Astronomy

First Earth-Sized Planet in Habitable Zone

Posted on by Chris McMahon

The last few decades have been an exciting time for the exploration of other solar systems. So many exoplanets have been found, with the total going from literally zero to thousands. First with Kepler, then Spitzer, and now TESS — the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite — which can detect minute fluctuations in the light emitted by target stars as their planets transit in front of their suns. This has been described as analogous to analysing the light from a lit-up skyscraper at night and being able to detect someone shifting down their office blind by one centimetre! More on TESS here.

All the planets of interest identified by the TESS will be classified with the TOI prefix ( Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite Object of Interest).

TESS has already had its first find. An Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of the star designated TOI 700, which is 100 lightyears away. Cosmic spitting distance! For the astronomically minded, this star is in the constellation of Dorado. It’s so exciting  to imagine these stars as fostering a solar system favourable to life. TOI 700 is a cool M dwarf star, also known as a red dwarf star, the coolest in the cosmic stellar sequence, the most common, and the longest-lived stars. This red dwarf has 50% of our Sun’s surface temperature, and 40% of its radius — like a cool little sister.

TOI700 d First Earth-Sized Planet in a Habitable Zone

The planet that all the excitement is about is TOI 700 d, which is the outermost of three identified planets in that system. It is estimated to be around 20% larger than Earth, with an orbital period of 37 days, receiving perhaps 86% of the energy that our Sun provides to Earth. All three planets in this system are thought to be tidally locked to their star. This means they rotate once per orbit, with one face always toward its sun and the other permanently facing away — day and night sides — much like how the Moon is tidally locked to Earth.

Based on our solar system, we are used to the idea of rocky planets existing closer to the sun, with gas giants appearing further out. In TOI 700 the closest planet to the sun (TOI 700 b) is Earth-sized and rocky, the second (TOI 700 c) is likely have a composition similar to Neptune, while the goldilocks third planet (TOI 700 d) is Earth-sized and rocky!

What makes TOI 700 d unique is that it’s the first Earth-sized exoplanet located in the habitable zone. Astronomers have found thousands of Jupiter-sized planets, many of them “hot Jupiters” that orbit very close to their star, and other rocky planets, some of which are Earth-sized, but all of which lay outside the zone where liquid water might exist on their surface.

The only hitch for TOI 700 d is that despite receiving less solar energy, it is thought to be receiving up to 35 times more extreme UV radiation, which is not so great news for developing life. Regardless, TOI 700 d is a solid candidate for a habitable world, and one in our close stellar neighbourhood.

Future work will be targeted at characterisation of the planets’ atmospheres, and if possible, their actual compositions. Given the fact that they are likely to be tidally locked, the 3D climate modellers are going to have their work cut out for them!

The likelihood that the three planets in this system might be tidally locked has really tickled my SF brain, since one of the major premises of my SF book The Tau Ceti Diversion, was that the target planet (where all the action takes place) is tidally locked to its sun.

The Tau Ceti Diversion . . . with the crew dead, and the starship’s fusion drive held back from a lethal explosion, Karic and the surviving officers finally reach a habitable planet. The last thing they expected was to find it already occupied . . .

Get The Tau Ceti Diversion here!

Space Lasers Fired at the Moon!

Posted on by Chris McMahon

Space lasers fired at the Moon! It sounds like something from an Austin Powers movie – do you mean a “Space Laser” <air quotes> 🙂

The truth is even more interesting. Astronomers at observatories in new Mexico, Italy and Germany have been firing lasers at the Moon for 50 years as part of a long-ranging experiment that has yielded data on the tidal behaviour of Earth’s oceans, the surprising flex of the elastic lunar surface (up to 15 cms), the gradual movement of the Moon away from the Earth, and confirmation of Einstein’s gravitational theories.

Mercury's Tidally Locked Orbit
Apollo legacy lives on – through prisms

Arrays of hundreds of prisms left on the lunar surface by Apollo missions receive the incoming laser beams and bounce them back to Earth. The Apollo 11 and 14 arrays have 100 quartz glass prisms each, while the array left by Apollo 15’s astronauts has 300! The accuracy in measurement these prism arrays allow is stunning — and the experiment just keeps yielding data year after year because the arrays require no power or maintenance.

The returning signals have allowed the orbit, rotation and orientation of the Moon to be very accurately determined, and have confirmed that he the distance between the Earth and Moon is increasing by around 4 cm a year.

The experiment has highlighted the behaviour of Earth’s ocean tides, but also has shown that the lunar crust also rises and falls in a solid lunar “tide”. It has also confirmed that the Moon has a fluid core! This really surprised me, having thought (like many others) that the Moon was a “dead” rock. In fact the prevailing theory, even among scientists, was that the core would be cool and solid. The Moon’s fluid core affects the position of its north and south poles, which the experiment was sensitive to pinpoint.

The experiment has also confirmed Einstein’s theory of gravity, which assumes that the attraction between bodies is independent of their composition – proven true for the gravitational affects between the Sun and Moon, and Sun and Earth, despite the higher iron content of the Earth.

And that’s not the end for lunar reflectors. NASA has recently approved a new generation of reflectors to be positioned within the next ten years. These would be spread over a larger area, allowing more extensive analysis of lunar geography and further verification of Einstein’s gravitational theory.

Cool, huh?

Studies like this are invaluable in understanding new worlds. As a SF writer, they provide invaluable insights when it comes to building your own planets. Check out my own world-building in my SF novel, The Tau Ceti Diversion.

With the crew dead, and the starship’s jury-rigged fusion threatening a lethal explosion, Karic and the surviving officers finally reach a habitable planet. It’s a miracle, but the last thing they expected was to find that planet already occupied . . .

Get it now!

Atmosphere on a Fictional Planet

Posted on by Chris McMahon

So you’ve got your story working, but how do you sketch out the atmosphere on a fictional planet? Maybe you have some idea of the mass, radius and gravity and you’ve got the orbit in the ‘sweet spot’ goldilocks zone where liquid water can be present on the surface, but what will conditions on the surface actually be like?

What sort of factors go into whether that planet, presumably an Earth-like rocky world, will have an atmosphere that can support terrestrial life?

Planets above a blue planet

The gravity of the planet is one key variable, along with surface temperature, and the strength of the planet’s magnetosphere, which can protect against atmospheric stripping due to solar wind.

The surface temperature of a planet will determine how much kinetic energy, and so velocity, the gas particles will have. If that temperature, and velocity, is high enough it will exceed the planet’s escape velocity and the molecules will fly off into space like tiny spaceship explorers. Earth has lost most of its very light gases like hydrogen and helium in this way, whereas the gas giants have enough gravity to retain them. We kept our water, and we’ve got a lot of it! If Earth was sitting where Venus is things would be different, the additional temperature would give those lighter gases like water vapour enough energy to escape, and also prevent any being trapped on the planet’s surface itself (whereas some is ‘sequestered’ on Earth as water and ice at our lower surface temperature). But beyond the early, settling down period where the lighter gases are lost, any world larger than Earth, orbiting in that goldilocks zone, will not continue to lose a significant proportion of its atmosphere through thermal processes.

Here’s a cool pictorial on thermal escape (source: Wikipedia).

Solar_system_escape_velocity_vs_surface_temperature.svg

Beyond that thermal stripping process, is where the magnetosphere comes into its own, deflecting the solar wind – one of the main non-thermal processes leading to atmospheric loss. The very thickness of a planet’s atmosphere (retained due to its gravity, and as a function of surface temperature), will also protect a planet from the solar wind, even in the absence of a magnetosphere. It’s thought that Venus’ thick atmosphere, ionized by solar radiation and the solar wind, produces magnetic moments that act out to 1.2-1.5 planetary radii away from the planet to deflect the solar wind, much like a magnetosphere (but an order of magnitude closer to the planet). In fact, it’s thought the dominant non-thermal atmospheric loss process on Venus is actually from a type of naturally induced electrical acceleration. On Venus, the stripping of the lighter electrons from the atmosphere causes an excess of positive charges, accelerating ions like H+ out of its atmosphere.

Our explorers need a breathable atmosphere, but they also need an atmospheric pressure like our own Earth’s.

My fictional planet of Cru, in the Tau Ceti Diversion, has comparable surface temperatures to Earth, but a higher surface gravity. The higher surface gravity, and its lower density, allowed me to assume a lighter atmospheric composition, and allow an atmospheric pressure, or weight of atmosphere, close to surface much like Earth’s. That atmospheric composition is crucial to having a reasonable atmospheric pressure – its not just the gravity of the planet. Venus, even though it has slighter lower gravity than Earth, has a crushing atmospheric pressure of 90 times Earth’s due to its heavier  atmosphere of CO2.

Check out what my my intrepid explorers found in my novel The Tau Ceti Diversion when they touched down on the planet!

Read it now on Amazon!

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Estimating Surface Gravity on a Fictional Planet

Posted on by Chris McMahon

So you want to estimate surface gravity on a fictional planet? Easy!

One of the things I had to do as part of the rework of my novel The Tau Ceti Diversion, is to try and work out the surface gravity of my fictional planets. From the Kepler data, there are two exoplanets located in the Tau Ceti system that are likely to be in the system’s habitable zone, or where there is the possibility of liquid water on the surface, and perhaps life as we know it.

To play around with my estimates of gravity, I used ratioed rearrangements of Newton’s law of gravity (law of universal gravitation) and a simple formula relating the density of a spherical planet to its mass and radius (these are at the bottom of the post in the ADDENDUM).

WARNING: MATHS CONTENT!!!

Here’s Newtons famous law:)

law of gravity

The two planets thought to be in Tau Ceti’s habitable zone are denoted Tau Ceti e and Tau Ceti f. What is known about these two planets is their likely orbit, eccentricity, and their mass. All of these properties have been derived by calculation, based on observed data, so are all known to within appropriate error bounds, but I’m leaving the error off my scribblings so things don’t get too messy.

Tau Ceti e is thought to be around 4.3 Earth Masses, or Me (i.e. 4.3 times as heavy as Earth), while Tau Ceti f, the planet that orbits a bit further out, is thought to be around 6.67 Me. For the astronomically minded, these two planets orbit at around 0.55 and 1.35 AU from Tau Ceti respectively.

So, here’s where I cheated a bit, like any good engineer. I started with the answer I wanted and calculated backwards to see if the answer I wanted led to reasonable base assumptions. This is not as cheeky as it sounds, because when you have an insoluble problem (i.e. not enough data is known for an explicit result), an iterative approach is often used.

For my story to work, I needed a surface gravity on my planet of no more than 1.2g – that’s twenty percent higher than Earth’s. But how could I get a gravity that low on a planet that was over 4 times the mass of Earth? The answer is that surface gravity is a function of mass and radius, or going a step further along the calculation path, mass and density.

I used a ratioed form of Newton’s law that allowed me to relate the ratio of two planets gravitational forces to the ratios of their masses and radii. I already knew the ratio of the gravities ( assumed at gTCe/gE= 1.2) and the ratio of the masses (MTCe/ME =  4.3), so could calculate the ratio of radii (rE/rTCe) at 1.89.  Using another formula that related the ratio of the two planet’s densities to their ratioed mass and radii, I could then calculate their ratioed densities (dens TCe/ densE) at 0.63. So at the end of all that, to have a surface gravity of 1.2 g, Tau Ceti e would have to have a density of 63% of Earth’s. Is that reasonable?

The density of Earth is 5.514 g/cm3, not too much different from the density of a rocky planet like Mercury (5.427 g/cm3), but a lot higher than other solar system planets like Jupiter and Uranus (1.326 g/cm3 and 1.27 g/cm3 respectively), comprised of lighter materials. A surface gravity of 1.2g on Tau Ceti e would put its density at around 3.5 g/cm3, less dense than our own rocky planets, but certainly in a feasible range.

So what sort of densities would you expect for the Tau Ceti system? One clue is the metallicity of the system, which is a measure of the ratio of iron to hydrogen in the star’s makeup. In the case of Tau Ceti, this is estimated to be around one third of our own sun. This indicates the star is likely to be older than the Sun, made up of stellar remnants left over from less evolved stars that have not had time to form as much of the heavier elements in their internal fusion factories.

So Tau Ceti is made up of lighter elements. Based on this, it was reasonable to assume that the planets in the Tau Ceti system would also be made up of proportionally lighter elements, and quite possibly in the range I had estimated. Tau Ceti e and Tau Ceti f are also large planets – much larger than our own Earth – so having a density in between Earth and our own gas giants also made sense to me.

Using the same planetary density I had calculated for Tau Ceti e, for the larger Tau Ceti f, gave me a surface density of around 1.4g for the bigger planet – just a little too high for feasible human colonisation – and that fit nicely with my story as well.

It was a lot of fun playing with these calculations, and thankfully the known science fit with my story, at least with some comfortable wiggle room!

Check out what challenges that increased gravity provided for my intrepid explorers in my novel The Tau Ceti Diversion!

Read it now on Amazon!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ADDENDUM

For those interested in the maths. . .

Density formula:  densp= Mp / (4/3*pi()*rp^3)

Where:

densp= Density of Planet (kg/m3)

Mp = mass of planet (kg)

rp = radius of planet (m)

In ratio form: densp1/densp2= Mp1/Mp2 *(rp2/rp1)^3

 

Ratio of Newtons law relating gravity, mass and radius of two planets:

gp1/gp2= Mp1/Mp2 *(rp2/rp1)^2

 

Tau Ceti – One of Our Celestial Neighbours

Posted on by Chris McMahon

The Tau Ceti system is indeed one of our close cosmic neighbours. At less than 12 lightyears away, it is one of the closest systems to Earth’s own solar system – along with others such as the Centauri system and Epsilon Eridani. Because of its nearness to our own solar system, it has been a favourite in science fiction for decades. A likely first or second step for any intrepid interstellar explorers.

I first started toying with the idea of a novel set in the Tau Ceti system more than twenty years ago. And as these things go, the story developed in fits and starts as I bounced between novel projects and other stories. One of the things about writing science fiction, particularly near-future SF, is that the science never stands still. And particularly, in the last few decades, the developments in astronomy and the identification of planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets, has been almost exponential!

When I wrote the first draft of The Tau Ceti Diversion, there was not a single confirmed planet identified outside Earth’s solar system. Now, thanks largely to the latest Kepler space-based telescope discoveries, there are more than 3000! Not only that, but there have been five identified in the Tau Ceti system itself, with one – and possibly two – in the habitable zone around that star.

What did this mean for me? It meant a ton of research, and lot of very careful rewriting!

In my very early drafts of The Tau Ceti Diversion, I was free to imagine an Earth-like solar system of planets and shape them as I saw fit for the story. But by the time the last draft was completed, only months ago, I had very specific information about what those planets might be. I knew their approximate mass, their orbits, even their eccentricity. I had to go back to the drawing board – and my excel spreadsheets – to try and work out how these known planets would fit within the very specific constraints of my story. Not the least of which was that my story included a tidally locked planet!

It’s no accident that the Tau Ceti system has been popular as a setting for science fiction. Even before the identification of its family of planets, Tau Ceti, in the constellation of Cetus, was known to be very similar to our own Sun. It is smaller, about 78% of the Sun’s mass, and is the closest solitary G-class star (the same spectral class as the Sun). That’s enough to make it seem like our cousin. Add to that Tau Ceti’s stability, and lack of stellar variation, and you already feel like moving in. The only hitch is the presence of a debris disk, which means that any planet orbiting Tau Ceti is likely to face more impact events than planets in our own solar system.

Seen from Tau Ceti, the Sun would appear much like Tau Ceti does to us – a third magnitude star visible to the naked eye.

The composition of Tau Ceti, as measured by the ratio of its iron to hydrogen content, or metallicity, is lower than our Sun, indicating that it is older: its makeup derived from earlier stars yet to manufacture the same amount of heavy elements in their internal fusion factories.

So similar to our own Sun, and so close, it’s no wonder that it is also a target for the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) program.

As readers of my novel The Tau Ceti Diversion will discover, the explorers in my novel certainly find some intelligent life there!

Read it now on Amazon!

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Laser Communication with Spacecraft

Posted on by Chris McMahon

New technology promises to take laser communication with spacecraft from science fiction to science fact. This technology offers a new answer to a 60-year-old problem: you have had your launch and your shiny new space probe has made it to orbit without being ripped to shreds by tons of exploding chemical fuel, but once it’s up there, how do you talk to it?

The conventional answer is radio waves, but the rate of information transfer is woefully slow – just ask any NASA scientist who has tried to distill usable data out of probe transmissions. There are no ‘subspace’ communications in the real world, just lots of waiting while the precious data rolls in at the same old pace.

But, thanks to new laser technology, this is about to change.

Radio waves have been the standard since the dawn of spaceflight, but the new optical communications has the potential to increase that rate by as much as 10 to 100 times. That means instead of painstakingly assembling still photographs, we could actually get high-res photos or even video from the surface of other planets, or moons like Titan. How cool is that!

This new communication system will also be crucial as spacecraft are sent further into the solar system, stretching conventional radio transmissions to the limit.

The key factor is that while both radio and lasers travel at the speed of light, lasers use a higher-frequency bandwidth, allowing the transmission of much more data. The typical rate of information transfer might around a few megabits per second (Mbps). For example, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter sends data at a maximum rate of around of 6 Mbps. Using laser technology of equivalent size and power rating would probably increase this to 250 Mbps – a huge improvement.

There are some possible wrinkles though. Clouds and atmospheric conditions can cause interference in laser transmissions. And receiving those transmission will require a whole new Earth-based infrastructure – preferably in areas with clear skies.

Radio’s reliability will ensure it will endure as a communication method, but the new technology will continue to step closer to widespread application. The Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, will launch in 2019. This probe will test signals between two new ground-based stations and geostationary orbit, a distance of 40,000 km. This will be followed by the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) probe, led by JPL, in 2023, which, along with other science goals, will test transmissions between Earth and its target, a nearby metallic asteroid.

In my novel, The Tau Ceti Diversion, the explorers use laser communications to stay in contact with Earth – well at least until an unnamed saboteur puts the beam out of alignment:) Read more about the story and check out the free sample chapters on Amazon!

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Mercury’s Tidally Locked Orbit

Posted on by Chris McMahon

Mercury is weird

Mercury’s tidally locked orbit is a good example of how the universe always throws astronomers a few surprises.

The planet is tidally (or gravitationally) locked to our Sun, but this is not the typical “synchronous” tidal locking with a 1:1 ratio of rotation and orbit, such as the Moon and Earth, with the same face always presented to the larger partner. Mercury is locked into a what’s known as a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance, which is unique in our solar system.

The thing about the universe is that things look different from different places. Although Mercury’s orbital period is around 88 Earth days, from Earth it appears to move around its orbit in around 116 days (because we are moving too).

With Mercury’s 3:2 resonance it rotates exactly three times for every two revolutions the planet makes around the Sun. Yet the Sun is also turning. From the Sun’s frame of reference, Mercury appears to rotate only once every two Mercurian years. So the little yellow men who live in the caves there have to wait two years to see a single day go by, or about 176 Earth days. Birthdays must be complicated!

So how did astronomers get the idea that Mercury was synchronously locked to the Sun? This was because whenever Mercury was best placed for observation it was nearly always in the some point in its freaky 3:2 orbital resonance, so was showing the same face to observers on Earth. Since, by coincidence, Mercury’s rotatation (58.7 Earth days) is almost exactly half of its orbital period as observed from Earth (116 days). It was not until the radar observations of the planet in 1965 that astronomers learned the truth of its orbital antics.

Mercury's Tidally Locked Orbit

Thermal underwear a must on Mercury

Mercury has virtually no atmosphere, and is at the mercy of the Sun. Its surface temperature can rise on its equator to 427C (800F) during the day, and plummet to -173C (-280F) at night, while the poles are little more stable at around -93C (-136F). Although the planet has a small tilt, it has the highest orbital eccentricity of all the solar system planets, its orbital distance from closest (perihelion) to furtherest from the Sun (aphelion) varying by as much as 1.5 times.

Like our own Moon, the surface of Mercury is heavily cratered, indicating that the planet has been geologically inactive for billions of years.

My novel, The Tau Ceti Diversion, is a story about our search for new planets to colonise outside our solar system. Much of the action takes place on planet tidally locked to Tau Ceti that has some rather unique characteristics. The novel is due to be launched on September 1st 2016, and pre-order is now available on Amazon! Read more about what happens in the story here!

Stay tuned for a free chapter download, coming soon!

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Day Side & Night Side – Tidal Locking of Planets

Posted on by Chris McMahon

So what is tidal locking? Our Moon is tidally locked to the Earth, always presenting the same face to us. That doesn’t mean that the Moon is stationary, far from it, it just means that it takes just as long to rotate around its own axis as it does to revolve around the Earth. The same thing can happen for planets, which can be tidally locked to their stars, always presenting the same side of the planet to their star, giving those planets a permanent ‘day’ side and ‘night’ side.

We could expect these planets to have some pretty unique characteristics, with a hot, dry side, and a frigid frozen night side. Some scientists have even dubbed them ‘eyeball’ Earth’s due to the likely combination of features that might develop.

one-side-planet eyeball earth

Source: space.com

In my SF novel, the Tau Ceti Diversion, the action is set on a planet that is tidally locked to Tau Ceti, always divided into a hot day side and a cooler night side. This set up was crucial to the novel, and to the civilisation that the stranded crew of the starship Starburst find when they land on the planet’s night side. Actually they were aiming for the terminator – the dividing line between the day and night sides – expecting this to be a temperate zone. But I can’t say much more without spoilers:-)

Tau Ceti is a G-class sun, around 12 lightyears from Earth. One of our close stellar neighbours. Could we expect that one of its planets would be tidally locked to its star?

Well, it did not take me too much research to realise that this is one very complex question. It would indeed be surprising to find a tidally locked planet around Tau Ceti. Finding a tidally locked planet might be more likely around a smaller M class star. But there are many, many variables that might allow a planet to become tidally locked to its star within a reasonable fraction of that star’s lifetime. The variables that might increase the likelihood of a planet becoming tidally locked early in the star’s lifetime include the lack of a companion satellite (i.e. more likely if there is no moon), a low initial rate of planetary spin, a low dissipation function (the rate at which mechanical energy is converted into heat), a low rotational inertia . . . even the rigidity of the planet can be variable.

So, all these variables gave me enough wiggle room to allow my planet to be tidally locked. Plus I had a secret weapon – a key bit of backstory that affected the planet’s spin at a key point of its history. But I can’t say anything about that either, not without giving away the story!

Stars are classified based on their spectral characteristics. The M-class spectrum contains lines from oxide molecules, particularly TiO, with absorption lines of hydrogen typically absent. M-class are the most common of stars, representing over 76% of our stellar neighbours.  So we might expect more than a few tidally locked planets out there. Of course these will be the smaller bodies, Earth-sized and smaller, so will not be well represented in our current exoplanet catalogue, which features a lot of big, Jupiter-sized and heavier planets due to the methods used to identify exoplanets (so far). M-class stars are light orange red in colour, from 0.08-045 solar masses and low luminosity (less than 0.08 of our Sun’s). This class features rare and exotic creatures that can rarely be seen by the naked eye, mostly red dwarfs, although some are red giants, or even red supergiants. The class also includes the intruiging brown dwarfs, which are ‘late’ class M stars.

My novel, The Tau Ceti Diversion, a story about our search for new planets to colonise outside our solar system, is due to be launched on September 1st 2016, and pre-order is now available on Amazon! Read more about what happens in the story here!

Stay tuned for a free chapter download, coming soon!

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Postcard from Jupiter – First Snaps from Juno

Posted on by Chris McMahon

The Juno spacecraft’s JunoCam camera is now operational, and is sending data back to Earth. The camera was switched on six days after the exploration craft entered orbit around Jupiter. Although the first high-resolution images are weeks away, we have our first assembled image of the planet. The shot below was taken at a distance of 4.3 million kilometers from Jupiter (2.7 million mi) as it was moving into its capture orbit. Our remote pair of eyes, JunoCam, captured an image of Jupiter, complete with Great Red Spot, and shots of three of Jupiter’s four bigger moons.

First Juno Photo NASA

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

It’s fantastic to have received this tangible evidence of Juno’s operational status, and its survival of the extreme radiation that surrounds Jupiter. Juno has been specially designed to cope this this intense radiation environment, which can cause degradation of the spacecraft and instruments, noise from particle collision with detectors, and electric charging of the spacecraft itself. And Jupiter has a lot radiation to share. The huge planet’s magnetosphere extends out to 100 Jupiter radii – pretty astounding when you compare it to Earth’s magnetosphere, which extends to 10 Earth radii. This magnetosphere acts to concentrate and reflect solar radiation and cosmic rays from outside the solar system, and holds gases, like those ejected by Io’s volcanic activity, which get ionized and energized and emit their own radiation.

Juno’s detectors and electronics are shielded by a half-inch thick titanium vault. Its external camera also has additional shielding – enough to make it four times heavier than even the biggest star trackers to date. The spacecraft’s orbit has also been specially designed to avoid the most intense radiation zones.

In completing its mission, Juno will orbit Jupiter 37 times, going as low as 4,100 kilometers (2,600 mi) over the planet’s cloud tops. Juno’s scientific instruments will probe beneath the cloud cover and also study its auroras, allowing us to learn more about Jupiter’s origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.

JunoCam will continue to send back images on each of its many capture orbits.

But for our first high-resolution images, we will have to wait until August 27 when Juno makes its next close pass to Jupiter.

My novel, The Tau Ceti Diversion, a story about our search for new planets to colonise outside our solar system, is due to be launched on September 1st 2016! Read more about what happens in the story here!

Stay tuned for a free chapter download, coming soon!

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Hot Young Planets

Posted on by Chris McMahon

One of the real mysteries of identified exoplanets is the how many very large planets – the size of our Jupiter and even larger – are so close to their parent stars. This is a strange thing for us Terrans, because in our solar sytem, all our gas giants are in outer orbits. A situation so familiar anything else just seems plain wrong.

hot jupter

These ‘hot jupiters’ – heated by their proximity to their parent stars – are often in very close orbits to their suns, more equivalent to the orbit of say Mercury in our own solar system.

So how did they get there? Did they form there, or did they somehow migrate there? Were they wandering planets that were captured by their new suns?

At first these hot jupiters were considered anomalies, but as the list of exoplanets grew, astronomers found – to their surprise – that these type of planets were common. So what’s up? Is our solar system really the odd one out? It would be interesting if that was true, since the position of our own gas giants was crucial to the formation of higher life forms on Earth. Jupiter acted like a cosmic vacuum cleaner, stopping the multiple asteroid impacts that would have driven life on Earth back to basics time and time again.

The Spitzer telescope has been observing a hot Jupiter called HD 80606b, 190 lightyears from Earth, that has a highly eccentric orbit, swinging around its star every 111 days.

The theory is that these hot jupiters start out in highly eccentric orbits around their stars (like a very flat or ‘skiny’ ellipse), swinging first closer, then further out from their star. Over a period of hundreds of millions of years, gravitational influences from nearby stars or planets drive them into circular orbits, which are close to their parent stars. Part of this process is thought to be the loss of the planet’s gravitational energy as heat as it passes close to its parent star.

In HD 80606b, astronomers think they are observing one of these gas giant exoplanets in the middle of its migration. We still see the highly eccentric orbit, but it is now swinging very close to its parent star, moving toward its final, closer, circular orbit.

I don’t think we have a hundred million years to find out if this theory is correct, but at the rate our exoplanet discoveries are coming in, we will certainly have more data, and perhaps enough snapshots of multiple hot jupiters to get a good idea of exactly what’s happening in solar system formation.

My novel, The Tau Ceti Diversion, a story about our search for new planets to colonise outside our solar system, is due to be launched on September 1st 2016! Read more about what happens in the story here!

Check out the NASA post on HD 80606b, and the cool graphics, here.

 

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