June 15, 2016

New planet is largest discovered

that orbits two suns
If you cast your eyes toward the constellation Cygnus, youll be looking in the direction
of the largest planet yet discovered around a double-star system. Its too faint to see
with the naked eye, but a team led by astronomers from NASAs Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and San Diego State University (SDSU) in California,
used NASA's Kepler Space Telescope to identify the new planet, Kepler-1647b.
The discovery was announced today in San Diego at a meeting of the American
Astronomical Society. The research has been accepted for publication in the
Astrophysical Journal with Veselin Kostov, a NASA Goddard postdoctoral fellow, as lead
author.
Kepler-1647 is 3,700 light-years away and approximately 4.4 billion years old, roughly
the same age as Earth. The stars are similar to the sun, with one slightly larger than our
home star and the other slightly smaller. The planet has a mass and radius nearly
identical to that of Jupiter, making it the largest transiting circumbinary planet ever
found.
Planets that orbit two stars are known as circumbinary planets, or sometimes Tatooine
planets, after Luke Skywalkers home world in Star Wars. Using Kepler data,
astronomers search for slight dips in brightness that hint a planet might be passing or
transiting in front of a star, blocking a tiny amount of the stars light.
But finding circumbinary planets is much harder than finding planets around single
stars, said SDSU astronomer William Welsh, one of the papers coauthors. The
transits are not regularly spaced in time and they can vary in duration and even depth.
Its a bit curious that this biggest planet took so long to confirm, since it is easier to find
big planets than small ones, said SDSU astronomer Jerome Orosz, a coauthor on the
study. But it is because its orbital period is so long.
The planet takes 1,107 days just over three years to orbit its host stars, the longest
period of any confirmed transiting exoplanet found so far. The planet is also much
further away from its stars than any other circumbinary planet, breaking with the

tendency for circumbinary planets to have close-in orbits. Interestingly, its orbit puts the
planet with in the so-called habitable zonethe range of distances from a star where
liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet
Like Jupiter, however, Kepler-1647b is a gas giant, making the planet unlikely to host
life. Yet if the planet has large moons, they could potentially be suitable for life.
Habitability aside, Kepler-1647b is important because it is the tip of the iceberg of a
theoretically predicted population of large, long-period circumbinary planets, said
Welsh.
Once a candidate planet is found, researchers employ advanced computer programs to
determine if it really is a planet. It can be a grueling process.
Laurance Doyle, a coauthor on the paper and astronomer at the SETI Institute, noticed
a transit back in 2011. But more data and several years of analysis were needed to
confirm the transit was indeed caused by a circumbinary planet. A network of amateur
astronomers in the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope "Follow-Up Network provided
additional observations that helped the researchers estimate the planets mass.
June 27, 2016

First detection of methyl alcohol

in a planet-forming disc
The organic molecule methyl alcohol (methanol) has been found by the Atacama Large
Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the TW Hydrae protoplanetary disc. This is the
first such detection of the compound in a young planet-forming disc. Methanol is the
only complex organic molecule as yet detected in discs that unambiguously derives
from an icy form. Its detection helps astronomers understand the chemical processes
that occur during the formation of planetary systems and that ultimately lead to the
creation of the ingredients for life.
The protoplanetary disc around the young star TW Hydrae is the closest known
example to Earth, at a distance of only about 170 light-years. As such it is an ideal
target for astronomers to study discs. This system closely resembles what astronomers
think the solar system looked like during its formation more than four billion years ago.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) is the most powerful

observatory in existence for mapping the chemical composition and the distribution of
cold gas in nearby discs. These unique capabilities have now been exploited by a group
of astronomers led by Catherine Walsh (Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands) to
investigate the chemistry of the TW Hydrae protoplanetary disc.
The ALMA observations have revealed the fingerprint of gaseous methyl alcohol, or
methanol (CH3OH), in a protoplanetary disc for the first time. Methanol, a derivative of
methane, is one of the largest complex organic molecules detected in discs to date.
Identifying its presence in pre-planetary objects represents a milestone for
understanding how organic molecules are incorporated into nascent planets.
Furthermore, methanol is itself a building block for more complex species of
fundamental prebiotic importance, like amino acid compounds. As a result, methanol
plays a vital role in the creation of the rich organic chemistry needed for life.
Catherine Walsh, lead author of the study, explained, Finding methanol in a
protoplanetary disc shows the unique capability of ALMA to probe the complex organic
ice reservoir in discs and so, for the first time, allows us to look back in time to the origin
of chemical complexity in a planet nursery around a young Sun-like star.
Gaseous methanol in a protoplanetary disc has a unique importance in astrochemistry.
While other species detected in space are formed by gas-phase chemistry alone, or by
a combination of both gas and solid-phase generation, methanol is a complex organic
compound which is formed solely in the ice phase via surface reactions on dust grains.
The sharp vision of ALMA has also allowed astronomers to map the gaseous methanol
across the TW Hydrae disc. They discovered a ring-like pattern in addition to significant
emission from close to the central star.
The observation of methanol in the gas phase, combined with information about its
distribution, implies that methanol formed on the discs icy grains, and was
subsequently released in gaseous form. This first observation helps to clarify the puzzle
of the methanol icegas transition, and more generally the chemical processes in
astrophysical environments.
Ryan A. Loomis, a co-author of the study, adds, Methanol in gaseous form in the disc
is an unambiguous indicator of rich organic chemical processes at an early stage of star
and planet formation. This result has an impact on our understanding of how organic
matter accumulates in very young planetary systems.

This successful first detection of cold gas-phase methanol in a protoplanetary disc

means that the production of ice chemistry can now be explored in discs, paving the
way to future studies of complex organic chemistry in planetary birthplaces. In the hunt
for life-sustaining exoplanets, astronomers now have access to a powerful new tool.
July 7, 2016

A surprising planet with three

suns
Luke Skywalker's home planet, Tatooine, in the Star Wars saga, was a strange world
with two suns in the sky, but astronomers have now found a planet in an even more
exotic system, where an observer would either experience constant daylight or enjoy
triple sunrises and sunsets each day, depending on the seasons, which last longer than
human lifetimes.
This world has been discovered by a team of astronomers led by the University of
Arizona, USA, using direct imaging at ESOs Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. The
planet, HD 131399Ab, is unlike any other known world its orbit around the brightest
of the three stars is by far the widest known within a multi-star system. Such orbits are
often unstable, because of the complex and changing gravitational attraction from the
other two stars in the system, and planets in stable orbits were thought to be very
unlikely.
Located about 320 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Centaurus (The
Centaur), HD 131399Ab is about 16 million years old, making it also one of the
youngest exoplanets discovered to date, and one of very few directly imaged planets.
With a temperature of around 580 degrees Celsius and an estimated mass of four
Jupiter masses, it is also one of the coldest and least massive directly-imaged
exoplanets.
"HD 131399Ab is one of the few exoplanets that have been directly imaged, and it's the
first one in such an interesting dynamical configuration," said Daniel Apai, from the
University of Arizona, USA, and one of the co-authors of the new paper.
"For about half of the planets orbit, which lasts 550 Earth-years, three stars are visible
in the sky; the fainter two are always much closer together, and change in apparent

separation from the brightest star throughout the year," adds Kevin Wagner, the paper's
first author and discoverer of HD 131399Ab.
Kevin Wagner, who is a PhD student at the University of Arizona, identified the planet
among hundreds of candidate planets and led the follow-up observations to verify its
nature.
The planet also marks the first discovery of an exoplanet made with
the SPHERE instrument on the VLT. SPHERE is sensitive to infrared light, allowing it to
detect the heat signatures of young planets, along with sophisticated features correcting
for atmospheric disturbances and blocking out the otherwise blinding light of their host
stars.
Although repeated and long-term observations will be needed to precisely determine
the planet's trajectory among its host stars, observations and simulations seem to
suggest the following scenario: the brightest star is estimated to be eighty percent more
massive than the Sun and dubbed HD 131399A, which itself is orbited by the less
massive stars, B and C, at about 300 au (one au, or astronomical unit, equals the
average distance between the Earth and the Sun). All the while, B and C twirl around
each other like a spinning dumbbell, separated by a distance roughly equal to that
between the Sun and Saturn (10 au).
In this scenario, planet HD 131399Ab travels around the star A in an orbit with a radius
of about 80 au, about twice as large as Plutos in the Solar System, and brings the
planet to about one third of the separation between star A and the B/C star pair. The
authors point out that a range of orbital scenarios is possible, and the verdict on the
long-term stability of the system will have to wait for planned follow-up observations that
will better constrain the planets orbit.
"If the planet was further away from the most massive star in the system, it would be
kicked out of the system," Apai explained. "Our computer simulations have shown that
this type of orbit can be stable, but if you change things around just a little bit, it can
become unstable very quickly."
Planets in multi-star systems are of special interest to astronomers and planetary
scientists because they provide an example of how the mechanism of planetary
formation functions in these more extreme scenarios. While multi-star systems seem
exotic to us in our orbit around our solitary star, multi-star systems are in fact just as
common as single stars.

"It is not clear how this planet ended up on its wide orbit in this extreme system, and we
can't say yet what this means for our broader understanding of the types of planetary
systems, but it shows that there is more variety out there than many would have
deemed possible," concludes Kevin Wagner. "What we do know is that planets in multistar systems have been studied far less often, but are potentially just as numerous as
planets in single-star systems."
June 20, 2016

NASA's K2 finds newborn

exoplanet around young star
Astronomers have discovered the youngest fully formed exoplanet ever detected. The
discovery was made using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope and its extended K2
mission, as well as the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Exoplanets are
planets that orbit stars beyond our sun.
The newfound planet, K2-33b, is a bit larger than Neptune and whips tightly around its
star every five days. It is only 5 to 10 million years old, making it one of a very few
newborn planets found to date.
"Our Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old," said Trevor David of Caltech in Pasadena,
lead author of a new study published online June 20, 2016, in the journal Nature. "By
comparison, the planet K2-33b is very young. You might think of it as an infant." David
is a graduate student working with astronomer Lynne Hillenbrand, also of Caltech.
Planet formation is a complex and tumultuous process that remains shrouded in
mystery. Astronomers have discovered and confirmed roughly 3,000 exoplanets so far;
however, nearly all of them are hosted by middle-aged stars, with ages of a billion years
or more. For astronomers, attempting to understand the life cycles of planetary systems
using existing examples is like trying to learn how people grow from babies to children
to teenagers, by only studying adults.
"The newborn planet will help us better understand how planets form, which is
important for understanding the processes that led to the formation of Earth," said coauthor Erik Petigura of Caltech.

The first signals of the planet's existence were measured by K2. The telescope's
camera detected a periodic dimming of the light emitted by the planet's host star, a sign
that an orbiting planet could be regularly passing in front of the star and blocking the
light. Data from the Keck Observatory validated that the dimming was indeed caused by
a planet, and also helped confirm its youthful age.
Infrared measurements from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope showed that the
system's star is surrounded by a thin disk of planetary debris, indicating that its planetformation phase is wrapping up. Planets form out of thick disks of gas and dust, called
protoplanetary disks, that surround young stars.
"Initially, this material may obscure any forming planets, but after a few million years,
the dust starts to dissipate," said co-author Anne Marie Cody, a NASA Postdoctoral
Program fellow at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "It is
during this time window that we can begin to detect the signatures of youthful planets
with K2."
A surprising feature in the discovery of K2-33b is how close the newborn planet lies to
its star. The planet is nearly 10 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun,
making it hot. While numerous older exoplanets have been found orbiting very tightly to
their stars, astronomers have long struggled to understand how more massive planets
like this one wind up in such small orbits. Some theories propose that it takes hundreds
of millions of years to bring a planet from a more distant orbit into a close one -- and
therefore cannot explain K2-33b, which is quite a bit younger.
The science team says there are two main theories that may explain how K2-33b
wound up so close to its star. It could have migrated there in a process called disk
migration that takes hundreds of thousands of years. Or, the planet could have formed
"in situ" -- right where it is. The discovery of K2-33b therefore gives theorists a new data
point to ponder.
"After the first discoveries of massive exoplanets on close orbits about 20 years ago, it
was immediately suggested that they could absolutely not have formed there, but in the
past several years, some momentum has grown for in situ formation theories, so the
idea is not as wild as it once seemed," said David.
"The question we are answering is: Did those planets take a long time to get into those
hot orbits, or could they have been there from a very early stage? We are saying, at
least in this one case, that they can indeed be there at a very early stage," he said.

Ames manages the Kepler and K2 missions for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission
development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system
with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University
of Colorado at Boulder.