Alien planet spotted around a white dwarf – a cosmic first

between the two stars,” Gaensicke said. “However, our observations show that it is a single white dwarf with a disc around it roughly ten times the size of our Sun made solely of hydrogen, oxygen and sulphur. Such a system has never been seen before, and it was immediately clear to me that this was a unique star.”

The composition of this disc is similar to that of our Solar System’s ice giants, Neptune and Uranus, the researchers said. It seems that a Neptunelike world – one about four-times wider than WDJ0914+1914 itself – is circling the white dwarf once every ten Earth days.

But this planet’s days appear to be numbered. Calculations performed by the team indicate that the white dwarf, which has a surface temperature around 28,000 degrees Celsius (50,400 degrees Fahrenheit), is evaporating the alien Neptune at a prodigious rate – about 3,300 tonnes (3,640 imperial tons) per second.

“Such a system has never been seen before, and it was clear that this was a unique star”

Boris Gaensicke

New research solves some of the mysteries of the ‘tiger stripes’ on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

The moon has been of particular interest to scientists ever since it was observed in detail by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. With Cassini’s data, scientists detected an icy subsurface ocean on the moon and strange tiger-stripe markings on the moon’s south pole that are unlike anything else in the Solar System. Icy material from Enceladus’ ocean spews into space through these stripes, or fissures, in the moon’s surface.

“First seen by the Cassini mission to Saturn, these stripes are like nothing else known in our Solar System,” lead scientist Doug Hemingway said in an statement. “They are parallel and evenly spaced, about 130 kilometres [80.7 miles] long and 35 kilometres [21.7 miles] apart. What makes them especially interesting is that they are continually erupting with water ice, even as we speak. No other icy planets or moons have anything quite like them.”

The moon isn’t frozen solid, as gravitational changes caused by its eccentric orbit around Saturn stretch it out slightly. This deformed shape causes the ice sheets at the poles to be thinner and more susceptible to splitting open, the researchers found. This led them to conclude that the fissures that make up these tiger stripes could have formed on the moon’s north pole just as well as the south pole, but the south pole just cracked first.

The astronaut assistant known as CIMON 2 just launched for the orbiting lab aboard SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule, which lifted off 5 December from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

CIMON 2 is following in the footsteps of the original CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile Companion), which reached the ISS in 2018.

CIMON 2 features some significant upgrades over its predecessor, which was a technology demonstration designed to show how humans and robots can collaborate in the space environment. For example, the newer robot has been updated with the ‘Watson Tone Analyzer’ from the IBM Cloud, giving CIMON 2 the ability to assess and react to astronauts’ emotions.

“With this update, CIMON has transformed from a scientific assistant to an empathetic conversational partner,” IBM representatives wrote in a statement. “Specifically, CIMON 2 has more sensitive microphones and an advanced sense of orientation. These AI capabilities and the stability of the complex software applications have also been significantly improved in the new CIMON 2.”

CIMON 2 could help lay the foundations for a powerful partnership between humanity and machine in the final frontier.

For the first time ever, astronomers have spotted evidence of an exoplanet circling a superdense stellar corpse known as a white dwarf, a new study reports. The vast majority of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, including our own Sun, will end up as white dwarfs. When these stars finish burning their nuclear fuel, they’ll first bloat up as enormous red giants, then eventually collapse down into white dwarfs, which pack about one solar mass into a sphere the size of Earth. Lead scientist Boris Gaensicke from the University of Warwick and his colleagues studied a white dwarf called WDJ0914+1914, which lies about 2,040 light years from Earth. In data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the researchers detected emissions of hydrogen, sulphur and oxygen coming from WDJ0914+1914. That’s an odd combination of gases for a whitedwarf system, so the team trained the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile on WDJ0914+1914. The VLT observations confirmed the presence of all three elements, and suggested that the emissions are coming from a ring of gas around the white dwarf. “At first we thought that this was a binary star with an accretion disc formed from mass flowing Above: The unique planet is slowing being deteriorated by its dead host

Right: The tiger stripes were one of Cassini’s many unusual finds as it orbited Saturn

Right: The original CIMON was roughly spherical and had a cartoonish face