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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday January 14 2017, @04:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the shhhhhh....-we-are-hunting-planets dept.

http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2017-03

Searching for planets around other stars is a tricky business. They're so small and faint that it's hard to spot them. But a possible planet in a nearby stellar system may be betraying its presence in a unique way: by a shadow that is sweeping across the face of a vast pancake-shaped gas-and-dust disk surrounding a young star. The planet itself is not casting the shadow. But it is doing some heavy lifting by gravitationally pulling on material near the star and warping the inner part of the disk. The twisted, misaligned inner disk is casting its shadow across the surface of the outer disk.

A team of astronomers led by John Debes of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, say this scenario is the most plausible explanation for the shadow they spotted in the stellar system TW Hydrae, located 192 light-years away in the constellation Hydra, also known as the Female Water Snake. The star is roughly 8 million years old and slightly less massive than our sun. The researchers uncovered the phenomenon while analyzing 18 years' worth of archival observations taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

[...] Given the relatively short 16-year period of the clocklike moving shadow, the planet is estimated to be about 100 million miles from the star — about as close as Earth is from the sun. The planet would be roughly the size of Jupiter to have enough gravity to pull the material up out of the plane of the main disk. The planet's gravitational pull causes the disk to wobble, or precess, around the star, giving the shadow its 16-year rotational period.

TW Hydrae.

Chasing Shadows: Rotation of the Azimuthal Asymmetry in the TW Hya Disk


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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14 2017, @06:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14 2017, @06:02AM (#453721)

    Interplanetary Niggers are coming to rape American Pussy, and only Trump can save our bitches. Nigger cock can't reach the Pussy when Trump already has his hand in there grabbing for Freedom.

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14 2017, @07:33AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14 2017, @07:33AM (#453733)

    Trump hands too small to full pussy, nigger cock slip in.