Early Bird has a song, too:
I don’t understand why the Tesla is on there… it’s only a monument to Musk’s ego.
But he’s so precious, bless his little heart.
Yeah, not good news for Branson, and hard to see how he’ll catch up with his fellow billionaire rocket company owners now. He should have just invested that money in a fleet of luxury sightseeing zeppelins instead.
Maybe it was just desperate to stay relevant since that hole is now on the mend.
“Lemme know when it finds Emeralds” - Elon Musk, probably
A few more space telescope images I assembled…
NGC 3627 (aka M66), via JWST MIRI (mid-infrared) instrument:
(MAST link)
NGC 628 (aka M74, the Phantom Galaxy), via JWST MIRI:
(MAST link)
NGC 1365, the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy, via JWST NIRCAM (near-infrared) instrument:
I previously posted a MIRI image of this object here.
(MAST link)
At “~12 - 13” times the mass of Jupiter and an estimated age of 140 million years at minimum, HD 206893 c has some characteristics which blur the line between giant planet and brown dwarf, but the way it was confirmed was also notable. From the announcement by Sasha Hinkley’s team at the University of Exeter:
The researchers confirmed the distant planet using the Very Large Telescope’s GRAVITY instrument – which works by using optical interferometry to synchronize the VLT’s four main telescopes in order to perform as one much larger telescope.
This technique allows GRAVITY to measure the position of the planet in its orbit extremely precisely, as well as measure the spectrum of light being emitted from the planet’s atmosphere – further allowing astrophysicists to characterize its atmosphere.
The research team has used this technique to conclude that the newly-discovered planet clearly shows obvious ‘brightening’ - due to it undergoing nuclear fusion by burning Deuterium, or “heavy Hydrogen” in its core.
The discovery marks a breakthrough in the quest to discover new, distant worlds, as this is one of the first detections of a planet whose presence was partially inferred due to the astrometric motion of the host star as it moves across the sky.
…
The discovery provides concrete evidence that modern instruments are able to directly detect exoplanets on orbital scales that are similar to our own solar system.
As Gaia continues to gather data, astronomers will be able to “look for anomalies in motion across the sky,” said Hinkley. “It’s going to take a little while… quite a bit of work and analysis to understand which of these stars we actually can map out a full orbit and which just show a proper motion anomaly across the sky.” Many will be “close enough, bright enough, and young enough” for follow-up observations, he said.
(A word about HD206893c’s planetary status. It’s awfully massive for a planet, but it also appears smaller than a brown dwarf. A reminder that, however much humans like to classify objects using terms like “star” or “planet,” nature has a way of defying categorization. Hinkley noted that astronomers struggle over these terms, and HD206893c is an unusual object. For example, “it’s below the deuterium-burning limit, even though it is burning deuterium,” he said, underscoring the challenge of classification.)
“Using precise measurements from both the Gaia and Hipparcos space missions that have measured precise positions of stars for the last couple of decades, we could point our instruments at where we thought a planet should be next to the star and indeed directly see the planet, confirming it is real. I did the orbital analysis here to compute where to point our instruments so we can directly see the planet,” continued Jason.
…
“We discovered a planet that is temporarily undergoing nuclear fusion, a process that typically separates planets from brown dwarfs and stars. Some models for how planets evolve have predicted that a very massive planet can go through a temporary nuclear burning phase as the planet cools and contracts. This is the first time we’ve seen it. The planet really pushes the limit of when a planet transitions to a brown dwarf (which all burn Deuterium).
In addition, many brown dwarfs undergo no fusion; even those at the high end of the mass range (over 60 MJ) cool quickly enough that after 10 million years they no longer undergo fusion.
ETA
