New Planet thats Visible Like a star,Looks Like SATURN. One of the brightest stars in the night sky appears to harbor a Saturn-sized planet and possibly other elements similar to our own solar system, astronomers announced Thursday. The star, Fomalhaut, is the 17th brightest and easily found with the unaided eye. It is a relatively young star, still shrouded in the dust of its birth. Fomalhaut sits in the constellation of Piscis Austrinus (the Southern Fish). It can spotted in the southern sky using the map on the right side of this page. The name "Fomalhaut" (pronounced "Fo-mal-ought") derives from the Arabic name for this star, Fum al Hut meaning "The Fish's Mouth." Astronomers said the Fomalhaut system suddenly looks very familiar and might even contain an Earth-like planet. "We believe Fomalhaut looks quite similar to our own solar system when it was only 200 million years old," said Ben Zuckerman of the University of California at Los Angeles. "At that age, a planetary system would already have formed. We would have trouble seeing it with optical telescopes because of the shroud of dust." Our solar system is about 4.6 billion years old and most of its dust has been swept clean by the planets, asteroids and comets. By observing young solar systems, astronomers hope to learn more about how our own evolved. Zuckerman was part of an international team of researchers who spotted a distortion in the disk of cold dust surrounding Fomalhaut. They believe the distortion, sort of a wave, is caused by the gravitational influence of an unseen planet. "We were amazed to find that the disk is actually bent about the star," said team leader Wayne Holland of the UK Astronomy Technology Center (ATC) in Edinburgh. "This strongly suggests there is an orbiting giant planet shaping the dust we see." More than 100 planets have been detected around other stars, all by indirect means. The planets have yet to be photographed. In recent years, astronomers have developed techniques for examining the debris around young stars by studying the infrared radiation emitted by the dust. Our own Sun, like Fomalhaut, is believed to have formed from a huge cloud of gas and dust. Leftover material went into orbit around the star, and some of it sticks together and eventually grows to planet size. Researchers do not know if giant planets like Saturn and Jupiter form by gathering gas onto a rocky core of if perhaps they simply collapse out of the debris cloud suddenly. Either way, astronomers suspect but are not certain that other planetary systems developed in the same manner as our own, with rocky inner planets and gaseous outer worlds. The new finding adds weight to the idea. The disk of dust around Fomalhaut looks like a doughnut, seen slightly edge on from our vantage point. The discovery team speculates that the hole has been caused by the accumulation of dust into planets like Earth. "There is any empty hole in the middle of the dust ring," Holland told SPACE.com. "Terrestial planets could certainly survive there, but we have no direct evidence for this." Holland said the only way to detect such a planet would be if it passes in front of the star. Astronomers could then note a slight dip in star light, possibly with the Hubble Space Telescope. But because the system's plane of rotation is not exactly edge-on, it is less likely that any possible planets would transit the star as seen from Hubble's point of view. The finding represents evidence for one of the most distant objects ever detected around another star. Previous discoveries of Jupiter-like planets have been confined to orbits roughly equal to Jupiter's distance from the Sun. Saturn and the apparent newfound planet are both considerably farther out. Fomalhaut is about 25 light years away. It is more than twice as massive as the Sun and nearly twice the diameter. The dust disk is seen nearly edge-on from our terrestrial vantage point and is similar in size to the Kuiper Belt of frozen objects that surround our solar system beyond the orbit of Pluto. "We may be seeing a region near Fomalhaut that has many millions of comets," said Jane Greaves of the ATC. Last year, astronomers found signs of an asteroid belt around a different star. The new discovery was made using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii. Because the dust is so cold, it could not be observed with traditional infrared telescopes. Instead, a special cooled camera called SCUBA recorded light in submillimeter wavelengths. The Fomalhaut discovery will be detailed in the Astrophysical Journal. Meanwhile, the research team is already analyzing SCUBA images of other bright stars, including Vega, which show evidence of similar perturbations in their dust disks. Holland said there are four others already known to be worth looking at. Earlier this year, David Wilner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics led a team that spotted two clumps of dust and gas at different times around the Vega. They figure the clumps could be a large planet in the making. Other stars have shown similar evidence for planetary birth in recent studies. Plans are in the works to eventually examine more than 100 nearby stars using SCUBA-like instruments. Disclamer:Intended fro educational purpose only.not copied with permission of the author... bye! Zion
