Exploring the Outer Edges: Unveiling the Ninth Planet or Unraveling Gravity's Secrets? | S26E126

This is Spacetime Series twenty six, Episode one hundred and twenty seven, for broadcast on the twentieth of October twenty twenty three. Coming up on space Time, the plot thickens and the Hunt Planet nine. You clues on planetary formation and fresh insights into the atmosphere and star of an exoplanet. All that and more coming up on space Time Welcome to space Time with Stuart Gary. A pair of theoretical physicists are reporting that the same observations inspiring the hunt for a ninth planet the outer edge of our Solar System might instead be evidence of a modified law of gravity originally developed to understand the rotation of galaxies. Reporting in the Astronomical Journal Researches, harsh Matter from Case Western Reserve University and Catherine Brown from Hamilton College made the assertion after studying the effect the Milky Way galaxy would have on objects in the outer Solar System. That's if the laws of gravity were governed by a theory known as modified new turn in dynamics or MOOND. MOOND proposes that to isaa, Newton's famous laws of gravity are valid only up to a point. That is, when the gravitational acceleration predicted by Newton's law becomes small enough, Moond allows for a different gravitational behavior to take over. The observational success of Mind on galactic scales is why more and more scientists are considering it an alternative to dark matter, the term physicists used to describe that mysterious hypothesized form of matter which is invisible but has gravitational effects on surrounding regular matter. It's thought to be what stops its galaxies flinging apart as they rotate, and provides an added degree of magnification during gravitational lensing events. Martha says Mon's really good at explaining gravitational observations, but it wasn't expected to have any noticeable effects on the Outer Solar System. Martha and Brown have studied Mon's effects on galactic dynamics before, but they became interested in Mon's more local effects after astronomers announced in twenty sixteen that a handful of objects in the Outer Solar System showed orbital anomalies that could be explained by a ninth planet. The hunt for that missing ninth planet's been going on ever since, but did not avail, at least not yet. Meanwhile, Brown realized that Mon's predictions might be at odds with the observations that had motivated the search for planet nine. She says they wanted to see whether or not the data that supported the planet nine hypothesis would effectively rule out Mond. Instead, they found that Mond predicted precisely the clustering that astronomers had observed. Mather and Brown argue that over millions of years, the orbits of some of the objects in the out of Solar System would be dragged into alignment with the galaxy's own gravitational field. Mathis says that when they plotted the orbits of the objects from the planet nine data set against the galaxy's own gravitational field, the alignment was striking. However, the author's caution the current data set is small, and that any number of other possibilities might prove to be correct. For example, it's been argued that the orbital peculiarities are all the result of observational bias. Brown says, regardless of the outcome, the new work highlights the potential of the out of Solar System. The servers the laboratory for testing gravity and studying some fundamental problems in physics this space time still to come. Astronomers have discovered the youngest hot Jupiter ever seen, and new insights into the atmosphere and star of an exoplanet. All that and more still to come on space time. Okay, let's take a short break from our show for a word from our sponsor, NordVPN, and today we're bringing you something that's going to elevate your Internet experience to the next level. 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And there's more to this celestial offer with NORDVP and you're not just getting a VPN, you're also enjoying the freedom of access to content from across the cosmos and without any geolocation restrictions. Of course, nordvpn's protection covers you across all your devices and they have a thirty day money back guarantee, so you've got absolutely nothing to lose. Are you ready for liftoff? Visit NordVPN dot com slash Stewart Garry or use the code Stewart Gary at the check So don't just explore, explore safely and freely with NordVPN. And remember this special offer is only for our spacetime listeners, So once again, visit NordVPN dot com, slash Stewart Gary or use the code Stewart Garry at the checkout for our special offer. And of course we'll include the ural details in the show notes and on our website. And now it's back to the show. This is Spacetime with Stuart Gary. Astronomers have discovered the youngest hot jupiter ever seen. Hot jupiters are giant gas exo planets in tight orbits around their stars. They're thought to have been originally formed further out in their star systems, but then migrated inwards to their current orbital positions. However, a study of a hot jupiter known as ci Toower B is raising more questions than answers about its origin. A reporting the Estrophysical Journal Letters suggest that CI Tower be as a close nine earth day orbit around its host star Ci Toower, which is located some four hundred and fifty light years from Earth in the constellation Taurus the Bull. The trouble is the star is only around two million years old, and that's far too young to have such a mature planet orbiting so closely for decades. Most astronomers believe that giant planets like the gas giants Jupiter and Satin in our Solar System would have formed further out from the host stars over periods of around ten million years or so, but the discovery of dozens of hot jupiters out there have led to new theoretical models that might describe how such planets could form. Now a four year nearing for its spectroscopic analysis of the ci tower system has provided some surprises. Astronomers have been studying ci towbe's brightness, mass, and atmospheric carbon monoxide levels to answer questions about how our planets so large could around a star so young. One of the studies authors at least a proto from the Lower Observatory is importantly, they were able to undertake spectroscopic observations of the planet itself, the first time this has been done for such a close sin planet around such a young star. The most valuable way to learn how planets form is the study planets like COITOWB that are either still forming or of only just completed forming. Ci Toowerb's age made it a perfect candidate for observation with the Emerson Grating Infrared Spectrograph. It's a unique high resolution instrument that was used during observations of CIOWERB from both the Mcdonnal observatories two point seven meter telescope and the Lower Observatory's four point three meter telescope. Because each atomic element and molecule of a star emits light at a specific set of wavelengths, Astronomers can look for specific signatures or spectral lines to see if an element is present in a distant star or planet. Spectral lions can also reveal the temperature and density of a star and how fast it's moving. Preto says the research team used the spectral lines from carbon monoxide to distinguish the light emitted by the planet from the light being emitted by the nearby star, but many the spectral lines that are featured in the planet are also featured in the star. If both the planet and the star were stationary, then the spectral lions would blend together, making them hard to distinguish from one another, meaning scientists wouldn't be able to tell what came from the star and what came from the planet. But because the planet's orbiting the star rapidly, its lines are shifting back and forth dramatically, allowing astronomers to subtract out the stars lines and see only the lions coming from the planet, and from those they could determine how bright the planet is relative to the star, which tells them something about how it formed. That's because the brightness of a star or planet depends both upon its size and its temperature. Direct observation evidence of the mass and brightness of Ci Tower b's especially useful because we also know it orbits a very young star. Most of the hot jupiter's found so far we're found orbiting middle aided stars, but Ciow's age provides a tight constraint for testing models by providing a unique empirical yardstick by which to measure competing theories. Can they produce a planet this spright and massive in so little time? The author's analysis of the spectral lines from carbon monoxide shows that Ci Tower B has a mass of around eleven point six jupiters and is around one hundred and thirty four times fainter than its parent star. At about two million years old, Ci Tow B is by far the youngest hot jupiter directly detected. Preto says that provides strong evidence that it formed through a hot start process, a theoretical model that describes how gravitational instabilities could form giant planets more rapidly than traditional accretion models. There's no way you could you could possibly make up the things that we see with telescopes. They're they're they're incredible. It's it's better than any kind of fiction. Our sun is sort of unusual and that it's all by itself. Most stars. If you go out at night, clear night, you look at the sky, you see all those little points of light. About half of those points you see are actually systems of more than one star, two, three, four, or five stars, all gravitationally bound. My name is Lisa Prato. I'm an astronomer at Low Observatory, and I work on very young binary stars and planet formation and very young stellar systems. Doctor Lisa Prato's research is aimed at solving a big question, how do planets form? The answer lies somewhere inside a star system. Doctor Proto doesn't look for any old stars. She looks for only the youngest ones. These are things that are compared to a human, would be minutes old, and for stars, they're a million years old or two million years old. So there are these new born stars, These young, wild, misbehaving stars are very unstable, very variable. So it's excruciatingly difficult to look for planets in these systems. But very young stars are the only chance for doctor Proto to catch a glimpse of a disc of dust and gas that's left over from the stars. Berth inside this disc is where planets form. The search for young stars with planets becomes especially interesting with binaries. You have two stars and both of them are they're born together, They're exposed to the same conditions, the same environment, and the two stars have the same temperature and the same mass. Why in some cases there's only one star still have a disc and the other star doesn't. Does that mean the other star has already formed planets? Or does that mean the other star didn't form with a disc? Or these great questions. And when you have two or more stars together, you actually have a sort of a built in control. Who knows what answers? Doctor Pratu might find Now that IGRINS, the most powerful infrared spectrograph in the world, has come to DCT through collaboration with the University of Texas and KASSI in Korea, Doctor Prato realizes that all future breakthroughs rely on collaboration, most importantly by passing the scientific method on to the next generation of astronomers. I think the most important thing that I do is actually mentoring students and interns and post docs. That's really cuy key to passing along knowledge. And ideas, not just the science itself, but also how to do the sciences, the ethics and the things that should drive the work in astronomy, which are curiosity and determination and dedication and honesty. That's Lisa Preta from the Low Observatory and this is space time still to come new insights into the atmosphere and star of an exoplanet, and later in the science report, scientists have now discovered one hundred and twenty five mammal species low in the dark. All that are more still to come on space time. Astronomers have failed defined any signs of an atmosphere around the Earth like exoplanet Trappis one B. The findings are reported in the Astrophysical Journal Letters are a blow for those who had speculated that this world could Sunday play host to a human colony. Discovered back in twenty sixteen, the Trappist one BE exoplanetary system is located just forty light years away, making it a celestial near neighbor. It's centered around a spectro type M red dwarf star, smaller and cooler than the Sun. So far, astronomers have detected seven tightly packed Earth like planets orbiting around the star, three of which, including Trappis one B, are within the star's habitable zone, the area around a star where temperatures would allow liquid water central for life as we know it to pul on a planet's surface. These features of all fueled hopes are finding potentially habitable environments for humans beyond our Solar system. The new observations examine the planets Trappist one, B, C, H ALL using the James Web Space telescope with Trappis one be observed during two transits. By analyzing the central star's light after it pass through the extoplanet's atmosphere during a transit, astronomers can obtain spectroscopic data on the chemical composition of the planet's atmosphere, providing unique fingerprints of the molecules and atoms found within that atmosphere. While all seven of Trappis one's planets have been tantilizing candidates in the search for Earth sized planets with an atmosphere, Trappist one be's proximity to its host star means it finds itself in harsher conditions than its siblings. It receives four times more radiation than the Earth does from the Sun and it has surfaced temperatures ranging from one hundred and twenty to two hundred and twenty degrees celsius. Astronomers say they could also confidently rule out the existence of a cloud free, hydrogen rich atmosphere. In other words, there appears to be no clear extended atmosphere around Trappis one be at all. However, it could not confidently exclude a thinner atmosphere, such as those composed of pure water, carbon dioxide, or methane, nor an atmosphere similar to that of Saturn's moon Titan, the only moon in the Solar System with its own atmosphere, and one which many scientists believe was very similar to the primordial Earth. However, if Trappist one BEE were to have an atmosphere, it would have been the easiest to detect and describe of all the targets in the system. That's because Trappis one B will be the closest planet to the star and thus the hottest planet in the system. Its transit would have created a strongest signal. All these factors make Trappis one BE a crucial yet challenging target for observation. In fact, the key finding of the study was the significant impact that stellar activity and contamination has when trains that determine the nature of an exoplanet. Now, stellar contamination refers to the influence of the star's own features, such as dark regions called sparts and bright regions called faculi, on the measurements of an exoplanet's atmosphere. The team found compelling evidence that still A contamination plays a crucial role in shaping the transmission spectru of Trappis one B and likely the other planets in the system as well. They found that central star's activity can create ghost signals, and these may fill the observer into thinking that detected a specific molecule in an exoplanet's atmosphere, and so the results underscore the importance of considering still A contamination when planning future observations of all exoplanetary systems. This is especially true for systems like Trappis I, since it's centered around a red dwarf star, which can be especially active with star spots and frequent flare events. This is Space Time and time out for another brief look at some of the other stories making us in science this week with a science report. A new study has found that koala populations across Australia have been decimated by bushfires in recent years, and researchers of forecasting that these wildfires will continue to threaten them and their habitats even more in coming decades. By generating FI susceptibility maps from the present through to the year twenty seventy, scientists were able to identify the threat that wildfires posed to koalas both now and under feature climate change scenarios, and they found alarming outcomes. The findings, reported in the journal Environmental Technology and Innovation, show that almost half of austress koala habitats will be under high bushfire threat by the year twenty seventy. There are fresh warnings today that at least forty percent of amphibian species around the world are currently under threat. The findings are reported in the journal Nature, based on an international assessment of eight thousand species. The assessment was done last year to update a previous analysis of amphibians in two thousand and four, which showed that they were the most threatened type of animal with a backbone in the world. Researchers say that the threats posed to amphibians are ongoing. However, while the vast majority of threats back in two thousand and four were related to disease and habitat loss. Ongoing and predicted climate change impacts are now responsible for thirty nine percent of the deterioration in the status of the animals. Scientists have now discovered around one hundred and twenty five mammal species that glow under ultraviolet light. The findings, reported in the journal the Raw Society Open Science, covers all twenty seven orders of mammals, suggesting that it's actually quite widespread amongst mammal species. Researchers say it's still unclear exactly why animals have this fluorescence, but it it's likely to be used to make their skin and therapy brighter and enhance visual signaling, especially for nocturnal species. Okay, time now for the silliest story of the week and a wyoming couple enjoying a ride on the popular Durango and Silvers and narrow Gate steam railroad, which snakes its way through southwestern Colorado. A video what appears to be the ever less is Sasquatch timendum from Austraya and Skeptics says it's one of the most unusual big foot sightings ever seen. That was great. It like a good sath quatch film. Everyone thinks death quatches up in the northwest of America, you know, with all foresty and stuff like that. But the supposed sighting supposed sides of almost every state all the way down to Florida of these sort of humuloid animals on the prow. And this film was supposed to be taken from a steam train, small gauge tourist train running between a couple of towns in Colorado. The story goes that someone was supposed to be filming on behalf of someone else to try and spot Elk, and therefore they were filming out the window the which was the back of the train, filming out the window, and they saw something moving. Now, if you look at the original video, this thing moving was a long way away that they saw it moving apparently, and then most of the videos you see online at large, so it makes them look a lot clearer. So this creature they saw, which is humanoid, very person thing you're walking along through some low brush, low scrub, and then sits down and then lies back. But what's happening is that someone suggested is lying down hiding in response to the train the whole minutes before the scene, and so that doesn't hold order to me. Right then, what it is seemed to be doing is lying down want to see someone filming it, which'd be an interesting prospect for a sealthquat to know when someone is filming it. And one of the strange things about this video is that it pans off to the right and doesn't film the creature anymore. Creature still as far as I'm still sitting on the ground, But then because the train is moving along, did you think you'd be turning around and filming this thing for as long as you could. It doesn't come along very often. Let's you see Bigfoot, but no, the camera just pans on as if it's just going along. I got to tell you, it looked more like a Wookie than a sasquatch. To me. It was long and thin like a wookie. Sasquatch is supposed to be tall and broad. Looks like a wookie costume. You can buy them for about three hundred dollars in the US. Apparently, I look at it, but so and the people themselves don't seem really like ridiculously excited about this thing. I don't know how often they spot a sasquatch, they say, you know, there's the elusive creature there. It is blood blah. But and you think I'd be running around screaming something, look at that, look at that, look at that, in around a high piece of voice and saying how exciting it was. They don't seem huge excited. Normally, when you watch episodes of Finding Bigfoot, they're doing the finding or the searching, at least if they don't actually find anything. They're doing the searching at night. So one of Thesume's Bigfoot would be nocturnal. Yet this is broad daylight. Yeah. The famous Patterson film that was in the late sixties was daylight as well. You know, film later admitted that it was certainly the guy who got dressed up said it was looking all along and yeah that's daylight. Yeah, most of the things at night. I don't know why ghosts when he come out at night, what's what's some of the ghosts in the daytime? You know, what's what's their problems? Because they're going to be seen. There is actually a company in the town they were heading towards, which promotes sasquatch through it. Now, they're actually really subtle about it. They're actually pretty cool. It seems to be. They're mainly just promoting four wheel drive camping trips out of the wild, so it's an interesting coincidence. It's Timendum from Ustria and Skeptics, and that's the show for now. Space Time is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Stitcher, Google Podcast, pocket Casts, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music Byites dot com, SoundCloud, YouTube, your favorite podcast download provider, and from space Time with Stuart Gary dot com. Space Time's also broadcast through the National Science Foundation, on Science Own Radio and on both iHeartRadio and tune In Radio. 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