|
Tau Boötis B
Tau Boötis b, or more precisely Tau Boötis Ab, is an extrasolar planet approximately 51 light-years away. The planet and its host star is one of the planetary systems selected by the International Astronomical Union as part of NameExoWorlds, their public process for giving proper names to exoplanets and their host star (where no proper name already exists). The process involved public nomination and voting for the new names, and the IAU planned to announce the new names in mid-December 2015. However, the IAU annulled the vote as the winning name was judged not to conform with the IAU rules for naming exoplanets. Discovery Discovered in 1996, the planet is one of the first extrasolar planets found. It was discovered orbiting the star Tau Boo (HR 5185) by R. Paul Butler, Paul Butler and his team (San Francisco Planet Search Project) using the highly successful radial velocity method. Since the star is visually bright and the planet is massive, it produces a very strong velocity ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
University Of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant university and the founding campus of the University of California system. Its fourteen colleges and schools offer over 350 degree programs and enroll some 31,800 undergraduate and 13,200 graduate students. Berkeley ranks among the world's top universities. A founding member of the Association of American Universities, Berkeley hosts many leading research institutes dedicated to science, engineering, and mathematics. The university founded and maintains close relationships with three national laboratories at Berkeley, Livermore and Los Alamos, and has played a prominent role in many scientific advances, from the Manhattan Project and the discovery of 16 chemical elements to breakthroughs in computer science and genomics. Berkeley is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mercury (planet)
Mercury is the smallest planet in the Solar System and the closest to the Sun. Its orbit around the Sun takes 87.97 Earth days, the shortest of all the Sun's planets. It is named after the Roman god ' ( Mercury), god of commerce, messenger of the gods, and mediator between gods and mortals, corresponding to the Greek god Hermes (). Like Venus, Mercury orbits the Sun within Earth's orbit as an inferior planet, and its apparent distance from the Sun as viewed from Earth never exceeds 28°. This proximity to the Sun means the planet can only be seen near the western horizon after sunset or the eastern horizon before sunrise, usually in twilight. At this time, it may appear as a bright star-like object, but is more difficult to observe than Venus. From Earth, the planet telescopically displays the complete range of phases, similar to Venus and the Moon, which recurs over its synodic period of approximately 116 days. The synodic proximity of Mercury to Earth makes Mercury most ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tidal Locking
Tidal locking between a pair of co-orbiting astronomical bodies occurs when one of the objects reaches a state where there is no longer any net change in its rotation rate over the course of a complete orbit. In the case where a tidally locked body possesses synchronous rotation, the object takes just as long to rotate around its own axis as it does to revolve around its partner. For example, the same side of the Moon always faces the Earth, although there is some variability because the Moon's orbit is not perfectly circular. Usually, only the satellite is tidally locked to the larger body. However, if both the difference in mass between the two bodies and the distance between them are relatively small, each may be tidally locked to the other; this is the case for Pluto and Charon. Alternative names for the tidal locking process are gravitational locking, captured rotation, and spin–orbit locking. The effect arises between two bodies when their gravitational interaction sl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inclination
Orbital inclination measures the tilt of an object's orbit around a celestial body. It is expressed as the angle between a Plane of reference, reference plane and the orbital plane or Axis of rotation, axis of direction of the orbiting object. For a satellite orbiting the Earth directly above the Equator, the plane of the satellite's orbit is the same as the Earth's equatorial plane, and the satellite's orbital inclination is 0°. The general case for a circular orbit is that it is tilted, spending half an orbit over the northern hemisphere and half over the southern. If the orbit swung between 20° north latitude and 20° south latitude, then its orbital inclination would be 20°. Orbits The inclination is one of the six orbital elements describing the shape and orientation of a celestial orbit. It is the angle between the orbital plane and the plane of reference, normally stated in degree (angle), degrees. For a satellite orbiting a planet, the plane of reference is usually ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andrew Collier Cameron
Andrew Collier Cameron is a British astronomer specialising in the discovery and characterisation of exoplanets. He is a founding co-investigator of the WASP project and served as the head of the School of Physics and Astronomy of the University of St Andrews between 2012 and 2015 where he is currently a professor. Career and research Cameron earned a doctoral degree from the University of Canterbury in 1982, with a thesis on southern hemisphere late-type Ca II emission-line stars. Cameron's research primarily focuses on stellar magnetic fields and the discovery and characterisation of extra-solar planets and cool stars. In his early career, he focused on the rotational history and dynamo-generated magnetic activity of cool stars, ultimately producing micro-arcsecond resolution maps of starspot distributions and surface magnetic fields. With Dr R. D. Robinson he co-discovered the centrifugally supported "slingshot prominence" systems in the coronae of the young, rapidly rotat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
HD 209458 B
HD 209458 b, which is also nicknamed Osiris after the Egyptian god, is an exoplanet that orbits the solar analog HD 209458 in the constellation Pegasus, some from the Solar System. The radius of the planet's orbit is , or one-eighth the radius of Mercury's orbit (). This small radius results in a year that is 3.5 Earth-days long and an estimated surface temperature of about . Its mass is 220 times that of Earth (0.69 Jupiter masses) and its volume is some 2.5 times greater than that of Jupiter. The high mass and volume of HD 209458 b indicate that it is a gas giant. HD 209458 b represents a number of milestones in extraplanetary research. It was the first of many categories: * a transiting extrasolar planet * The first planet detected through more than one method * an extrasolar planet known to have an atmosphere * an extrasolar planet observed to have an evaporating hydrogen atmosphere * an extrasolar planet found to have an atmosphere containing the elements oxygen and carbon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Transit (astronomy)
In astronomy, a transit (or astronomical transit) is a phenomenon when a celestial body passes directly between a larger body and the observer. As viewed from a particular vantage point, the transiting body appears to move across the face of the larger body, covering a small portion of it. The word "transit" refers to cases where the nearer object appears smaller than the more distant object. Cases where the nearer object appears larger and completely hides the more distant object are known as ''occultations''. However, the probability of seeing a transiting planet is low because it is dependent on the alignment of the three objects in a nearly perfectly straight line. Many parameters of a planet and its parent star can be determined based on the transit. In the Solar System One example of a transit involves the motion of a planet between a terrestrial observer and the Sun. This can happen only with inferior planets, namely Mercury and Venus (see transit of Mercury and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brown Dwarf
Brown dwarfs (also called failed stars) are substellar objects that are not massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion of ordinary hydrogen ( 1H) into helium in their cores, unlike a main-sequence star. Instead, they have a mass between the most massive gas giant planets and the least massive stars, approximately 13 to 80 times that of Jupiter (). However, they can fuse deuterium ( 2H), and the most massive ones (> ) can fuse lithium ( 7Li). Astronomers classify self-luminous objects by spectral class, a distinction intimately tied to the surface temperature, and brown dwarfs occupy types M, L, T, and Y. As brown dwarfs do not undergo stable hydrogen fusion, they cool down over time, progressively passing through later spectral types as they age. Despite their name, to the naked eye, brown dwarfs would appear in different colors depending on their temperature. The warmest ones are possibly orange or red, while cooler brown dwarfs would likely appear magenta or black to th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hot Jupiter
Hot Jupiters (sometimes called hot Saturns) are a class of gas giant exoplanets that are inferred to be physically similar to Jupiter but that have very short orbital periods (). The close proximity to their stars and high surface-atmosphere temperatures resulted in their informal name "hot Jupiters". Hot Jupiters are the easiest extrasolar planets to detect via the radial-velocity method, because the oscillations they induce in their parent stars' motion are relatively large and rapid compared to those of other known types of planets. One of the best-known hot Jupiters is . Discovered in 1995, it was the first extrasolar planet found orbiting a Sun-like star. has an orbital period of about 4 days. General characteristics Though there is diversity among hot Jupiters, they do share some common properties. * Their defining characteristics are their large masses and short orbital periods, spanning 0.36–11.8 Jupiter masses and 1.3–111 Earth days. The mass c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gas Giant
A gas giant is a giant planet composed mainly of hydrogen and helium. Gas giants are also called failed stars because they contain the same basic elements as a star. Jupiter and Saturn are the gas giants of the Solar System. The term "gas giant" was originally synonymous with "giant planet". However, in the 1990s, it became known that Uranus and Neptune are really a distinct class of giant planets, being composed mainly of heavier volatile substances (which are referred to as "ices"). For this reason, Uranus and Neptune are now often classified in the separate category of ice giants. Jupiter and Saturn consist mostly of hydrogen and helium, with heavier elements making up between 3 and 13 percent of their mass.The Interior of Jupiter, Guillot et al., in ''Jupiter: The Planet, Satellites and Magnetosphere'', Bagenal et al., editors, Cambridge University Press, 2004 They are thought to consist of an outer layer of compressed molecular hydrogen surrounding a layer of liquid metallic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kelvin
The kelvin, symbol K, is the primary unit of temperature in the International System of Units (SI), used alongside its prefixed forms and the degree Celsius. It is named after the Belfast-born and University of Glasgow-based engineer and physicist William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (1824–1907). The Kelvin scale is an absolute thermodynamic temperature scale, meaning it uses absolute zero as its null (zero) point. Historically, the Kelvin scale was developed by shifting the starting point of the much-older Celsius scale down from the melting point of water to absolute zero, and its increments still closely approximate the historic definition of a degree Celsius, but since 2019 the scale has been defined by fixing the Boltzmann constant to be exactly . Hence, one kelvin is equal to a change in the thermodynamic temperature that results in a change of thermal energy by . The temperature in degree Celsius is now defined as the temperature in kelvins minus 273.15, meaning t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bond Albedo
The Bond albedo (or ''spheric albedo'' or ''planetary albedo'' or ''bolometric albedo''), named after the American astronomer George Phillips Bond (1825–1865), who originally proposed it, is the fraction of power in the total electromagnetic radiation incident on an astronomical body that is scattered back out into space. Because the Bond albedo accounts for all of the light scattered from a body at all wavelengths and all phase angles, it is a necessary quantity for determining how much energy a body absorbs. This, in turn, is crucial for determining the equilibrium temperature of a body. Because bodies in the outer Solar System are always observed at very low phase angles from the Earth, the only reliable data for measuring their Bond albedo comes from spacecraft. Phase integral The Bond albedo (''A'') is related to the geometric albedo (''p'') by the expression :A = pq where ''q'' is termed the ''phase integral'' and is given in terms of the directional scattered flux '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
.svg "Click for more on -> Mercury (planet)")
