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Why Is Everything In The Universe Is Continuously Spinning?

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Meet “Super Saturn:” Alien Planet Found With Staggeringly Large Ring System

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Researchers have discovered that the ring system that they see eclipse the very young Sun-like star J1407 is of enormous proportions, much larger and heavier than the ring system of Saturn. This system is the first of its kind to be found outside Earth's solar system.

A SUPER SATURN

Astronomers at the Leiden Observatory in The Netherlands and the University of Rochester in New York have discovered that the ring system that they see eclipse the very young Sun-like star J1407 is of enormous proportions, much larger and heavier than the ring system of Saturn. The ring system — the first of its kind to be found outside our solar system — was discovered in 2012 by a team led by Rochester’s Eric Mamajek.

A new analysis of the data, led by Leiden’s Matthew Kenworthy, shows that the ring system consists of over 30 rings, each of them tens of millions of kilometers in diameter. Furthermore, they found gaps in the rings, which indicate that satellites (“exomoons”) may have formed. The result has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

“The details that we see in the light curve are incredible. The eclipse lasted for several weeks, but you see rapid changes on time scales of tens of minutes as a result of fine structures in the rings,” says Kenworthy. “The star is much too far away to observe the rings directly, but we could make a detailed model based on the rapid brightness variations in the starlight passing through the ring system. If we could replace Saturn’s rings with the rings around J1407b, they would be easily visible at night and be many times larger than the full Moon.”

“This planet is much larger than Jupiter or Saturn, and its ring system is roughly 200 times larger than Saturn’s rings are today,” said co-author Mamajek, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester. “You could think of it as kind of a super Saturn.”

The astronomers analyzed data from the SuperWASP project — a survey that is designed to detect gas giants that move in front of their parent star. In 2012, Mamajek and colleagues at the University of Rochester reported the discovery of the young star J1407 and the unusual eclipses, and they proposed that they were caused by a moon-forming disk around a young giant planet or brown dwarf.

In a third, more recent study also led by Kenworthy, adaptive optics and Doppler spectroscopy were used to estimate the mass of the ringed object. Their conclusions based on these and previous papers on the intriguing system J1407 is that the companion is likely to be a giant planet — not yet seen — with a gigantic ring system responsible for the repeated dimming of J1407’s light.

MASSIVE RINGS

The light curve tells astronomers that the diameter of the ring system is nearly 120 million kilometers (~74 million miles), more than 200 times as large as the rings of Saturn. The ring system likely contains roughly an Earth’s worth of mass in light-obscuring dust particles.

Mamajek puts into context how much material is contained in these disks and rings.

“If you were to grind up the four large Galilean moons of Jupiter into dust and ice and spread out the material over their orbits in a ring around Jupiter, the ring would be so opaque to light that a distant observer that saw the ring pass in front of the Sun would see a very deep, multi-day eclipse,” Mamajek says. “In the case of J1407, we see the rings blocking as much as 95 percent of the light of this young Sun-like star for days, so there is a lot of material there that could then form satellites.”

In the data, the astronomers found at least one clean gap in the ring structure, which is more clearly defined in the new model. “One obvious explanation is that a satellite formed and carved out this gap,” says Kenworthy. “The mass of the satellite could be between that of Earth and Mars. The satellite would have an orbital period of approximately two years around J1407b.”

Astronomers expect that the rings will become thinner in the next several million years and eventually disappear as satellites form from the material in the disks.

“The planetary science community has theorized for decades that planets like Jupiter and Saturn would have had, at an early stage, disks around them that then led to the formation of satellites,” Mamajek explains. “However, until we discovered this object in 2012, no one had seen such a ring system. This is the first snapshot of satellite formation on million-kilometer scales around a substellar object.”

Astronomers estimate that the ringed companion J1407b has an orbital period roughly a decade in length. The mass of J1407b has been difficult to constrain, but it is most likely in the range of about 10 to 40 Jupiter masses.

The researchers encourage amateur astronomers to help monitor J1407, which would help detect the next eclipse of the rings, and constrain the period and mass of the ringed companion. Observations of J1407 can be reported to the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). In the meantime, the astronomers are searching other photometric surveys looking for eclipses by yet undiscovered ring systems.

Kenworthy adds that finding eclipses from more objects like J1407’s companion “is the only feasible way we have of observing the early conditions of satellite formation for the near future. J1407’s eclipses will allow us to study the physical and chemical properties of satellite-spawning circumplanetary disks.”

Provided by The University of Rochester.

References: arXiv, Rochester University

Via Futurism.

BREAKING: NASA's Kepler Telescope Just Discovered Nearly 100 New Exoplanets

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The number of exoplanets has risen by almost 100, as an international team of astronomers confirms a new batch found in data captured as part of the K2 mission - the NASA Kepler telescope's new lease on life. They have been analysing the first batch of K2 data, and have just announced the discovery of another 95 planets - bringing the total number of exoplanets discovered by K2 to nearly 300.

"We started out analysing 275 candidates of which 149 were validated as real exoplanets. In turn 95 of these planets have proved to be new discoveries," said PhD student Andrew Mayo from the Technical University of Denmark, and lead author on the project.

The Kepler mission was launched in 2009. Since then, it has trailed Earth's orbit around the Sun, searching for exoplanets using the transit method - photographing stars over time, and looking for changes in the brightness.

If a star dims, then brightens again on a regular basis, that more than likely means it's being orbited by a body large enough to block at least some of its light. The method requires a lot of painstaking work poring over data to find the periods of dimness, and then confirm them.

It also just only works if the planet orbits between the observer (which is us, or rather the Kepler telescope) and its parent star. Nevertheless, it's very effective. The Kepler main mission found 2,341 confirmed exoplanets, according to NASA.

But then disaster struck in 2013, when the second of the telescope's four reaction wheels failed. The mission was revived as K2 when NASA figured out a way to use Kepler's thrusters as a makeshift reaction wheel, therefore retaining the ability to reorient the telescope to look at different parts of the sky.

Thankfully, it's still at work to this day. The data used for Mayo's team's analysis was collected in 2014. They had to comb the data thoroughly to make sure the stars' dimming was not caused by other factors.

"We found that some of the signals were caused by multiple star systems or noise from the spacecraft. But we also detected planets that range from sub-Earth-sized to the size of Jupiter and larger," Mayo said. "We validated a planet on a 10 day orbit around a star called HD 212657 [about 254 light-years away], which is now the brightest star found by either the Kepler or K2 missions to host a validated planet."

The brighter the host star, the more we can determine about the planet that orbits it - perhaps even more so when the next generation of much higher resolution space telescopes is launched. Astronomers may be able to even glean information about its atmosphere, as they have done for TRAPPIST-1 planets.

Between them, the Kepler and K2 missions have been used to find over 5,100 candidate exoplanets to date.

This is partially about the search for extraterrestrial life, but also because statistical data about the universe around us - such as how many planets there are, the average number of planets per system, and the number of rocky and gaseous planets - can tell us more about how typical (or not) our own Solar System is, and how it fits into our Universe.

The research has been published in the Astronomical Journal.

Via Sciencealert

Astronomers Reveal, THOUSANDS Of Alien Worlds May Lurk BEYOND Pluto!

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Thousands of worlds may lurk beyond Pluto — and a stunning new animation shows the ones we’ve found

An incredible new animation reveals the sheer number of alien worlds that may exist beyond the orbit of Pluto. The astronomer who compiled the data has said that it only illustrates a few dwarf planets hidden in the outermost reaches of our solar system.

Officially speaking, our solar system has eight ‘cosmic members’: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. However, beyond Neptune we have all-star ‘dwarf planet Pluto. Now, astronomers suggest that Pluto is one of the many worlds located in the region called the Kuiper Belt.

The animation first spotted in a Reddit post by user Nobilitie, and later shared by the Business insider is in fact a recording of a ‘physics-based’ simulator gamer called “Universe Sandbox 2,” according to Dan Dixon, the creator, and director of the software.

Each of the orbits—depicted as whitish rings—represent an object. The countless rings located beyond the eight inner rings are attributed to dwarf planets like Pluto.

According to a post on Reddit, the orbits of the dwarf planet candidates were based on a constantly updated list of celestial objects.

Interestingly, this fascinating list is maintained by Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology.

“It’s a nice illustration of what is out there,” Brown wrote in an email to Business Insider. “The striking difference between the orderly giant planets and the randomness of the dwarf planets is quite apparent.”

Mike Brown is the man behind the discovery of Eris, a celestial object that is 27 percent more massive than Pluto. Curiously, it was the discovery of Eris that degraded Pluto from a planet to a Dwarf planet.

As reported by the Business Insider, Pluto, Eris, Ceres, Makemake, Haumea, and five others meet Brown’s “near certainty” criteria — in other words, they’re definitely dwarf planets and not comets or other astronomical objects. Thirty are “highly likely” to be dwarf planets, 75 are “likely,” and nearly 850 are “probably” or “possibly” dwarf planets.

As the mind-bending animation illustrates, alien worlds orbiting our sun beyond Pluto may number in thousands.

Mike brown, together with Konstantin Batygin discovered evidence of a massive object—nearly the size of Neptune—beyond the orbit of Pluto. This celestial body has been referred to as Planet X, or planet nine. The scientific duo from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena argue that Planet Nine orbits the sun every 15,000 years.

This alien world—which has still not been observed directly—has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles).

According to Caltech, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun.

However, not only could there be a massive alien world beyond Neptune and Pluto, Brown estimates there may be thousands of dwarf planets out there.

“As you can see from the illustration, some of them are on exceedingly elliptical orbits. Those guys are going to spend most of their time at the outer edge of their orbit, so they’re hard to see,” Brown said.

“There might be a factor of ~5 more of those objects that we don’t know about.”

Redefining the meaning of Planet

According to Professor Brown, Pluto, Eris, Ceres, Makemake, Haumea, and five others meet Brown’s ‘near certainty’ criteria, meaning they are definitely dwarf planets as opposed to large comets or other objects. This means that there are thirty objects that are ‘highly likely’ to be dwarf planets, 75 are ‘likely,’ and almost 850 are labeled ‘probably’ or ‘possibly’ dwarf planets.

An illustration of Pluto’s orbit is shown in yellow. The dots beyond it are Kuiper Belt objects. NASA

Furthermore, Professor Brown indicates that half of the belt’s potential dwarf planets have yet to be discovered, taking their total number to around 2,000.

Discovering all of the supposed worlds is a tough task.

Brown doesn’t think spacecraft like the New Horizons—which is

now exploring the Kuiper Belt—will discover most of those missing worlds.

“The fact that there are so many of these things out there really shows that the future of their exploration is going to mostly rely on telescopes,” he said.

Scientists are currently trying to agree on a new system so that planets are classified by their size, whereas moons, dwarf planet, and planets are labeled based on their orbits of one another, reports the Daily Mail.

Scientists have proposed that if a celestial object is large enough, and it isn’t releasing hot gasses like our sun, then it is a planet. However, large groups of astronomers must first agree on the new definition before it is accepted worldwide.

Source:

Stunning animation reveals the arching orbits of thousands of planets that may exist just beyond Pluto

Caltech Researchers Find Evidence of a Real Ninth Planet

Forget Planet 9—There Are Strong Evidence For Planet TEN

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Could Planet Ten be lurking out there?

According to recent announcements, a TENTH planet—the size of Mars is lurking at the edge of our solar system. Scientists discovered that the orbits of Kuiper Belt Objects incline on average, to about 8 degrees with respect to the invariable plane. In other words, something of unknown origin is altering the average orbital plane in the outer solar system.

Scientists from the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) are convinced that an unseen object with a mass somewhere between that of Earth and Mars could be lurking in the Kuiper Belt

According to astronomers, the ‘planetary mass object’ seems to be affecting the orbits of other smaller bodies located within the Kuiper belt.

Planet TEN is very different from planet NINE—a supermassive planet said to orbit the sun from the other edges of our solar system.

Evidence for planet nine was announced back in 2016 when astronomers from Caltech in California came across numerous astronomical objects with highly erratic orbits.

Hey, if there could be Planet Nine, Planet Ten, there might as well be Planet Eleven, twelve and thirteen as far as we know, right?

Anyway, according to a new study, Kat Volk and Renu Malhotra, both from the Planetary and Lunar Laboratory at the University of Arizona, present very convincing evidence of the existence of planet ten—a celestial body the size of Mars—located in an orbit beyond Neptune.

According to the authors of the research, the mysterious planet has revealed its presence through its control over the orbital planes of a population of space rocks known as KBOs, or Kuiper Belt Objects, in the icy outer regions of our Solar System.

The Kuiper belt was named after Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper, though he did not predict its existence. In 1992, 1992 QB1 was discovered, the first Kuiper belt object (KBO) since Pluto. Since its discovery, the number of known KBOs has increased to over a thousand, and more than 100,000 KBOs over 100 km (62 mi) in diameter are thought to exist.

While most of the KBOs (which are debris left over from the formation of the Solar System) orbit around the Sun with orbital inclinations that do not depart from the average of what astronomers call “the invariable plane” of our planetary system, some objects farthest from the Kuiper belt behave in a very different way.

In fact, Volk and Malhotra discovered that their orbits incline, on average, to about 8 degrees with respect to the invariable plane. In other words, something of unknown origin is altering the average orbital plane in the outer solar system.

“The most likely explanation for our results is that there is some unseen mass,” lead author Volk said. “According to our calculations, something as massive as Mars would be needed to cause the warp that we measured.”

According to Volk and Malhotra, there’s a celestial body the size of Mars located around 60 AU from the sun, that influencing KBOs located at around 10 AU at either side of it.

“The observed distant KBOs are concentrated in a ring about 30 AU wide and would feel the gravity of such a planetary mass object over time, so hypothesizing one planetary mass to cause the observed warp is not unreasonable across that distance,” Volk said.

However, another theory is that a start that passed near our solar system at some point knocked the KBOs out of alignment.

“Once the star is gone, all the KBOs will go back to processing around their previous plane,” Malhotra said. “That would have required an extremely close passage at about 100 AU, and the warp would be erased within 10 million years, so we don’t consider this a likely scenario.”

Source: Space.com

Astronomers Discover New Stage In Origin Of Planets --"Solves An Enduring Mystery"

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Astronomers have struggled to assemble a complete theory of the origin of planets that explains how the initial dust develops into planetary systems. A French-UK-Australian team now think they have the answer, with their simulations showing the formation of 'dust traps' where pebble-sized fragments collect and stick together, to grow into the building blocks of planets.

Our Solar system, and other planetary systems, began life with disks of gas and dust grains around a young star. The processes that convert these tiny grains, each a few millionths of a metre (a micron) across, into aggregates a few centimetres in size, and the mechanism for making kilometre-sized 'planetesimals' into planetary cores, are both well understood.

The intermediate stage, taking pebbles and joining them together into objects the size of asteroids, is less clear, but with more than 3,500 planets already found around other stars, the whole process must be ubiquitous.

Dr Jean-Francois Gonzalez, of the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, in France, led the new work. He comments: "Until now we have struggled to explain how pebbles can come together to form planets, and yet we've now discovered huge numbers of planets in orbit around other stars. That set us thinking about how to solve this mystery."

The image below illustrates the stages of the formation mechanism for dust traps. The central star is depicted as yellow, surrounded by the protoplanetary disk, here shown in blue. The dust grains make up the band running through the disk. In the first stage, the dust grains grown in size, and move inwards towards the central star. The now pebble-sized larger grains (in the second panel) then pile up and slow down, and in the third stage the gas is pushed outwards by the back-reaction, creating regions where dust accumulates, the so-called dust traps. The traps then allow the pebbles to aggregate to form planetesimals, and eventually planet-sized worlds.

There are two main barriers that need to be overcome for pebbles to become planetesimals. Firstly the drag of gas on dust grains in a disk makes them drift rapidly towards the central star, where they are destroyed, leaving no material to form planets. The second challenge is that growing grains can be broken up in high-speed collisions, breaking them into a large number of smaller pieces and reversing the aggregation process.

The only locations in planet forming disks where these problems can be overcome are so-called 'dust traps'. In these high-pressure regions, the drift motion slows, allowing dust grains to accumulate. With their reduced velocity, the grains can also avoid fragmentation when they collide.

Until now, astronomers thought that dust traps could only exist in very specific environments, but the computer simulations run by the team indicate that they are very common. Their model pays particular attention to the way the dust in a disk drags on the gas component. In most astronomical simulations, gas causes the dust to move, but sometimes, in the dustiest settings, the dust acts more strongly on the gas.

This effect, known as aerodynamic drag back-reaction, is usually negligible, so up to now has been ignored in studies of growing and fragmenting grains. But its effects become important in dust rich environments, like those found where planets are forming.

The effect of the back-reaction is to slow the inward drift of the grains, which gives them time to grow in size. Once large enough, the grains are their own masters, and the gas can no longer govern their motion. The gas, under the influence of this back-reaction, will be pushed outwards and form a high-pressure region: the dust trap. These spontaneous traps then concentrate the grains coming from the outer disk regions, creating a very dense ring of solids, and giving a helping hand to the formation of planets.

Gonzalez concludes: "We were thrilled to discover that, with the right ingredients in place, dust traps can form spontaneously, in a wide range of environments. This is a simple and robust solution to a long standing problem in planet formation."

Observatories like ALMA in Chile already see bright and dark rings in forming planetary systems that are thought to be dust traps. Gonzalez and his team, and other research groups around the world, now plan to extend the trap model all the way to the formation of planetesimals.

Via Royal Astronomical Society

Image credits: Volker Schurbert

ESA Set to Explore ‘the Most Mysterious Planet’ in the Solar System

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A double decker spacecraft—which can carry TWO orbiters, one belonging to the Japanese Space Agency and another one from the European counterpart is set to explore one of the most mysterious planets in the solar system, on a mission that will launch in 2018. Scientists want to get as close as possible to the surface of the planet, which is blasted by EXTREME radiation levels around ten times higher than on the sun, and by temperatures that literally melt metal.

The Mission is set to launch on October 5, 2018, from Kourou in French Guinea and will arrive at Mercury, the closest planet in our solar system on December 5, 2025.

Mercury is considered as one of the most intriguing planets in our solar system, and very little is known about it. BepiColombo would be the European Space Agency’s FIRST mission to the closest planet in our solar system.

The ESA has said that BepiColombo aims to “follow up on many of the intriguing results of NASA‘s Messenger mission, probing deeper into Mercury’s mysteries than ever before.”

The mission’s main goal is to research the strange characteristics of Mercury’s internal structure and magnetic field generation, and specifically how it interacts with the Sun and the Solar Wind.

The entire mission cost around 1.3 billion Euros and involves around 33 companies from a total of twelve countries in Europe, as well as companies from the United States and Japan.

The spacecraft has an extremely unusual design carrying two orbiters, one from the ESA and one from JAXA, which will separate upon arrival in order to enter two different but complementary orbits around the closest planet to the sun.

According to the European Space Agency, “BepiColombo is Europe’s first mission to Mercury. It will set off in 2018 on a journey to the smallest and least explored terrestrial planet in our Solar System. When it arrives at Mercury in late 2025, it will endure temperatures in excess of 350 °C and gather data during its 1-year nominal mission, with a possible 1-year extension. The mission comprises two spacecraft: the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO). BepiColombo is a joint mission between ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), executed under ESA leadership.”

Image Credit: Airbus

The mission has already been delayed several times in the past but mission specialists are confident that the launch will definitely take place in Octobre of 2018.

Alvaro Gimenez, ESA’s director of science told reporters at the agency’s center in the Dutch coastal town of Noordwij: Mercury is the ‘most peculiar of all rocky planets.’ And Mercury rightfully is the most mysterious of them all, having a surface governed by extreme temperatures that range from a drastically 450 to -180 degrees Celsius.

However, Mercury is also the ONLY planet in the solar system that has a magnetic field beside Earth. And while Earth’s magnetic field protects us from harmful solar radiation, Mercury’s magnetic field is so weak that it doesn’t provide much protection against solar radiation. The planet orbits the sun just 58 million kilometers away, meaning that it’s bombarded by radiation levels that would destroy life as we know it in an instant.

Mercury is also a planet that is difficult to study from Earth due to its proximity to the sun, as the brightness tends to impede the view.

Furthermore, due to the extreme gravity, the sun has on the planet, it’s very hard to place a spacecraft into stable orbit around the planet.

“We are flying into a pizza oven which is why we had to test materials at a very high and different temperature rates. Sometimes with very unwanted results,” said Ulrich Reininghaus, the ESA BepiColombo project manager.

Mercury has truly been a challenge for space agencies around the globe. So far, only two NASA missions have managed to visit the planet before—the Mariner 10 and the Messenger missions who studied the planet in the 1970’s and 2011 respectively.

The Mercury mission is Europe’s “most complicated ever,” said Gimenez.

“It’s difficult to get there, it’s difficult to work there.”

Mission scientists want to get as close as possible to the surface of the planet, which is blasted by EXTREME radiation levels around ten times higher than on the sun, and by temperatures that literally melt metal.

Both spacecraft are expected to study the planet between one to two years, but experts say the orbiters could last a bit longer before crashing into the surface of the planet.

Source: ESA

BepiColombo will study one of the most mysterious planets in our solar system. Image Credit: Airbus

Planet Nine Breakthrough: Scientists Find NEW Evidence Of Mysterious Giant World

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SCIENTISTS are claiming to have found more evidence that a planet TEN times the size of Earth is lurking beyond Pluto.

Astronomers believe they have found conclusive evidence that suggests planet Nine is REAL.

It seems that scientists have after all found evidence that supports the existence of Planet Nine, even though last months experts said that it may not exist after all.

So, what’s the deal? Two astronomers at the “Universidad Complutense de Madrid” claim to have found evidence of the mysterious existence of Planet Nine or Planet X: a hypothetical planet hidden beyond the orbit of Pluto whose existence has been debated by scientists for years.

In 2016, a study announced the existence of the planet based on the peculiar distribution of the orbits of transneptunian objects (TNO) located in the Kuiper belt.

Then, scientists believed that it was precisely Planet Nine to blame for those orbits. However, biases were later detected in these observations that cast doubt on the conclusions of the study.

But now, Spanish astronomers have resorted to a more novel technique and less exposed to biases to observe the so-called extreme transneptunian objects (ETNO): a special class of celestial bodies that never cross the orbit of Neptune and are located particularly far away from the Sun—at a distance more than 150 AU and never cross Neptune’s orbit.

The evidence is there

Astronomers analyzed the distribution of the nodes–the points in orbit where ETNO’s cross the plane of the Solar System—only to find that some of them are grouped in orbit at times.

Also, a correlation between the positions of the nodes and their inclination was detected, although there should be none, which hints at the existence of a larger body located in the outermost edges of the solar system that is directly influencing their orbits.

“Using calculations and data mining, the Spanish astronomers have found that the nodes of the 28 ETNOs analysed (and the 24 extreme Centaurs with average distances from the sun of more than 150 AU) are clustered in certain ranges of distances from the sun; furthermore, they have found a correlation where none should exist between the positions of the nodes and the inclination, one of the parameters which defines the orientation of the orbits of these icy objects in space,” reports Phys.org.

Planet Nine say scientists could explain this unexpected correlation.

“If there is nothing to perturb them, the nodes of these extreme trans-Neptunian objects should be uniformly distributed, as there is nothing for them to avoid, but if there are one or more perturbers, two situations may arise,” astronomer Carlos de la Fuente Marcos said in a news release. “One possibility is that the ETNOs are stable, and in this case, they would tend to have their nodes away from the path of possible perturbers. But if they are unstable, they would behave as the comets that interact with Jupiter do, tending to have one of the nodes close to the orbit of the hypothetical perturber.”

“Assuming that the ETNOs are dynamically similar to the comets that interact with Jupiter, we interpret these results as signs of the presence of a planet that is actively interacting with them in a range of distances from 300 to 400 AU,” said de la Fuente Marcos. “We believe that what we are seeing here cannot be attributed to the presence of observational bias.”

The new findings, detailed this week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, lend credence to the previous hypotheses of researchers—Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown—at Caltech and the University of Arizona who explained in 2016 how a massive outer planet would be the likeliest explanation for the similarities in orbits of six distant objects, and they proposed specific orbital parameters. The predicted planet could be a super-Earth, with an estimated mass of 10 Earths (approximately 5,000 times the mass of Pluto), a diameter two to four times that of Earth, and a highly elliptical orbit with an orbital period of approximately 15,000 years.

(H/T Phys.org)

Here’s What NASA Could Accomplish If It Had The Us Military’s $600 Billion Budget

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For Americans, National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) has been a home-term since the '60s when it accomplished the seemingly impossible, carrying and landing humans on the Moon. Since then, NASA (National Aeronautics Space Agency) has revealed other alien-worlds like, Saturn's moon Titan and Mars, on top of NASA flew past every planet in our solar system.

It has achieved so much on a very small budget. What more could NASA have accomplished over the years? Just contemplate if we gave NASA hundreds of billions of dollars a year like what we use on the United States military.

The USA uses more budgets on space exploration than any other country in the world. NASA gets a huge amount of this investment, the country's main agency for space study.

But this small part of the budget that NASA gets is almost zero if compared to the complete US Federal budget. You will be stunned to know that after the Space Agency landed the first man on the Moon (1969), its budget has dropped from 4.5 percent of the Federal budget to less than 0.5 percent.

So let’s see if NASA’s budget hadn’t reduced? And what if, its investment was comparable to the US military’s?

For sure it’s impossible to know what precisely we could have reached, but here’s a look at what could have happened if US military’s budget was comparable to NASA’s in 2016.

Alternative way, the military’s financial plan for 2016 would pay for a crewed operation to Mars with 10s of billions to spare. NASA guesses it would cost 450 billion dollars to take and land the first humans on Mars by the late 2030s or quick 2040s.

What else might the space agency do with 600 billion dollars? Let’s look at how NASA allotted its funds in 2016. That would simply meet present costs for NASA’s largest ongoing projects including:

Construction and launch budgets for the most dominant rocket in history, the Space Launch System (SLS).

The utmost powerful space telescope ever built, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Partner with SpaceX on its first mission to Mars in 2018, the Red Dragon Mission (RGM).

Pay for NASA procedures on board the International Space Station (ISS) through 2024.

So, how would you have National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) spend the rest?

We can think of some thoughts.

The Seven Most Extreme Planets Ever Discovered

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Scientists recently discovered the hottest planet ever found – with a surface temperature greater than some stars. As the hunt for planets outside our own solar system continues, we have discovered many other worlds with extreme features.

And the ongoing exploration of our own solar system has revealed some pretty weird contenders, too. Here are seven of the most extreme.

The hottest

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How hot a planet gets depends primarily on how close it is to its host star – and on how hot that star burns. In our own solar system, Mercury is the closest planet to the sun at a mean distance of 57,910,000km. Temperatures on its dayside reach about 430°C (806°F), while the sun itself has a surface temperature of 5,500°C.

But stars more massive than the sun burn hotter. The star HD 195689 – also known as KELT-9 – is 2.5 times more massive than the sun and has a surface temperature of almost 10,000°C. Its planet, KELT-9b, is much closer to its host star than Mercury is to the sun.

Though we cannot measure the exact distance from afar, it circles its host star every 1.5 days (Mercury's orbit takes 88 days). This results in a whopping 4300°C – which is hotter than many of the stars with a lower mass than our sun.

The rocky planet Mercury would be a molten droplet of lava at this temperature. KELT-9b, however, is a Jupiter-type gas giant. It is shrivelling away as the molecules in its atmosphere are breaking down to their constituent atoms – and burning off.

The coldest

At a temperature of just 50 degrees above absolute zero (-223°C) OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb snatches the title of the coldest planet. At about 5.5 times the Earth's mass it is likely to be a rocky planet too.

Though not too distant from its host star at an orbit that would put it somewhere between Mars and Jupiter in our solar system, its host star is a low mass, cool star known as a red dwarf.

ESO OGLE BLG Lb. ESO, CC BY-SA

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The planet is popularly referred to as Hoth in reference to an icy planet in the Star Wars franchise. Contrary to its fictional counterpart, however, it won't be able to sustain much of an atmosphere (nor life, for that matter). This because most of its gases will be frozen solid – adding to the snow on the surface.

The biggest

If a planet can be as hot as a star, what then makes the difference between stars and planets?

Stars are so much more massive than planets that they are ignited by fusion processes as a result of the huge gravitational forces in their cores. Common stars like our sun burn by fusing hydrogen into helium.

But there is a form of star called a brown dwarf, which are big enough to start some fusion processes but not large enough to sustain them. Planet DENIS-P J082303.1-491201 b with the equally unpronounceable alias 2MASS J08230313-4912012 b has 28.5 times the mass of Jupiter – making it the most massive planet listed in NASA's exoplanet archive.

It is so massive that it is debated whether it still is a planet (it would be a Jupiter-class gas giant) or whether it should actually be classified as a brown dwarf star. Ironically, its host star is a confirmed brown dwarf itself.

The smallest

Just slightly larger than our moon and smaller than Mercury, Kepler-37b is the smallest exoplanet yet discovered. A rocky world, it is closer to its host star than Mercury is to the sun. That means the planet is too hot to support liquid water and hence life on its surface.

The oldest

PSR B1620-26 b, at 12.7 billion years, is the oldest known planet. A gas giant 2.5 times the mass of Jupiter it has been seemingly around forever. Our universe at 13.8 billion years is only a billion years older.

Artist's impression of the biggest planet known. Credit: NASA and G. Bacon (STScI)

PSR B1620-26 b has two host stars rotating around each other – and it has outseen the lives of both. These are a neutron star and a white dwarf, which are what is left when a star has burned all its fuel and exploded in a supernova.

However, as it formed so early in the universe's history, it probably doesn't have enough of the heavy elements such as carbon and oxygen (which formed later) needed for life to evolve.

The youngest

The planetary system V830 Tauri is only 2 million years old. The host star has the same mass as our sun but twice the radius, which means it has not fully contracted into its final shape yet. The planet – a gas giant with three quarters the mass of Jupiter – is likewise probably still growing.

That means it is acquiring more mass by frequently colliding with other planetary bodies like asteroids in its path – making it an unsafe place to be.

The worst weather

Because exoplanets are too far away for us to be able to observe any weather patterns we have to turn our eyes back to our solar system.

If you have seen the giant swirling hurricanes photographed by the Juno spacecraftflying over Jupiter's poles, the largest planet in our solar system is certainly a good contender. However, the title goes to Venus. A planet the same size as Earth, it is shrouded in clouds of sulfuric acid.

The atmosphere moves around the planet much faster than the planet rotates, with winds reaching hurricane speeds of 360km/h (224mph). Double-eyed cyclones are sustained above each pole. Its atmosphere is almost 100 times denser than Earth's and made up of over 95% carbon dioxide.

The resulting greenhouse effect creates hellish temperatures of at least 462°C (864°F) on the surface, which is actually hotter than Mercury. Though bone-dry and hostile to life, the heat may explain why Venus has fewer volcanoes than Earth.

Christian Schroeder, Lecturer in Environmental Science and Planetary Exploration, University of Stirling

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.