Artist rendition of newly formed planet orbiting its young star
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC)Astronomers in Germany have announced the discovery of a newborn planet in a distant solar system.

Johny Setiawan, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, discovered the extrasolar planet using the 2.2m Max-Planck-Gesellschaft telescope in Chile. He said it’s the first and so far earliest example of a planet observed during its formation process.

Planets are thought to form out of the disks of dust and gas swirling around newly created stars. The new planet, catalogued as TW Hydrae b, is situated in the constellation Hydrae some 180 light years from Earth, and is only about 8 or so million years old – a mere baby in terms of planetary formation. In fact, the star it circles isn’t much further along in its own development.

"This demonstrates that planets can form within 10 million years, before the disk has been dissipated by stellar winds and radiation," the researchers explained in a recent issue of the journal Nature.

The gaseous newborn’s mass is about 10 times that of Jupiter in our own solar system, and orbits at a distance of about 4 million miles, just inside the inner edge of its star’s disk of gas and dust.

"The discovery shows that what we always call as 'protoplanetary' disks are indeed protoplanetary; they form planets," Setiawan said. "There are many 'protoplanetary' disks detected around young stars, but no planets so far have been detected within such young systems."

MORE INFORMATION

BBC.com story
Story at SpaceRef.com
The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia
Max Planck Institute for Astronomy

Tags : universe, planet, astronomy, new planets, protoplanetary disk, planet formation

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New properties: Must planets have the elements needed to make water? New discoveries have astronomers asking that question.Does a planet need to have the elements for water?

What makes a planet is under even more scrutiny these days.

Last year it was the demotion of Pluto from the rank of planet.

This past week astronomers from Harvard announced that they’ve discovered a pair of planets in a far-off gala y that have properties unlike any other planet we know of.

Both bodies, called exoplanets, are huge gaseous bodies like Jupiter. And what researchers have found is that they are missing water from their makeups.

Both planets revolve around suns that have hydrogen and oxygen, the building blocks of water. Planets usually have the same composition of the suns they orbit. The elements for water aren’t a must for a planet. In our solar system, both Mercury and Venus lack the ingredients for water. But with huge planets like these, hydrogen and oxygen have always been present.

What researchers have found are hot, windy conditions. Temperatures are gauged to be as high as 1,500 degrees F with winds gusting between 500 and 2000 miles per hour.

The closest of the new exoplanets is 360 trillion miles from Earth and is located in the constellation Vulpecula. The other planet is 900 trillion miles away in the constellation Pegasus. Researchers think that planet has an atmosphere made up of fine particles of silicate.
And it’s possible that elements for water are actually there but not visibile with our current technology. Scientists say it's possible the water is hiding beneath dust clouds or that all the airborne water molecules are the same temperature, making it impossible to see using an infrared spectrograph.

Or maybe it's just not there.

Tags : space, exoplanets, new planets

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