Posted by Davin Flateau on 3 May 2005 at 8:10 am.
Filed under Astronomy.
The folks at the Space Telescope Science Institute (home of the Hubble) are hosting a conference this week celebrating a decade of extrasolar planet discoveries around normal stars. Normal stars? Are we inadvertently offending other stars by calling some “abnormal?” Do we really want to get something that big mad at us? Celestial name-calling aside, the conference title does remind us that the first planets discovered around other stars — shouldn’t have been there. Dun dun dunnnnn!
It wasn’t that long ago when earthlings looked out to distant suns, and had to imagine if there really were other planets there. We certainly tried to find extrasolar planets, but they’re incredibly small and dim compared to their stellar parents, so we knew we had our work cut out for us. We measured the exact position of stars to see if we could spot them wobbling due to unseen planets - no dice. No luck either with trying to block out stars’ blinding light to see if something popped out. Most astronomers thought there had to be other planets out there orbiting the countless stars. And then, in 1994, it happened - it was announced that an astronomer indirectly found planets around another star. The first discovery of planets anywhere since Pluto in 1930! But these planets were the last things astronomers expected.
Penn State’s Alexander Wolszczan stunned the world when he announced that he discovered three planets around a pulsar, specifically, pulsar PSR B1257+12, 1000 light-years away in the constellation Virgo. A pulsar is a rapidly spinning star that’s left over after certain types of stars go supernova and explode.
Yes, explode. How can there be planets happily orbiting along after their parent blew itself to smithereens long ago? They should’ve flown off into deep space after the bulk of their parent’s mass went kablooey. Wolszczan found the planets indirectly by measuring tiny variations in the radio pulses that pulsars give off (hence, the name pulsar). His idea was that the planets were making the pulsar wobble ever so slightly, changing the precise timing of the radio signals Wolszczan was seeing.
Astronomers were highly skeptical following the announcement. Many astronomers were certain that when more observations and calculations were made, the variations would turn out to be something else, or disappear altogether. Planets were supposed to be found around nice stable stars, whose long term stability nurtured the development of their planetary offspring over millions and billions of years. Planets around pulsars were about as preposterous as airborne swine.
Almost overnight, puzzled astronomers started floating new theories. Maybe the planets were there beforehand, and somehow survived the supernova. Maybe they were originally really far away from the star, survived the explosion, and later spiraled inward to their current positions. And perhaps the explosion created another protoplanetary disk, forming planets from the exploded debris in a cosmic recycling operation.
Wolszczan’s announcement would turn the field of planet formation on its ear. It wasn’t long before other possible explanations for the timing changes were eliminated, and the bizarre pulsar planets were confirmed. Astronomers shook their heads in disbelief - they didn’t know how these impossible planets got there, but there they were staring back at them in the data. Skepticism turned into excitement and wonderment as the realization set in.
A few years later, other teams of astronomers started the wave of discovering planets around “normal” stars. The count is up to 155 of these so far, with more being discovered every year. In fact, it was announced that they just confirmed the first picture of an extrasolar planet (right image).
But only one other pulsar has a confirmed planet, and that was discovered just last year. So while the “normal” planets get all the headlines and symposiums, let’s give some love to the “abnormal” freakish planets that began the new wave of discovery.
Davin Flateau
kaylight on 7 Jun 2007 at 2:23 am: 1
hello stars are coool
kaylight on 7 Jun 2007 at 2:23 am: 2
hello stars are coool
kaylight on 7 Jun 2007 at 2:23 am: 3
hello stars are coool
kaylight on 7 Jun 2007 at 2:23 am: 4
hello stars are coool