Random snippets from the AAS.
My apologies - a lot of this is press release fodder you can find on any random science aggregator or pop-sci blog.
I usually prefer to find my own topics and news to write about, but I was busier than usual with real life and crap, so I will channel the highlights, just in case you missed some:
- John Grunsfeld, astronaut and physicist, and Hubble repairman extraordinaire, appointed Deputy Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute - go John.
- Crockett (Lowell, UCLA) et al find a 6 MJ/sin(i) planet in a 0.1 AU (14 d e~ 0.5) orbit.
Around a 1 Myr T-Tauri star. The poster, amusingly, does not say which star in their sample.
Hmm.
Could be a brown dwarf or direct formation massive Jovian.
Or the theory for giant planet formation is wrong, still, which is inconceivable. - Barnes and collaborators at UoW take a look at CoRoT-7b the how rock planet found by CoRoT - they speculate that there may be sufficient residual tidal heating to melt the crust through tidally pumped volcanism.
True, but contingent on some assumptions.
preprint.Jackson etal also look at CoRoT-7b and suggest it may be the remnant core of a previously more massive planet possibly as high as Saturn mass.
Maybe. - Gaudi (OSU) gave a nice review of exoplanet demographics and estimates 15% or so may be Solar System analogs. Oh, it was his Warner Prize lecture...
The error on that must be about a factor of 3 - so figure somewhere between 5-45%
That √(N-1) term can be a real drag.
more as I get to it and catch up
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What's wrong with the junior Jovian planet?
We know that differentiated bodies form in a few million years via radiometric meteorite dating, so assuming our Jupiter formed faster than that, what's the problem?
It is too short a time, according to nominal theory of aggregative growth formed by oligarchic and runaway phase
theoretically the differentiated bodies ought to form slower and Jovians have to build a core
very hard to do in less than a megayear as must be the case here
some parameters that can be tweaked, but the timescales don't come out naturally
But iron meteorites are older than chondrules and within error (~1 MA) of CAI's (e.g. Baker et al. 2005). So if we know that they did form and differentiate in < 1 MA, who cares about what they should do?
I suppose we could also consider that the methods for estimating the ages of T Tauri stars are wrong as well...