Using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, scientists have found a huge exoplanet and a brown dwarf. This is the first time a planet has been uniquely discovered by Gaia’s ability to sense the gravitational tug or ‘wobble’ the planet induces on a star. Both the planet and brown dwarf are orbiting low-mass stars, a scenario thought to be extremely rare.
📹 ESA – European Space Agency
📸 ESA/Gaia/DPAC/M. Marcussen
#ESA #Gaia #SpaceDiscovery
In mythology, centaurs are half-human, half-horse creatures, but in space, they’re celestial objects orbiting the Sun between Jupiter and Neptune.
Centaurs are “hybrid” objects in the sense that they share characteristics with trans-Neptunian objects from the Kuiper Belt reservoir and short-period comets.
A team of scientists used the James Web Telescope to study Centaur 29P.
While data from previous observations of Centaur 29P showed a carbon monoxide (CO) gas jet pointed toward Earth, Webb parsed the jet’s composition in greater detail, and also detected multiple never-before-seen features of the centaur: two jets of carbon dioxide (CO2) emanating in the north and south directions, and another jet of CO pointing toward the north.
Centaur 29P’s different CO and CO2 abundances suggest that the body may be composed of different pieces that coalesced together during its formation. However, other scenarios to explain Centaur 29P’s outgassing activity are still being considered.
📹 ESA – European Space Agency
📸 ESA/NASA
#ESA #Webb #Centaurs