It’s rare that 3 million years old would be considered young, but that’s the case for a recently discovered exoplanet. The study of planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets, has exploded in the last decade with more than 5,000 confirmed discoveries to date. But most of those are older, fully mature planets comparable in age to the Earth, which is around 4.5 billion years old.
Recently, though, astronomers using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) found a planetary baby, which is the youngest transiting planet discovered so far. It is called transiting because it was spotted when it passed in front of its host star, in an event called a transit, which astronomers can spot by looking for dips in brightness from the star.
“To our knowledge, this makes IRAS 04125+2902 b the youngest transiting planet discovered so far by a factor of about three,” the authors wrote in their paper in the journal Nature describing the finding.
Previous researchers have discovered young exoplanets that are between 10 million and 40 million years old, but not younger than that — in part because planets this young can still be forming from the disk of matter around their stars, called the protoplanetary disk, or because this disk is so dense with dust and gas that it hides the baby planets from view. In this case, there was something funny about the disk of matter around star IRAS 04125+2902 that enabled the scientists to see the exoplanet — the disk was skewed, being at an odd angle compared to the orbital plane of the star.
The young planet is very close to its star, with a year there lasting just under nine Earth days, but it is big with a radius more than 10 times that of Earth. That size means it could be on its way to becoming a type of planet called a super-Earth or a sub-Neptune, types which we don’t see in our solar system but are common beyond it.
The planet is also relatively nearby, at around 520 light-years away from Earth. That makes it a great place to study how planets form, the researchers write, and suggest that using a tool like the James Webb Space Telescope could help uncover more about this unusual star and its planet: “Given its close proximity to Earth [160 parsecs, or 520 light-years] and rare configuration, the system is a powerful environment for understanding early formation and migration.”
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.