October 23, 2012 – A Soyuz rocket blasts off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, carrying spacemen Oleg Novitskiy, Kevin Ford, and Evgeny Tarelkin to the ISS. (NASA)
10 Intriguing Worlds Beyond Our Solar System
In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the first confirmed planet around a sun-like star (aka exoplanet), a collection of some interesting exoplanets has been put together. Some of these are rocky, some are gaseous and some are very, very cold. But there’s one thing each these strange new worlds have in common: All have advanced scientific understanding of our place in the cosmos. Check out these 10 exoplanets, along with artist’s concepts depicting what they might look like. For an extended list of 20 exoplanets, go HERE.
1. Kepler-186f
Kepler-186f was the first rocky planet to be found within the habitable zone – the region around the host star where the temperature is right for liquid water. This planet is also very close in size to Earth. Even though we may not find out what’s going on at the surface of this planet anytime soon, it’s a strong reminder of why new technologies are being developed that will enable scientists to get a closer look at distance worlds.
2. HD 209458 b (nickname “Osiris”)
The first planet to be seen in transit (crossing its star) and the first planet to have it light directly detected. The HD 209458 b transit discovery showed that transit observations were feasible and opened up an entire new realm of exoplanet characterization.
3. Kepler-11 system
This was the first compact solar system discovered by Kepler, and it revealed that a system can be tightly packed, with at least five planets within the orbit of Mercury, and still be stable. It touched off a whole new look into planet formation ideas and suggested that multiple small planet systems, like ours, may be common.
4. Kepler-16b
A real-life “Tatooine,” this planet was Kepler’s first discovery of a planet that orbits two stars – what is known as a circumbinary planet.
5. 51 Pegasi b
This giant planet, which is about half the mass of Jupiter and orbits its star every four days, was the first confirmed exoplanet around a sun-like star, a discovery that launched a whole new field of exploration.
6. CoRoT 7b
The first super-Earth identified as a rocky exoplanet, this planet proved that worlds like the Earth were indeed possible and that the search for potentially habitable worlds (rocky planets in the habitable zone) might be fruitful.
7. Kepler-22b
A planet in the habitable zone and a possible water-world planet unlike any seen in our solar system.
8. Kepler-10b
Kepler’s first rocky planet discovery is a scorched, Earth-size world that scientists believe may have a lava ocean on its surface.
9. Kepler-444 system
The oldest known planetary system has five terrestrial-sized planets, all in orbital resonance. This weird group showed that solar systems have formed and lived in our galaxy for nearly its entire existence.
10. 55 Cancri e
Sauna anyone? 55 Cancri e is a toasty world that rushes around its star every 18 hours. It orbits so closely – about 25 times closer than Mercury is to our sun – that it is tidally locked with one face forever blistering under the heat of its sun. The planet is proposed to have a rocky core surrounded by a layer of water in a “supercritical” state, where it is both liquid and gas, and then the whole planet is thought to be topped by a blanket of steam.
2015 TB145 was discovered on 2015 Oct 10 by the Pan-STARRS I survey. The object will approach the Earth within 0.00326 au (1.3 Lunar distances or about 490 000 km) on 2015 Oct 31 at about 17:12 UT (10:12 AM PDT). The asteroid is in an extremely eccentric (~0.86) and high inclination (~40 deg) orbit. It has a Tisserand parameter of 2.937 hinting that it may be cometary in nature. Its absolute magnitude of 19.9 indicates that its diameter is probably within a factor of two of 320 meters. At closest approach the SNRs/run at DSS-14 are expected to be over 20000, so this should be one of the best radar targets of the year. We hope to obtain images with a range resolution as high as 2 m/pixel using DSS-13 to transmit and Green Bank (and possibly Arecibo) to receive. The flyby presents a truly outstanding scientific opportunity to study the physical properties of this object.
The encounter velocity is 35 km/s, which is unusually high.
This is the closest approach by a known object this large until 1999 AN10 approaches within 1 lunar distance in August 2027. The last approach closer than this by an object with H < 20 was by 2004 XP14 in July 2006 at 1.1 lunar distances.
2015 TB145 could reach 10th magnitude before sunrise on October 31 for observers in North America, but it will be close to the waning gibbous Moon and probably challenging to see with small telescopes. The asteroid will be in Taurus at the time of closest approach. After closest approch 2015 TB145 will be a daytime object and too close to the Sun to observe with optical telescopes.
detected only 3 weeks prior to closest encounter, awesome.
Pluto mosaic made from New Horizons LORRI images taken 14 July 2015 from a distance of 80,000 km.
This view is projected from a point 1800 km above Pluto’s equator, looking northeast over the dark, cratered, informally named Cthulhu Regio toward the bright, smooth expanse of icy plains informally called Sputnik Planum. Pluto’s north pole is off the image to the left. This image mosaic was produced with panchromatic images from the New Horizons LORRI camera, with color overlaid from the Ralph color mapper onboard New Horizons.
(source)
yeah… solid boosters in your cargo bay seems a lot saner
Charon in Enhanced Color NASA’s New Horizons captured this high-resolution enhanced color view of Charon just before closest approach on July 14, 2015. The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the spacecraft’s Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC); the colors are processed to best highlight the variation of surface properties across Charon. Charon’s color palette is not as diverse as Pluto’s; most striking is the reddish north (top) polar region, informally named Mordor Macula. Charon is 754 miles (1,214 kilometers) across; this image resolves details as small as 1.8 miles (2.9 kilometers).
(source)
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