Venus’ twin? Earth-size planet hot

Astronomers discover new distant object in solar system

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida, Nov 12, (AP): There’s a new rocky Earth-size planet on our galactic block, and it’s a sizzler.

Astrophysicists on Wednesday revealed the newfound world, GJ 1132b, named after the small nearby star that it orbits.

Even though the mercury can hit 450 degrees at this planet, it’s cool enough to have a thick Venus-like atmosphere. Lucky for scientists, it’s close enough to find out.

Planet GJ 1132b is just 39 light-years away, within the atmospheric study range of the Hubble Space Telescope. Given that a single light-year represents 5.87 trillion miles — the distance light can travel in a year — this planet is about 230 trillion miles away.

A team led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Zachory Berta-Thompson discovered the planet in May, using telescopes in Chile. He and his colleagues reported their findings Wednesday in the journal Nature.

While the scientists say the planet is too hot for life, it’s still much cooler than the rocky fireballs known to orbit stars beyond our solar system. The official term for a planet outside our solar system is exoplanet.

“If we find this pretty hot planet has managed to hang onto its atmosphere over the billions of years it’s been around, that bodes well for the longterm goal of studying cooler planets that could have life,” Berta-Thompson said in a statement.

Berta-Thompson and the others estimate that GJ 1132b has a diameter of about 9,200 miles, slightly bigger than Earth. Its mass, however, is thought to be 60 percent greater than Earth’s.

Observing

Its home star — GJ 1132 — is a red dwarf one-fifth the size of our sun. The planet circles every 1.6 days from just 1.4 million miles out, thus the heat wave. A slight dip in the starlight every 1.6 days was the giveaway for the observing team.

“Our ultimate goal is to find a twin Earth,” said astronomer David Charbonneau of the HarvardSmithsonian Center for Astrophysics, one of the authors, “but along the way we’ve found a twin Venus.”

He added in a statement: “We suspect it will have a Venus-like atmosphere, too, and if it does, we can’t wait to get a whiff.”

The astronomers are seeking followup observations from Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch in 2018, and other future craft could provide even more details.

In a companion article in Nature, the University of Maryland’s Drake Deming points out astronomers will be able to study GJ 1132b with “unprecedented fidelity” given its proximity and also the small size of its star, which should minimize light interference with the measurements.

That, in large part, makes it in his words “arguably the most important planet ever found outside the solar system.” He was not involved with the study.

It’s unknown, for now, whether this star system harbors other planets.

Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a miniature planet that is the most distant body ever found in the solar system, scientists said on Wednesday.

“We can’t really classify the object yet, as we don’t know its orbit,” said Scott Sheppard, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. “We only just found this object a few weeks ago.”

Based on its reflectivity, scientists believe the icy body, known as V774101, is between 300 and 600 miles (500 to 1,000 kms) in diameter, roughly half the size of Pluto. It is almost 10 billion miles from Earth, or three times farther away than Pluto.

Distant

Currently, the most distant planetlike bodies in the solar system are Sedna, discovered in 2003, and VP113, discovered in 2012. At more than 80 times farther from the sun than Earth, the two are still closer than V774101, which is currently 103 times more distant from the sun than Earth.

Sheppard said it will take a year of observations to determine if V774101 travels into Pluto’s neighborhood, a region beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt. This swath of space, which contains thousands of tiny planets, is 40 to 50 times farther away from the sun than Earth.

“If it never gets near Neptune that would make the object very interesting as its orbit would be unperturbed by the giant planets and thus allow us to understand the dynamics of the outer solar system,” Sheppard wrote in an email.

Also: OBSERVATORIO LAS CAMPANAS, Chile:

Chile broke ground Wednesday on a massive telescope that is set to be the world’s largest and will allow astronomers to look back to the earliest moments after the Big Bang.

The Giant Magellan Telescope, an international project designed to take astronomy into the next decade, will begin operations in 2021 and provide images 10 times clearer than the Hubble space telescope, organizers said.

HONOLULU:

Three people arrested for blocking telescope construction crews on a mountain held sacred by Native Hawaiians want to testify at their upcoming trials in Hawaiian.

Even though Hawaiian is one of the state’s official languages, court cases are primarily conducted in English, with interpreters provided for those who speak other languages.

The three cases were postponed as court officials arrange for Hawaiian interpreters.

During the 2014 fiscal year, there were seven cases that used Hawaiian interpreters, according to the state Judiciary. In fiscal 2010 there were three cases.