Word: pegasi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Pegasi] bring artists to come speak and organize exhibitions. [But] I probably would have done this anyway,” she says...
...Pegasi] bring artists to come speak and organize exhibitions. [But] I probably would have done this anyway,” she says...
...Butler was in the middle of rewriting the software last October to accommodate the spectrometer's newly heightened sensitivity when a disconcerting flood of E-mail started pouring in. Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, had just detected a planet circling the star 51 Pegasi, lying 45 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. Says Queloz: "We first thought that our instrument was faulty, but repeated verifications and computations finally convinced us that we had bagged a planet...
...object turned out to be peculiar. It's half as massive as Jupiter, but orbiting closer to 51 Pegasi than Mercury is to the sun. That means its surface temperature is 1300C, hotter than a blast furnace. Still, it is a planet. "I was a little schizophrenic about it," says Marcy. "On the one hand, we had been scooped. But I also felt euphoric that humanity had entered a new era in which new worlds were going to be subject to exploration...
...also a beginning of sorts. Faced with the existence of these planets, astronomers must now revise their theories to fit the new facts. To begin with, theorists have to scramble to explain how the 51 Pegasi planet could have formed and survived intact so close to its parent star. The planet around 70 Virginis is also problematic: its orbit is egg-shaped rather than circular, which suggests to some astronomers that it formed more like a star than like a planet. Indeed, many experts think it is technically a brown dwarf--a star that never got big enough to ignite...