Universal Neighbours
I read such an interesting article on the always fascinating Scientific American’s web site today. Scientists have found another solar system about 5000 light years away. This is where planets revolve around a sun. Scientists are starting to think that solar systems may not be rare as conventional wisdom had believed. I was immediately struck. 5000 years. My mind paused for a second as my earth bound brain thought of the potentially endless grasp of space stretching out to a scale beyond human dimensions.
5000 light years is such a mind boggling distance. For example, the closest star to Earth (besides our sun) is something like 24,000,000,000,000 miles (38,000,000,000,000 kilometers) away. That’s the closest star.
Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second). Therefore, a light second is 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers). A light year is the distance that light can travel in a year, or:
186,000 miles/second * 60 seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year = 5,865,696,000,000 miles/year
A light year is 5,865,696,000,000 miles (9,460,800,000,000 kilometers).
So the nearest star is 24 TRILLION miles away! 38 TRILLION kilometers away! This closest star is called Proxima Centauri and is 4.2 light years away. Now consider 5000 light years away for this new solar system. Amazing isn’t it:
Scaled-Down Solar System Found 5,000 Light-Years Away
Smaller versions of Jupiter and Saturn may be the first of many
By JR Minkel - Scientific American
Astronomers have discovered a pair of planets around a star 5,000 light-years away that resemble smaller versions of Jupiter and Saturn, hinting that solar systems like ours may be unexpectedly common. As in our own solar system, the closer of the two planets to their star is the larger one, 70 percent as massive as Jupiter; the more distant planet has 90 percent the mass of Saturn.
The star itself, dubbed OGLE-2006-BLG-109L, is dimmer than our sun and is only half its size. But the ratios between the two planets’ masses and that of their star as well as their relative orbital distances are very similar to those of Jupiter and Saturn. “Basically what we found is a scaled-down analog of our solar system,” says Scott Gaudi, an assistant professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University and lead author of the study published this week in Science.
Gaudi and his colleagues discovered the planets over a two-week period in early spring 2006, when their stellar parent crossed in front of a more distant star. Due to an effect called gravitational microlensing, the gravity of the nearer star magnified the light 500-fold from the more distant one. The motions of the planets caused periodic spikes in the brightness of the magnified light, which allowed the team to calculate the size of the planets and their distances from the star. The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile first detected the event.
Researchers know of other multi-planet systems, but the planets are all huddled close to their stars. Microlensing events reveal planets that are more distant from their stars.
Previous to this discovery, microlensing had turned up four planets, two of them Jupiter-size. But this crossing was the first one that happened to have the right conditions to reveal the presence of smaller planets. “The first time we could find a Jupiter-Saturn analogue, we did,” Gaudis says. “And that provides us a hint … that these kind of solar system analogues might be quite common.”
External Links:
(26 nearest stars)
We have a long way to do to travel 5000 light years. (source article)
The history of space travel in 2 minutes:
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