There are countless worlds in our galaxy, all formed in the same process that created this planet you’re sitting/standing on and reading these words from. Pretty awesome thought. I’m a science fiction reader, so of course my thoughts always center on how many of those worlds might have life — in particular, the life we might be able to communicate or even visit (if that were even possible). Finding those worlds isn’t just a matter of pointing a telescope up at stars and looking for little planets circling around them. Stars are bright and big; planets not so much. Most of the time, they’re hidden in the glare of their star — just as Earth would be lost in the Sun’s glare as seen from light-years away.
Most of the planets that HAVE been discovered around other stars are of the Jupiter-class and larger variety. They’re often called “Hot Jupiters” because their temps are so high — but not hot enough to be stars. They’re easier to spot that smaller, Earth-sized worlds. That’s changing now, due to missions like Kepler and COROT, which are designed to find the kinds of planets where life might be hanging out. And, they’re doing it in a variety of ways.
Planet searches are a hot topic right now in astronomy and space science — so much so that my latest episode of The Astronomer’s Universe over at Astrocast.tv focuses on exoplanets and the methods astronomers are using to ferret them out from the glare of their stars. You can watch it below — and by all means, head over to the main site and watch all the segments in this month’s episode!
So, did you see any Perseids last night? We went out after midnight and saw maybe 20 before the Moon’s brightness lit the sky up too much. There were several really bright blue-white ones flaring across the sky and a lot of smaller flashes that went by pretty quickly. Did you know that each time you see a meteor flare in the sky, you’re seeing the vaporization of something that likely formed well before the planets did? That may have been the leftovers of a stellar explosion long before our Sun was born? Meteors are usually always bits of dust and grains thrown off by comets as they round the Sun, or are the crumbs of ancient collisions between asteroids. Those crumbs and bits of dust are scattered along the comet’s path, and occasionally they intersect with Earth. Those that aren’t bounced off the top of the atmosphere come heading straight in. As these bits of cosmic debris blast speed through the air, they get heated and vaporized — giving off light in the process. That’s what we see as a meteor.
There’s debris scattered throughout the solar system, the leftovers from the formation of the planets, moons, rings, and Sun. Of course, it’s spread very thin — chances are if you were going through interplanetary space you’d encounter little of it, but it’s out there. However, when it encounters Earth, that’s when things get all flashy and bright for these little bits of dust. Think about that the next time you’re out stargazing and see that telltale flash of light go across the sky. You’re watching the demise of something that’s likely OLDER than this planet.
Planetary Billiards
Artists' impression of what the WASP-17 system might look like. Courtesy KASI/CBNU/ARCSEC (Click to embiggen.)
Speaking of planetary systems, there’s a new world joining the ever-growing list of exoplanets out there. A team of scientists from the United Kingdom’s Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) project and the Geneva Observatory Extrasolar Planet Search program announced today that they found a giant planet they named WASP-17. It’s orbiting around a star about a thousand light-years away. That in itself would be sort of ho-hum in these days of “oh, gee, there’s another planet out there — how about finding us an Earthlike one” attitude from the press — but this planet is orbiting is star the “wrong” way. That is, it’s in a retrograde orbit, moving opposite the direction of anything else that’s in orbit around the star. This is a big honkin’ clue that something happened to knock the planet out of the orbit it formed in and send it careening like a billiard ball off in an entirely different orbit. The best guess is that WASP-17 had a close encounter with an even bigger planet during the often-violent period of planetary formation around the star. It’s a dangerous time for objects orbiting newly formed stars — things smash into each other, forming larger planets or grinding smaller objects to dust.
Not only is this planet headed the wrong way, but it’s huge — and that’s also a clue to its violent experiences in the past. As it got shoved into its current highly elliptical retrograde orbit, WASP-17 experienced some intense tidal interactions (caused by the gravitational pull of the star, perhaps, and at least by nearby objects). Those tides alternately compress and stretch the planet, which has the density of polystyrene (think foam cups), which heats it up (same as at Io, the volcano world orbiting Jupiter here in our own solar system). Heating causes bloating, and voila — you get WASP-17.
This discovery doesn’t just tell astronomers about that particular system however — it also gives really good insight into what conditions were like when the Sun and planets formed 4 billion years or so ago. It wasn’t just a “here’s a Sun, here are some planets, now start evolving” kind of thing. The process is long, drawn out, involves lots of crashes of objects, and apparently, some cosmic billiards!
