Category: space

A White Dwarf Star Ripped This Planet To Bits

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Astronomers recently found what seems to be a planet around a white dwarf star, or what’s left of it anyway. Due to the intense gravity of the white dwarf star, which is what our Sun will become after its done being a red giant in the future, the planet was ripped the shreds, with what it once called part of itself, orbiting around the white dwarf.

Not cool.

Actually it’s very cool to see something like this happen, since for astronomers to see an exoplanet this small is very hard to do, making this quite the special occurrence. The only reason this planet survived the red giant phase of its star, named an appropriate SDSS J122859.93+104032.9 (catchy), was because it was out far enough from its parent star that it was not able to be swallowed whole by the behemoth the star once was.

Technically, the scientists didn’t see the planet as I see my screen right now. Using a method that measured the amount of brightness being sent from calcium ions, which alerted them there was gas circulating in the disk, they were able to determine that it was a planetesimal orbiting the star. Previously, they had been monitoring this specific white dwarf since it is one of the only ones of it kind with a disk filled with gas and debris. They were not able to get the look they needed until recently in the past couple of years, which eventually led them to this conclusion.

While this is cool and exciting news, it does put into perspective just how powerful the world around us is. An entire planet was shredded due to an insane amount of gravity, something that we feel every day. It makes me appreciate the situation us as humans are in in our sanctuary we call Earth just that much more.

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Planet Nine Could Be Even More Likely Thanks To New Discovery

Planet Nine, sometimes called “Planet X”, is a theoretical planet that has been hypothesized to live in the dark, outer reaches of the solar system.

No, it’s not the planet that’s theorized by some crazies to collide with Earth and we’ll all die. That’s about as true as saying birds are a government conspiracy. It has negative legs to stand on.

On a more serious note, recent research supported this theory of a planet orbiting the far reaches of the solar system when looking at the striking similarities of eccentric orbits of objects (shown below).

This image shows the eccentric and similar orbits of objects and the hypothesized planet nine orbit
Could Planet Nine really exist?

The probability of this happening “is about .007 percent”.

This could not possibly be random.

The clustering of these far out object’s orbits was something Scott Shepard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., knew could very well be the tell tale sign of a 9th planet in the solar system. Sifting through his research, he found what he was looking for; yet another object that keeps furthering the idea that of a 9th planet’s gravity affecting the orbits of these far out objects. Properly named “FarFarOut” (since they had already used “FarOut”), this object is the farthest solar system object to have ever been discovered.

Shepard will have to verify whether or not this object correctly helps the theory of a ninth planet existing, but until then, the hopes are getting higher for there to be another planet out there somewhere in our solar system.