A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
A planet 100 light-years away looks like a newborn child variant of Jupiter, space experts say. The new world, known as 51 Eridani b, is just 20 million years of age - a little child by cosmic measures. The outsider world could yield pieces of information to the arrangement of our Solar System, which has an unordinary lay-out.
The find was made by the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), which searches for weak, youthful planets circling brilliant, generally adjacent stars. The new world demonstrates the most grounded methane signature ever distinguished on an outsider planet. Past Jupiter-like exoplanets have indicated just swoon hints of methane, making them altogether different from the overwhelming methane airs of gas monsters in our Solar System. The space experts additionally distinguished water, utilizing GPI's spectrometer instrument.
"Previous search methods couldn't find systems like our own, with
But the Jupiter-like exoplanets that have been discovered so far are much hotter than models have predicted. This hints that they could have formed quickly - as gas collapses to make a scorching planet in what is known as a "hot-start".The core build-up process can also form rocky planets like the Earth. But the fast collapse process might only make giant gas planets. The planets in our Solar System are 4.5 billion years old, but at just 20 million years old, 51 Eridani b might be young enough to reveal clues about how it was created.
"This planet really could have formed the same way Jupiter did; the whole solar system could be a lot like ours," said co-author Bruce Macintosh, from Stanford University's Kavli Institute.
The new gas giant is roughly twice the mass of Jupiter. Until now, the gas giant planets that have been directly detected have been much larger - five to 13 times Jupiter's mass.
It orbits a little further from its parent star than Saturn does from the Sun and has a temperature of 430C (800F), hot enough to melt lead, but still rather cold compared with other alien gas giants, which reach temperatures above 540C (1,000F).
The Gemini Planet Imager is installed on the 8m Gemini South Telescope in Chile. It began science operations in 2014.
Other scientific instruments designed to detect exoplanets do so indirectly, by, for example, detecting the dip in starlight as a planet passes in front of its parent sun. GPI instead searches for light from the planet itself - referred to as direct imaging.
The astronomers use adaptive optics to sharpen the image of a star, and then block out the starlight. Any remaining incoming light is then analysed, with the brightest spots indicating a possible planet.
Comments
Post a Comment