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Exoplanet discoveries
Posted: 13.06.2002, 17:49
by 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
Posted: 13.06.2002, 18:39
by 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...
Posted: 14.06.2002, 02:45
by 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.
Posted: 14.06.2002, 06:09
by 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
Posted: 14.06.2002, 14:16
by 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)
Posted: 14.06.2002, 17:55
by chris
guest wrote: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
Auto- update ?
Posted: 14.06.2002, 19:29
by 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 ?
The limit size for fusion
Posted: 14.06.2002, 19:31
by Unimatrix 11
to chris: it?s about 13x mass of jupiter
Posted: 14.06.2002, 19:43
by RonA
Thanks for the answer, Chris! (and fast too!) Now I can amaze my friends with eye-glazing astronomical trivia!
Ron A
sorry i?m new to forums
Posted: 14.06.2002, 20:03
by Unimatrix 11
Got something messed up - just wanted to help...
Posted: 15.06.2002, 16:38
by Rassilon
Unimatrix 11 wrote: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
Posted: 17.06.2002, 01:21
by 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.