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ScienceDaily (July 30, 2010) — Astronomers have imaged a very young brown dwarf, or failed star, in a tight orbit around a young nearby sun-like star.

An international team led by University of Hawaii astronomers Beth Biller and Michael Liu with help from University of Arizona astronomer Laird Close and UA graduate students Eric Nielsen, Jared Males and Andy Skemer made the rare find using the Near-Infrared Coronagraphic Imager, or NICI, on the international 8-meter Gemini-South Telescope in Chile.

What makes this discovery special is the proximity between the 36 Jupiter-mass brown dwarf companion, dubbed PZ Tel B, and its primary star, named PZ Tel A. They are separated by only 18 Astronomical Units, or AUs, similar to the distance between Uranus and the sun.

Most young brown dwarf and planetary companions found by direct imaging are at orbital separations greater than 50 AUs -- larger than the orbit of Pluto, at 40 AUs.

In addition to its small separation, in just the past year the researchers observed PZ Tel B moving quickly outward from its parent star.

An older image, taken seven years ago and reanalyzed by Laird Close, a professor at UA's Steward Observatory and the department of astronomy, showed PZ Tel B was obscured by the glare from its parent star as recently as 2003, indicating its orbit is more elliptical than circular.

"Because PZ Tel A is a rare star being both close and very young, it had been imaged several times in the past," said Close. "So we were quite surprised to see a new companion around what was thought to be a single star."

Lead author and UA graduate Beth Biller said, "PZ Tel B travels on a particularly eccentric orbit -- in the last 10 years, we have literally watched it careen through its inner solar system. This can best be explained by a highly eccentric, or oval-shaped, orbit."

The host star, PZ Tel A, is a younger version of the sun, having a similar mass but a very young age of only 12 million years (about 400 times younger than the sun). In fact, the PZ Tel system is young enough to still possess significant amounts of cold circumstellar dust, which may have been sculpted by the gravitational interaction with the young brown dwarf companion.

This makes the PZ Tel system an important laboratory for studying the early stages of solar system formation. With an estimated mass of 36 times that of Jupiter, PZ Tel B's orbital motion has significant implications for what type of planets can form (and whether planets can form at all) in the PZ Tel system.

Because PZ Tel B is so close to its parent star, special techniques are necessary to distinguish the faint light of the companion from the light of the primary star. PZ Tel B is separated by 0.33 arcseconds from PZ Tel A, equivalent to a dime seen at a distance of 7 miles (11 km).

In order to take pictures so close to the star, the team used an adaptive optics system coupled to a coronagraph in order to block out excess starlight, and then applied specialized analysis techniques to the images to detect PZ Tel B and measure its orbital motion.

PZ Tel B was discovered using the Near-Infrared Coronagraphic Imager, or NICI, the most powerful high-contrast instrument designed for imaging brown dwarfs and extrasolar planets around other stars. NICI can detect companions 1 million times fainter than the host star at just 1 arcsecond separations.

An international team of researchers drawn from across the Gemini Telescope community is currently carrying out a 300-star survey with NICI, the largest high-contrast imaging survey conducted to date.

NICI campaign leader Michael Liu said: "We are just beginning to glean the many configurations of solar systems around stars like the sun. The unique capabilities of NICI provide us with a powerful tool for studying their constituents using direct imaging."

The discovery of PZ Tel B is described in a paper being published by Astrophysical Journal Letters.

This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and NASA. NICI is a facility instrument at the Gemini Observatory.

This graphic shows the sun-like star, PZ Tel A and its brown dwarf companion, PZ Tel B. The vast majority of light from PZ Tel A has been removed from this image using specialized image analysis techniques. For size comparison, the size of Neptune's orbit is shown; PZ Tel B is one of few brown dwarfs imaged at a distance closer than 30 Astronomical Units from its parent star. It travels around its star at a closer distance than Uranus revolves around our sun. (Credit: Image provided by Beth Biller and the Gemini NICI Planet-Finding Campaign)

The ring a billion years after the collision between the two galaxies, as simulated at CEA. © CEA - Léo Michel-Dansac (CNRS CNRS/INSU Université Lyon 1)

An international team unveiled the origin of the giant gas ring in the Leo group of galaxies. With the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, the scientists were able to detect an optical signature of the ring corresponding to star forming regions. This observation rules out the primordial nature of the gas, which is of galactic origin. Thanks to numerical simulations made at CEA, a scenario for the formation of this ring has been proposed: a violent collision between two galaxies, slightly more than one billion years ago. The results will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

In the current theories on galaxy formation, the accretion of cold primordial gas is a key-process in the early steps of galaxy growth. This primordial gas is characterized by two main features: it has never sojourned in any galaxy and it does not satisfy the conditions required to form stars. Is such an accretion process still ongoing in nearby galaxies? To answer the question, large sky surveys are undertaken attempting to detect the primordial gas.

The Leo ring, a giant ring of cold gas 650,000 light-years wide surrounding the galaxies of the Leo group, is one of the most dramatic and mysterious clouds of intergalactic gas. Since its discovery in the 80s, its origin and its nature were debated. Last year, studies of the metal abundances in the gas led to the belief that the ring was made of this famous primordial gas.

Thanks to the sensitivity of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope MegaCam camera, the international team observed for the first time the optical counterpart of the densest regions of the ring, in visible light instead of radio waves. Emitted by massive young stars, this light points to the fact that the ring gas is able to form stars.

A ring of gas and stars surrounding a galaxy immediately suggests another kind of ring: a so-called collisional ring, formed when two galaxies collide. Such a ring is seen in the famous Cartwheel galaxy. Would the Leo ring be a collisional ring too?

In order to secure this hypothesis, the team used numerical simulations (performed on supercomputers at CEA) to demonstrate that the ring was indeed the result of a giant collision between two galaxies more than 38 million light-years apart: at the time of the collision, the disk of gas of one of the galaxies is blown away and will eventually form a ring outside of the galaxy. The simulations allowed the identification of the two galaxies which collided: NGC 3384, one of the galaxies at the center of the Leo group, and M96, a massive spiral galaxy at the periphery of the group. They also gave the date of the collision: more than a billion years ago!

The gas in the Leo ring is definitely not primordial. The hunt for primordial gas is still open!

As if the debate over what is and what is not a planet hasn't gotten confusing enough, Hubble Space Telescope astronomers have now confirmed the existence of a tortured, baked object that could be called a "cometary planet."

The gas giant planet, dubbed HD 209458b, is orbiting so close to its star that its heated atmosphere is escaping away into space. Now, observations by the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) aboard NASA's Hubble suggest that powerful stellar winds are sweeping the castoff material behind the scorched planet and shaping it into a comet-like tail.

"Since 2003 scientists have theorized that the lost mass is being pushed back into a tail and have even calculated what the tail looks like," says astronomer Jeffrey Linsky of the University of Colorado in Boulder, leader of the COS study. "We think we have the best observational evidence to support that theory. We have measured gas coming off the planet at specific speeds, some coming toward Earth. The most likely interpretation is that we have measured the velocity of material in a tail."

HD 209458b weighs slightly less than Jupiter, but it orbits 100 times closer to its star than Jupiter does. The roasted planet zips around in a mere 3.5 days. (In contrast, our solar system's speedster, Mercury, orbits the Sun in a leisurely 88 days.) The planet is one of the most intensely scrutinized extrasolar planets because it is one of the few known alien worlds that can be seen passing in front of, or transiting, its star. The transit causes the starlight to dim slightly. In fact, the gas giant is the first alien world discovered to transit its parent star. It orbits the star HD 209458, located 153 light-years from Earth.

Linsky and his team used COS to analyze the planet's atmosphere during transiting events. During a transit, astronomers can study the structure and chemical makeup of a planet's atmosphere by sampling the starlight that passes through it. The dip in starlight due to the planet's passage, excluding the planet's atmosphere, is very small, only 1.5 percent. When the atmosphere is added, the dip jumps to 8 percent, indicating a bloated atmosphere.

COS detected the heavy elements carbon and silicon in the planet's super-hot (2,000-degree-Fahrenheit) atmosphere. This detection reveals that the parent star is heating the entire atmosphere, dredging up the heavier elements and allowing them to escape the planet.

The COS data also showed that the material leaving the planet was not all traveling at the same velocity. "We found gas escaping at high velocities, with a large amount of this gas flowing toward us at 22,000 miles per hour," Linsky explains. "This large gas flow is likely gas swept up by the stellar wind to form the comet-like tail trailing the planet."

Hubble's newest spectrograph, with its ability to probe a planet's chemistry at ultraviolet wavelengths that are not accessible to ground-based telescopes, is proving to be an important instrument for probing the atmospheres of "hot Jupiters" like HD 209458b. Astronomers have also used COS to sample the atmosphere of another baked planet, WASP-12b, whose puffy atmosphere is spilling onto its star.

Another Hubble instrument, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), observed HD 209458b in 2003. The STIS data showed an active, evaporating atmosphere, and a comet-tail-like structure was suggested as a possibility. But STIS wasn't able to obtain the spectroscopic detail necessary to show an earthward-moving component of the gas during transits. Because of COS's unique combination of very high ultraviolet sensitivity and good spectral resolution, the earthward moving component of the gas — the tail — could be directly detected for the first time.

Although this "extreme" planet is getting roasted by its star, it won't be destroyed anytime soon. "It will take about a trillion years for the planet to evaporate," Linsky says.

See also: History of general relativity

In 1912, Einstein returned to Switzerland to accept a professorship at his alma mater, the ETH. Once back in Zurich, he immediately visited his old ETH classmate Marcel Grossmann, now a professor of mathematics, who introduced him to Riemannian geometry and, more generally, to differential geometry. On the recommendation of Italian mathematician Tullio Levi-Civita, Einstein began exploring the usefulness of general covariance (essentially the use of tensors) for his gravitational theory. For a while Einstein thought that there were problems with the approach, but he later returned to it and, by late 1915, had published his general theory of relativity in the form in which it is used today.[68] This theory explains gravitation as distortion of the structure of spacetime by matter, affecting the inertial motion of other matter. During World War I, the work of Central Powers scientists was available only to Central Powers academics, for national security reasons. Some of Einstein’s work did reach the United Kingdom and the United States through the efforts of the Austrian Paul Ehrenfest and physicists in the Netherlands, especially 1902 Nobel Prize-winner Hendrik Lorentz and Willem de Sitter of Leiden University. After the war ended, Einstein maintained his relationship with Leiden University, accepting a contract as an Extraordinary Professor; for ten years, from 1920 to 1930, he travelled to Holland regularly to lecture.[69]

In 1917, several astronomers accepted Einstein ’s 1911 challenge from Prague. The Mount Wilson Observatory in California, U.S., published a solar spectroscopic analysis that showed no gravitational redshift.[70] In 1918, the Lick Observatory, also in California, announced that it too had disproved Einstein’s prediction, although its findings were not published.[71]
Black circle covering the sun, rays visible around it, in a dark sky.
Eddington’s photograph of a solar eclipse, which confirmed Einstein’s theory that light “bends.”

However, in May 1919, a team led by the British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington claimed to have confirmed Einstein’s prediction of gravitational deflection of starlight by the Sun while photographing a solar eclipse with dual expeditions in Sobral, northern Brazil, and Príncipe, a west African island.[67] Nobel laureate Max Born praised general relativity as the "greatest feat of human thinking about nature";[72] fellow laureate Paul Dirac was quoted saying it was "probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made".[73] The international media guaranteed Einstein’s global renown.

There have been claims that scrutiny of the specific photographs taken on the Eddington expedition showed the experimental uncertainty to be comparable to the same magnitude as the effect Eddington claimed to have demonstrated, and that a 1962 British expedition concluded that the method was inherently unreliable.[34] The deflection of light during a solar eclipse was confirmed by later, more accurate observations.[74] Some resented the newcomer’s fame, notably among some German physicists, who later started the Deutsche Physik (German Physics) movement.[75][76]