Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Mysterious Object Viewed in the Taurus star-forming system


Tell me this doesn't have science fiction written all over it. Check out the picture. On the right you have a mysterious object discovered near a brown dwarf doesn’t fit into any known astronomical category. It's in a binary system with the brown dwarf companion buuuuuuuuut
it’s too young to have formed by accretion, though it masses like a planet, evidence points towards or better away from the normal way planets form, and it too light to be another brown dwarf.

So at the very least the conventions held for planetary formation have to be re-examined. As
Kevin Luhman of Penn State University, recently said in The Astrophysical Journal. “This seems to indicate that there are two different ways for nature to make small companions.”

It gets weirder, read the complete Wired article here

2 comments:

Rosehippi said...

why do they always have to be a solid mass, why cant they be MADE by intellegent beings perhaps as a safe place to live when the planet goes awry??? perhaps it is hollow??? perhaps it came from else where thinking it was habitable to find it was not????just curious... won't truly know anything till we get there ... will we?

Beam Me Up said...

Rosehippi
no real response except that to say it can't be hollow. How come? Kepler....if its hollow, its mass is low and it has to orbit well outside the "life zone" I know they have found gas giants inside the orbit of Mercury in some systems. But its like spinning a ball on a string...what happens when you pull the string shorter....same thing. Don't get me wrong, I love Dysons and Niven Rings or even gas torus fascinating
and fun.