Birth of a Planet

For the first time, astronomers have been able to detect the birth of a planetary system. They suggest that these systems are formed from pieces of hot dust and gas particles. These astronomers were able to find two protoplanets, which are smaller objects that become planets.

This is astonishing because finding these forming planets is a complex problem where new systems are usually covered in dust so we aren't able to detect them and so we must be able to create new detection methods.

These stars produce the material and dust that form planets. Growing planets will move through this material and create gaps of debris that astronomers can detect with infrared light. The younger planets absorb the material and increase in size. As the material falls onto the planet's surface, it gets hotter, making the planet appear more red than usual and becomes visible to us.

Source:
http://www.iflscience.com/space/witnessing-birth-planets-0
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2041-8205/766/1/L1/meta

Interplanetary Dust

Interplanetary dust is considered very important as it is thought to play a huge role in the formation and evolution of the solar system and may have actually formed water on our planet.

Cosmic dust is made up of tiny particles at the nanometer and micrometer levels. These particles appear at the end of a star's life and at the creation of a solar system.

Stars form from the combustion of a gas cloud made up of hydrogen and helium. They use the hydrogen to create heavier elements through nuclear fusion. These elements of carbon, oxygen, and other types are released at the end of a star's life where it collapses on its own gravity and creates a supernova, which is the biggest explosion in space. There are heavier elements which are formed from this supernova and create this interplanetary dust.

These interplanetary dust particles in our own galaxy are mostly made from comets which provide evidence for theories about the formation of planets.

Sources:
http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/nasa-knows/what-is-a-supernova.html
http://www.iflscience.com/space/what-interplanetary-dust-and-can-it-spread-ingredients-life

Meteor Showers on Mercury

In a new study, Mercury is regularly being hit by a comet which affects the planet's atmosphere to a considerable degree and from this we may be able to discover how this airless body keeps its ethereal envelopes.

Mercury is considered an airless body which has clouds of atomic particles on its surface which is vastly different than the dense atmospheres of both Earth and Mars and is called a 'surface boundary exosphere.'

Researchers recently discovered that there is a peak emission of the element calcium on Mercury which is seen when the planet passes through its perihelion. A comet known as comet Encke has the shortest period of any comet, reaching perihelion in about 3.3 days at 31 million miles from the sun. The orbit of this comet is stable and so it has created a comet dust stream and this affect the emission of calcium from Mercury. This dust spread along the comet's orbit, forming the stream that collides alongside Mercury exactly when the comet does resulting in the observed levels of calcium.

Sources:
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/mercury-gets-meteoroid-shower-from-comet-encke
http://earthsky.org/space/comet-encke-pelts-mercury-with-meteors

Stars Touching

The VTFS system, which is located in the Tarantula Nebula, was observed by the Very Large Telescope has recently discovered a double star system in which these two stars are overlapping and share as much as 30% of their mass.

These two stars orbit each other about once every day, resulting in an overcontact binary system. This phenomena is described by how they share a gaseous envelope where the gas does not rotate with the system itself. These are very large stars which have a combined mass of 57 times the mass of the sun as well as a high temperature of 4 x 10^5 degrees of Celsius.

It is very rare to find two stars that are connected in this manner since this state doesn't last very long and in this case, once the stars split it will have a catastrophic affect. Since these stars are orbiting each other so fast, the energy created will cause a long duration gamma ray burst which will result in both their deaths where they will continue to merge until they become one gigantic rotating star.

Sources:
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/C/contact_binary.html
http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-find-two-distant-stars-touching-and-the-results-could-be-catastrophic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst#Ultra-long_gamma-ray_bursts

The Volcanic Exoplanet

This new world called CoRoT-7b is a new type of exoplanet which has oceans of lava, volcanic activity, and has an atmosphere made up of vaporized rock that disintegrates because of this planet's heat.

The heat of this planet comes from a process called tidal heating. The gravity of this planet pulls the inside of planet, turning solid rock into magma which erupts on the surface. This magma's heat is intensified by the atmosphere which produces eruption plumes.

CoRoT-7b was named after the French telescope that it was discovered by. It is five times the weight of earth and twice the size. It's atmosphere could also be similar to that of weather on Earth such as rain. However, the rain of this exoplanet would be vaporized rock which condenses in the sky to form small rocks that would fall instead of water like on our own planet.

This exoplanet is also the remains of an even bigger gas giant which was a super planet. After being hit by its parent star, CoRoT-7b has become an extreme environment located in the constellation of Monoceros.

Source:
http://www.space.com/7782-strange-lava-world-shriveled-remains.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103511000534

Exoplanets in Quadruple Systems

New measurements are being conducted on a quadruple star system with the lowest mass. These measurements are supporting a theory that large gas planets form in the same way as stars.

Exoplanets have many different types of characteristics and vary greatly. There were many different theories that suggested these systems were created by growing from cores that were close to host stars.

However, another theory arose suggesting that these exoplanets were created in the same way as stars. In a recent finding, there is evidence that this might be the case. 2M0441+2301 AabBab is a quadruple system in which a OSIRIS instrument at the Keck Observatory was used to measure the first ever resolved spectra of this system which confirmed its properties.

This particular system is a hierarchical quadruple system which has a pair of binary systems which are close by that orbit each other at huge distances of at least 1800 AU. The new measurements show that the first of the binary pair consists of a brown dwarf, which is in between the size of a small star and a giant planet that emits infrared radiation, and a low mass star. The second of the pair also contains a brown dwarf, which has a mass of 19 times the mass of jupiter, as well as a companion which is around ten times the mass of jupiter. This makes the system's mass add up to about 0.26 solar masses which makes it the lowest mass quadruple system discovered.

What makes the  structure of this system interesting is how it was formed from the collapse of a molecular cloud core as well as the different masses of each binary pair. The companion's mass in the second pair suggests that it is possible to form this companion from a cloud-fragmentation pathway which leads to an explanation for the formation of exoplanets in this way.


Sources:
http://aasnova.org/2015/10/16/a-four-star-lightweight/
http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/question62.html

Blues Skies and Water Ice on Pluto

NASA has recently sent back new photos of Pluto with the spacecraft Hew Horizons which reveal that it has a blue sky as well as water ice. 

The pictures show how the atmospheric haze around the Kuiper Belt reflects blue light, even though the particles are actually a red or grey color. This blue color reflects characteristics of the atmosphere, including information on the size and composition of the haze particles. 

Blue skies are a result of sunlight scattering very tiny particles, which are often nitrogen. This phenomena is found on Pluto, however the particles are larger than on earth, but still relatively small. These particles are called tholins, which form high up in the atmosphere where ultraviolet light breaks apart the nitrogen molecules and ionizes them. This allows them to react with each other and create more positively and negatively charged ions in the atmosphere. 

Water Ice was also discovered on the surface of Pluto. Scientists are still trying to understand how the water forms, while ice is abundant on the surface. The water ice that was detected on Pluto radiated a red color which corresponds to the red tinted color of other tholins. 

These tholins are produced by ions that recombined with each other after being broken apart by the ultraviolet rays of the sun. The recombined molecules form complex macromolecules which keep expanding. These molecules combine to form gases which cover themselves in ice before they fall through the atmosphere of Pluto.