Everything About Kepler-432b is Extreme, Especially the Way it’s Going to Die

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Everything About Kepler-432b is Extreme, Especially the Way it’s Going to Die

Everything About Kepler-432b is Extreme, Especially the Way it’s Going to Die:

Illustration of the orbit of Kepler-432b (inner, red) in comparison to the orbit of Mercury around the Sun (outer, orange). Credit: Dr. Sabine Reffert.

Astronomers are calling Kepler-432b a ‘maverick’ planet because everything about this newly found exoplanet is an extreme, and is unlike anything we’ve found before. This is a giant, dense planet orbiting a red giant star, and the planet has enormous temperature swings throughout its year. In addition to all these extremes, there’s another reason you wouldn’t want to live on Kepler 432b: its days are numbered.

“In less than 200 million years, Kepler-432b will be swallowed by its continually expanding host star,” said Mauricio Ortiz, a PhD student at Heidelberg University who led one of the two studies of the planet. “This might be the reason why we do not find other planets like Kepler-432b – astronomically speaking, their lives are extremely short.”

Kepler-432b is one of the densest and massive planets ever found. The planet has six times the mass of Jupiter, but is about the same size. The shape and the size of its orbit are also unusual, as the orbit is very small (52 Earth days) and highly elongated. The elliptical orbit brings Kepler-432b both incredibly close and very far away from its host star.

“During the winter season, the temperature on Kepler-432b is roughly 500 degrees Celsius,” said Dr. Sabine Reffert from the Königstuhl observatory, which is part of the Centre for Astronomy. “In the short summer season, it can increase to nearly 1,000 degrees Celsius.”

Dr. Davide Gandolfi, also from the Königstuhl observatory, said that the star Kepler-432b is orbiting has already exhausted the nuclear fuel in its core and is gradually expanding. Its radius is already four times that of our Sun and it will get even larger in the future.

While Kepler-432b was previously identified as a transiting planet candidate by the NASA Kepler satellite mission, two research groups of Heidelberg astronomers independently made further observations of this rare planet, acquiring the high-precision measurements needed to determine the planet’s mass. Both groups of researchers used the 2.2-metre telescope at Calar Alto Observatory in Andalucía, Spain to collect data. The group from the state observatory also observed Kepler-432b with the Nordic Optical Telescope on La Palma (Canary Islands).

The results of this research were published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Source: University of Heidelberg

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the United States government agency responsible for the civilian space program as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines a UFO as "An unidentified flying object; a 'flying saucer'." The first published book to use the word was authored by Donald E. Keyhoe. The acronym "UFO" was coined by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book, then the USAF's official investigation of UFOs. He wrote, "Obviously the term 'flying saucer' is misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short." Other phrases that were used officially and that predate the UFO acronym include "flying flapjack", "flying disc", "unexplained flying discs", "unidentifiable object", and "flying saucer". The phrase "flying saucer" had gained widespread attention after the summer of 1947. On June 24, a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier. Arnold timed the sighting and estimated the speed of discs to be over 1,200 mph (1,931 km/h). At the time, he described the objects' shape as being somewhat disc-like or saucer-like, leading to newspaper accounts of "flying saucers" and "flying discs". In popular usage the term UFO came to be used to refer to claims of alien spacecraft. and because of the public and media ridicule associated with the topic, some investigators prefer to use such terms as unidentified aerial phenomenon (or UAP) or anomalous phenomena, as in the title of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP).

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Photos of Nature | Nature Photography What is The Universe

Tuesday, February 17, 2015