(Press-News.org) Astronomers at The University of Warwick and the University of Sheffield have helped discover an unusual star system which looks like, and may even once have behaved like, a game of snooker.
The University of Warwick and Sheffield astronomers played a key role in an international team that used two decades of observations from many telescopes around the world. The UK astronomers helped discover this "snooker like" star system through observations and analysis of data from an astronomical camera known as ULTRACAM designed by the British researchers on the team.
They looked at a binary star system called which is 1670 light years away from Earth. NN Serpentis is actually a binary star system consisting of two stars, a red dwarf and a white dwarf, which orbit each other in an incredibly close, tight orbit. By lucky chance Earth sits in the same plane as this binary star system, so we can we can see the larger red dwarf eclipse the white dwarf every 3 hours and 7 minutes.
It was already thought that there may be at least one planet orbiting these two stars. However the University Warwick and Sheffield astronomers were able to use these incredibly frequent eclipses to spot a pattern of small but significant irregularities in the orbit of stars and were able to help demonstrate that that pattern must be due to the presence and gravitational influence of two massive gas giant planets. The more massive gas giant is about 6 times the mass of Jupiter and orbits the binary star every 15.5 years, the other orbits every 7.75 years and is about 1.6 times the mass of Jupiter.
Given the overall shape of the system, and how that this star system came to exist, it was hard for the British members of the research team not to think of the game of snooker.
One of the UK researchers on the project, Professor Tom Marsh from the University of Warwick's Department of Physics, said:
"The two gas giants have different masses but they may actually be roughly the same size as each other, and in fact will also be roughly the same size as the red dwarf star they orbit. If they follow the patterns we see in our own star system of gas giants with a dominant yellow or blue colours, then it's hard to escape the image of this system as being like a giant snooker frame with a red ball, two coloured balls, and dwarf white cue ball."
This star system will also have seen dramatic changes in what is relatively recent times in astronomical terms the what is now the White Dwarf "cue ball" of the system may have suffered, and caused, violent changes to its own orbit and the orbit of all the planets and stars in the system.
Professor Vik Dhillon, from the University of Sheffield, said "If these planets were born along with their parent stars they would have had to survive a dramatic event a million years ago: when the original primary star bloated itself into a red giant, causing the secondary star to plunge down into the present very tight orbit, thereby casting off most of the original mass of the primary. Planetary orbits would have seen vast disturbances. Alternatively, the planets may have formed very recently from the cast off material. Either way, in relatively recent times in astronomical terms this system will have seen a vast shock to the orbits of the stars and planets, all initiated by what is now the white dwarf at the heart of the system."
INFORMATION:
Notes for editors
The discovery was made possible by an international consortium of astronomers, from the UK (University of Warwick and the University of Sheffield), Germany (Georg-August-Universitat in Gottingen, Eberhard-Karls-Universitat in Tubingen), Chile (Universidad de Valparaiso), and the United States (University of Texas at Austin).
ULTRACAM is a high-speed, 3-channel CCD camera for astrophysical research ULTRACAM was funded by PPARC and is a collaboration between ), Professor Tom Marsh (University of Warwick) Professor Vik Dhillon (Sheffield) and the Astronomy Technology Centre (Edinburgh).
The full research paper is published in the journal "Astronomy and Astrophysics" and is entitled "Two planets orbiting the recently formed post-common envelope binary NN Serpentis" by K. Beuermann, F. V. Hessman, S. Dreizler, T. R. Marsh, S. G. Parsons, D. E. Winget, G. F. Miller, M. R. Schreiber, W. Kley, V. S. Dhillon, S. P. Littlefair, C. M. Copperwheat and J. J. Hermes
Astronomy and Astrophysics A&A 521 L60 (2010)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201015472 it can be found online at http://www.aanda.org/index.php?option=com_article&access=standard&Itemid=129&url=/articles/aa/abs/2010/13/aa15472-10/aa15472-10.html
or http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.3608
For further information please contact:
Professor Tom Marsh, Department of Physics , University of Warwick
Tel: +44 (0)24 765 74739 t.r.marsh@warwick.ac.uk
Peter Dunn, Head of Communications
Communications Office, University of Warwick,
+44 (0)24 76 523708 or +44(0)7767 655860
email: p.j.dunn@warwick.ac.uk
Professor Vik Dhillon, University of Sheffield
Tel: +44(0)114 22 24528
email : vik.dhillon@sheffield.ac.uk
Kyle Christie, Media Relations Assistant
University of Sheffield
Tel: +44(0)114 222 9852
email: k.christie@sheffield.ac.uk
PR152 November 8th 2010
Astronomers find star system that looks like game of snooker
2010-11-10
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Softening crystals without heat: Using terahertz pulses to manipulate molecular networks
2010-11-10
Kyoto, Japan -- As if borrowing from a scene in a science fiction movie, researchers at Kyoto University have successfully developed a kind of tractor beam that can be used to manipulate the network of the molecules. In a paper soon to be published in Physical Review Letters, the team has demonstrated a technique using terahertz pulses that could have broad applications in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries.
Terahertz waves, an area of specialty for the Koichiro Tanaka lab at Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS), exist in ...
Recommendation letters may be costing women jobs, promotions
2010-11-10
A recommendation letter could be the chute in a woman's career ladder, according to ongoing research at Rice University. The comprehensive study shows that qualities mentioned in recommendation letters for women differ sharply from those for men, and those differences may be costing women jobs and promotions in academia and medicine.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, Rice University professors Michelle Hebl and Randi Martin and graduate student Juan Madera, now an assistant professor at the University of Houston, reviewed 624 letters of recommendation for 194 ...
Lab on chip for membrane proteins
2010-11-10
Membrane-associated receptors, channels and transporters are among the most important drug targets for the pharmaceutical industry. The search for new drugs resembles looking for a needle in a haystack. Therefore new analytical techniques are required which facilitate the simultaneous screening of a large library of compounds across a variety of membrane proteins. However, this class of methods is still at the early stages of development. The group of Prof. Dr. Robert Tampé, in collaboration with the Walter Schottky Institute at Technical University Munich, has now presented ...
Quantum computers a step closer to reality thanks to new finding
2010-11-10
Quantum computers should be much easier to build than previously thought, because they can still work with a large number of faulty or even missing components, according to a study published today in Physical Review Letters. This surprising discovery brings scientists one step closer to designing and building real-life quantum computing systems – devices that could have enormous potential across a wide range of fields, from drug design, electronics, and even code-breaking.
Scientists have long been fascinated with building computers that work at a quantum level – so small ...
How the dragon got its 'snap'
2010-11-10
VIDEO:
This is a computer model of the growth of a snapdragon flower, produced by the groups of Professor Andrew Bangham of the University of East Anglia and Professor Enrico Coen...
Click here for more information.
"How do hearts, wings or flowers get their shape?" asks Professor Enrico Coen from the John Innes Centre. " Unlike man-made things like mobile phones or cars, there is no external hand or machine guiding the formation of these biological structures; they ...
MicroRNA controls mammary gland development in mice
2010-11-10
This release is available in German.
Hormones, growth factors and several proteins ensure that development occurs in the right way, at the right time. The components that cause breast development in mammals, for example, were thought to be largely known. However, as a team of scientists from Göttingen, Frankfurt and Hanover have now discovered, in the case of breast development, hormones and proteins do not account for the full story. The scientists have shown that tiny ribonucleic acid molecules play a key role in this process. The mammary glands of mice lacking the ...
Scientists identify 1 cause of damage in Alzheimer's disease and find a way to stop it
2010-11-10
Researchers suspect that a protein superstructure called amyloid beta is responsible for much of the neural damage of Alzheimer's disease.
A new study at the University of California, San Diego, shows that amyloid beta disrupts one of the brain's anti-oxidant proteins and demonstrates a way to protect that protein, and perhaps others, from amyloid's harmful effects.
"Amyloid seems to cause damage to cells," said chemistry professor Jerry Yang. "We have reported in a very detailed way one potential interaction of how amyloid can cause disease, and we found a way to ...
Parents should talk about math early and often with their children
2010-11-10
VIDEO:
University of Chicago psychologist Susan Levine has found that early exposure to mathematics words prepares students for success later in school.
Click here for more information.
The amount of time parents spend talking about numbers has a much bigger impact on how young children learn mathematics than was previously known, researchers at the University of Chicago have found.
For example, children whose parents talked more about numbers were much more likely to ...
Sunburnt whales
2010-11-10
Whales exhibit skin damage consistent with acute sunburn in humans, and it seems to be getting worse over time, reveals research published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), Queen Mary, University of London and CICIMAR, studied blue whales, fin whales and sperm whales in the Gulf of California to determine the effect of rising levels of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) on their health.
For a number of years scientists have observed blisters on the skin of whales. Now, using high-quality photos to give ...
Mountain ranges may act as "safe haven" for species facing climate change
2010-11-10
Swiss researchers studying the projected effects of climate change on alpine plant species have discovered that mountain ranges may represent a 'safer' place to live during changing climate conditions. The research, published in the Journal of Biogeography, finds that the habitat diversity of mountain ranges offer species 'refuge habitats' which may be important for conservation.
The research, led by Daniel Scherrer and Christian Körner from the University of Basel, Switzerland, was carried out over two seasons in the Swiss Central Alps at 2500m. The authors used a high ...