June 4, 2021
Here’s what the biggest giant planet in our solar system, Jupiter, looks like. The Juno spacecraft captured this image during its 31st close flyby of Jupiter on December 30, 2020. The storm known as the Great Red Spot is visible on the horizon, nearly rotated out of view. Citizen scientist Tanya Oleksuik created this color-enhanced image using data from the JunoCam camera. Image via NASA.
Our solar system is normal
In late May 2021, astronomers released new results in a 30-year census of planetary systems beyond our own. The results show that most are arranged much like
our solar system. That is, most giant exoplanets aren’t close to their parent stars, but instead live in the suburbs of their systems. That’s contrary to what astronomers thought when first discovering giant exoplanets in the 1990s. For awhile, they thought hot Jupiters – giant planets close to their stars – might be the norm. Now the California Legacy Survey, which began in the 1990s, has
Project Illuminates Where Giant Exoplanets Reside – East Boston Times-Free Press eastietimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from eastietimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
[Astronomers have long wondered whether the configuration of planets in our solar system is common elsewhere in the universe. New results from the longest-running survey of exoplanets helps answer this question.]
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Giant Planets Found in Stellar Suburbs
In the neighborhood that makes up our solar system, the giant planets-Jupiter and Saturn-reside in the chilly outer regions, while smaller planets tend to orbit closer to the sun. Our planet Earth lives in an intermediate tropical zone well-suited to life. Planet hunters have long wondered: Is this same type of planetary configuration common around other stars throughout our galaxy or are we unique?
The best way to find out is to do a census of the planetary denizens of the galaxy. Astronomers began such a census, called the California Legacy Survey, over three decades ago, and are now releasing a new batch of results. One pattern to emerge from the data is that giant planets tend to reside about 1 to 10 astronomical units (AU) from their host stars, a mostly icy region located beyond the temperate zone of a star. An AU is defined as the distance from Earth to our sun, or about 93 million miles.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft. (Photo credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/
Current and former astronomers from the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (
IfA) have wrapped up a massive collaborative study that set out to determine if most solar systems in the universe are similar to our own. The 30-year Hawaiʻi-based planetary census sought to find where giant planets tend to reside relative to their host stars.
In our solar system, the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn are found in the chilly outer regions, while smaller planets tend to orbit closer to the Sun. Earth lives in an intermediate tropical zone well-suited to life, at a distance of 1