Exoplanet discoveries

[chris]

17 exoplanet discoveries were announced today!

[link]http://www.obspm.fr/encycl/encycl.html[/link]

4 from the Anglo-Australian Telescope, 13 from the Marcy and Butler's team. One of them has an approximately Jupiter-like orbit; another has an M sin i of only 30 Earth masses. This is very cool news! I'll update extrasolar.ssc with the new discoveries as soon as I get home from work unless someone else beats me to it

--Chris

[Sum0]

Code: Select all

"d" "HD 75732" #55 Cnc
{
   Texture "jupiterlike.jpg"
   Mass      1600
   Radius    70000

   # orbital data
   EllipticalOrbit {
      Period          14.52
      SemiMajorAxis   6.01
      Eccentricity    0.16
   }

   RotationPeriod   10.0
}

This is my rendering of the Jupiter-like planet, although i've probably made a mistake somewhere...

[Mikeydude750]

Yeah, I heard somewhere that there is a Jupiter-sized planet in about the same distance from it's star as Jupiter is from ours.

[chris]

Here is extrasolar.ssc updated with the new planets:

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/files/extrasolar.ssc

I'll put a link to this on the main Celestia page tomorrow. Enjoy!

--Chris

[guest]

I was going to post on this same subject.
This new "Jupiter-like" planet is supposed to be about 5X the size of our own Jupiter. Don't I remember from school someone saying that if Jupiter had been a bit larger, it could have been a "minor" star?
Does anyone know the limit on gas giants before the fusion process starts?
Just curious.
Ron A (at work)

[chris]

I was going to post on this same subject.
This new "Jupiter-like" planet is supposed to be about 5X the size of our own Jupiter. Don't I remember from school someone saying that if Jupiter had been a bit larger, it could have been a "minor" star?
Does anyone know the limit on gas giants before the fusion process starts?
Just curious.
Ron A (at work)

At around 13 Jupiter masses, a body is massive enough for deuterium fusion to occur. This is generally accepted as the planet - brown dwarf boundary. At 80 Jupiter masses, temperatures become high enough that normal hydrogen fusion takes place and you've got a red dwarf star.

--Chris

[Unimatrix 11]

I just heard that news on tv (about the jupiter like planet) - I just wanted
to examine the it?s mother star and -- the planet is there !!!
I downloaded cel a few month ago - and loaded no updates - i there an
auto-update working - here ?

[Unimatrix 11]

to chris: it?s about 13x mass of jupiter

[RonA]

Thanks for the answer, Chris! (and fast too!) Now I can amaze my friends with eye-glazing astronomical trivia!
Ron A

[Unimatrix 11]

Got something messed up - just wanted to help...

[Rassilon]

I just heard that news on tv (about the jupiter like planet) - I just wanted
to examine the it?s mother star and -- the planet is there !!!
I downloaded cel a few month ago - and loaded no updates - i there an
auto-update working - here ?

no chris has esp lol

I see that I will be doing up 55 Cnc this week

[Rickster]

We've known about the 55 Cancri system for awhile -- this week's news was that the group at JPL announcing that they thought it was an extremely good candidate for having Earthlike planets.

Some Celestia exploration shows something quite interesting: if there were an Earthlike planet at ~1 AU in that system, you could look up at the sun and actually see partial eclipses of it by the innermost gas giant. Wild.