A puffy planetary puzzle.Astronomers Famous astronomers and astrophysicists include: Directory: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A
The newfound new·found adj. Recently discovered: a newfound pastime. Adj. 1. newfound - newly discovered; "his newfound aggressiveness"; "Hudson pointed his ship down the coast of the newfound sea" planet is called HAT-P-1b. It's 450 light-years from Earth and 36 percent wider than Jupiter, which is the largest planet in our solar system solar system, the sun and the surrounding planets, natural satellites, dwarf planets, asteroids, meteoroids, and comets that are bound by its gravity. The sun is by far the most massive part of the solar system, containing almost 99.9% of the system's total mass. . HAT-P-1b circles its parent star very closely--much more closely than Earth circles its own parent star, the sun. It also has a surprisingly low density. Although it's bigger than Jupiter, it has only half of Jupiter's mass. That makes it a puffy giant. The density of HAT-P-1b is the lowest of any known planet, says codiscoverer Robert Noyes of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It consists of the Harvard College Observatory and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The Center is located at 60 Garden Street. in Cambridge, Mass. That's very unusual for a planet, especially one that orbits its star so closely. "We have a bit of a puzzle," Noyes says. Astronomers found HAT-P-1b using six small, robotic telescopes. Four of the telescopes are at the Whipple Observatory in Arizona, and the other two are in Hawaii. They detected the planet because, while orbiting, it passes directly between Earth and its parent star, the fainter member of a double-star system called ADS 16402. Each time it does this, the planet blocks a little bit of the star's light reaching Earth. HAT-P-1b is an extrasolar planet extrasolar planet also called exoplanet Planet that orbits a star other than the Sun. The existence of extrasolar planets, many light-years from Earth, was confirmed in 1992 with the detection of three bodies circling a pulsar. , which means it exists outside our solar system. It's one of about 200 extrasolar planets that astronomers have discovered so far. Only one other extrasolar planet has a density nearly as low as that of HAT-P-1b. Originally, some astronomers had considered this planet a fluke fluke, parasitic flatworm of the trematoda class, related to the tapeworm. Instead of the cilia, external sense organs, and epidermis of the free-living flatworms, adult flukes have sucking disks with which they cling to their hosts and an external cuticle that . Now, they have to take more seriously the idea that puffy, hot supergiants may not be that rare.--E. Jaffe http://www.sciencenewskids.org/articles/20060920/Note3.asp |
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