Distant Wanderers: the Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System.BRUCE DORMINEY Bruce Dorminey is an award-winning science journalist who writes about astronomy and astrophysics. He is a former Hong Kong bureau chief for Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine and a former Paris-based technology correspondent for the Financial Times newspaper. Some are big; some are small. Some are searingly hot; others are abysmally cold. Some follow stable, circular orbits; others follow wildly elliptical el·lip·tic or el·lip·ti·cal adj. 1. Of, relating to, or having the shape of an ellipse. 2. Containing or characterized by ellipsis. 3. a. paths. They are the planets that lurk To view the interaction in a chat room or online forum without participating by typing in any comments. See de-lurk. lurk - lurking beyond the realm of our own solar system--and are sometimes so strange that they challenge our very definition of the word planet. Ten years ago, we didn't know of a single such 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. . However, new technology paved the way for the identification of 60 new planets in the past 5 years and the potential for hundreds more to be discovered in the near future. How did these planets form? Could there be life there? These simple questions lead to larger conundrums: Does life on Earth mirror cycles of birth and death around other stars like our sun? Will we be able to leave Earth and 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. to avoid the inevitable death of our own star? Dorminey takes readers to the frontier of such thinking by astronomers, astrobiologists, and planetary theorists. This tour is a vivid account of the outer reaches of the universe as scientists understand them and offers clues to the mysteries that lurk there. Copernicus, 2001, 226 p., b&w photos/illus., hardcover, $29.95. |
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