion, so-named because of the female arachnids that devour males after mating. And tantalizingly, the grisly scene is some of the best evidence yet of a stage of stellar evolution called the common envelope phase, which has never been directly observed by astronomers. Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars, the incredibly dense stellar cores that are left over in the aftermath of a supernova. Everything about neutron stars exhaust superlatives — their gravity most of all. They are so tightly packed, containing more mass than our Sun inside a form just a dozen miles in radius, that all their atoms and their constituent protons and electrons have been crushed into neutrons, with just a teaspoon of this improbable matter weighing trillions of pounds. Their powerful magnetic fields, billions of times stronger than Earth's, unleash beams of radio waves into space along their poles. Further beggaring belief, some neutron stars become pulsars, which spin up to hundreds of times per second after siphoning material from a stellar companion, if it has one. Their sweeping beams of radiation, like cosmic lighthouses, look like a repeating signal to observers. The newly discovered pulsar, PSR J1928+1815, intrigued the astronomers because its radio pulses suggested that it was extremely close to its host, completing an orbit every 3.6 hours. They also noticed that for one-sixth of that orbit, the pulsar would vanish from view, indicating that the host was eclipsing it. "That's a large part of the orbit," coauthor Jin-Lin Han, a radio astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing, told Gizmodo. "That's strange, only a larger companion can do this." Over four and a half years, Han's team closely observed the system using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) in southern China, the largest and most powerful single-dish radio telescope in the world. Their observations revealed that the host star was between one to 1.6 times the mass of our Sun, while the pulsar was more likely 1.4 stellar masses. Determining the make of the host star, however, took some additional sleuthing. Its tight orbit and the fact that it was only detectable in radio wavelengths, Giz noted, ruled out its being a Sun-like star. And since it was large enough to eclipse the pulsar, it had to be something larger than a stellar remnant like another neutron star. That pointed to something altogether more spectacular: a helium star, created after the pulsar, when it was still an ordinary neutron star, tore off its host's layers and created a huge common envelope, a cloud of hydrogen gas that swallows both the stars. In this case, the poor star under attack managed to cling on to its evacuated innards for just 1,000 years — a blink in a stellar lifespan — before the whole, mighty envelope fell apart. Fleeting as it was, its impact is lasting: the friction exerted by the gases gradually nudged both stars closer together. Common envelopes are rare because the process of a neutron star stripping its companion, which causes it to spin and graduate to a pulsar, usually results in all the siphoned material being devoured. But if the companion is massive enough, much of it survives. The discovery marks the first spider star found orbiting a helium star. While the astronomers didn't get to witness the envelope in action, this is some of the most convincing evidence to date that this long-theorized stage of stellar evolution exists. In all, the team estimates that there're just 16 to 84 star systems like this one in the entire Milky Way — and, against all odds, we got to see one. More on space: Scientists Puzzled by Mysterious Motion in Atmosphere of Saturn's Moon
NDTV
17-05-2025
- Science
- NDTV
NASA's James Webb Telescope Spots Frozen Water In Distant Star System For The First Time
Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of astronomers has confirmed the presence of frozen water in a distant but young star system. While scientists have found plenty of water ice in our solar system, it is the first time that they have definitive proof of frozen water in other star systems. The details, published in the journal Nature, state that crystalline water ice has been found in a dusty debris disk that orbits a Sun-like star, only 23 million years old, 155 light-years away. The star is slightly more massive and hotter than the Sun, which led to the formation of a slightly larger system around it. Webb's findings showed there is a significant gap between the star, named HD 181327, and its debris disk, which is similar to our solar system's Kuiper Belt. "Webb unambiguously detected not just water ice, but crystalline water ice, which is also found in locations like Saturn's rings and icy bodies in our solar system's Kuiper Belt," said Chen Xie, the lead author of the new paper. "HD 181327 is a very active system. There are regular, ongoing collisions in its debris disk. When those icy bodies collide, they release tiny particles of dusty water ice that are perfectly sized for Webb to detect." Implication The presence of water ice in a similar region could point towards a pattern about how planetary systems evolve across the universe. It may be more than a coincidence that the first confirmed water ice we're seeing around another star mirrors the distribution of our solar system. Additionally, the water ice is not spread evenly throughout this system, with the majority of it found where it's coldest and farthest from the star. "Toward the middle of the debris disk, Webb detected about eight per cent water ice. Here, it's likely that frozen water particles are produced slightly faster than they are destroyed." Scientists have long posited that ice could be present in debris disks, but prior to Webb, they did not have the instruments sensitive enough to make such observations. After the success with HD 181327, the researchers are expected to increase their efforts to search for and study water ice in debris disks in actively forming planetary systems throughout the Milky Way galaxy.
