Three New Gas Giants May Provide Hint Into Major Astronomical Mystery

European astronomers with the Super Wide Angle Search for Planets (SuperWASP) consortium of planet hunters have detected three new gas giant alien worlds.The SuperWASP is an international effort to use the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in Spain and the South African Astronomical Observatory to discover exoplanets. Both observatories are equipped with eight wide-angle cameras that monitor the sky for planetary transit events (when planets pass in front of their stars, allowing them to be imaged by human telescopes). The three planets were discovered orbiting three stars also discovered by the SuperWASP program: WASP-151, WASP-153 and WASP-156. "In this paper, we report the discovery of three transiting exoplanets by the SuperWASP survey and the SOPHIE spectrograph with mass and radius determined with a precision better than 15 percent," wrote the astronomers, led by a team out of the University of Porto in Portugal.

Two of the planets are "hot Saturns," large but low-density gas giants that are very close to their stars. The larger of the two, WASP-153b, has a radius 1.86 times that of Saturn and is 1.3 times as dense. The smaller hot Saturn, WASP-151b, is 1.36 times larger than Saturn and is 1.03 times as dense. Both of them have orbital periods of less than a week.

Meanwhile, the third planet is a "super-Neptune:" a planet appreciably bigger than Neptune (2.5 times more massive in this case) but smaller than Saturn, which is about five times more massive than Neptune. This third planet, WASP-156b, only needs 3.83 days to complete a revolution around its star.

This third find is the exciting one to astronomers, as shockingly few super-Neptunes have been discovered — a dearth named the so-called "Neptunian Desert." Many terrestrial planets (like Earth and Venus), gas giants (like Jupiter and Saturn), and super-Earths (like Uranus and Neptune) have been discovered. Meanwhile 156b is only the ninth-ever super-Neptune to be found of the thousand-plus exoplanets confirmed — and nobody is sure why.

"These three planets also lie close to (WASP-151b and WASP-153b) or below (WASP-156b) the upper boundary of the Neptunian desert. (…) While a detailed analysis of the origin of the Neptunian desert is beyond the scope of this paper, it is still interesting to look into the similarities and differences between WASP-156b and WASP-151b/WASP-153b since they might provide useful hints on the nature of this desert," the paper reads.

SpaceX to Launch Korean Communications Satellite Today: Watch It Live

SpaceX aims to pull off another launch-and-landing double play today (Oct. 30), and you can watch all the spaceflight action live. A SpaceX two-stage Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch the KoreaSat 5A communications satellite at 3:34 p.m. EDT (1934 GMT) today from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. You can courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via the company at http://www.spacex.com/webcast. If all goes according to plan, the booster's first stage will return to Earth for a soft landing less than 10 minutes after liftoff, settling vertically onto a SpaceX "drone ship" stationed off the Florida coast. Such landings are part of SpaceX's plan to develop fully and rapidly reusable rockets and space vehicles, a key priority for the company and its billionaire founder and CEO, Elon Musk. To date, SpaceX has aced 18 Falcon 9 touchdowns and re-launched landed boosters on three different occasions.

SpaceX has also re-flown a Dragon cargo capsule once and aims to do so again on its next resupply run to the International Space Station for NASA, which will launch no earlier than December.

KoreaSat 5A is owned by the South Korean company KTSat. The satellite will provide TV and other communications services to people in South Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia, according to the company's website. The satellite will also aid maritime communications from East Africa to East Asia.

KoreaSat 5A will replace KoreaSat 5, which launched in 2006.

We may have just seen the first comet from another solar system

The solar system may be hosting a visitor from the stars. A newly discovered comet is screaming away from Earth, and based on its weird orbital trajectory astronomers think it might be the first comet ever observed that came from interstellar space. A sky-surveying telescope in Hawaii spotted the fast-moving object, now called C/2017 U1, on 18 October, after its closest approach to the sun. During the next week, astronomers made 34 separate observations of the object and found it has a strange trajectory that is at an angle to the orbits of the planets and does not circle the sun. Now, astronomers are hoping more skywatchers will take a look and pin down whether it’s from our neighborhood or an interloper from beyond. Most comets follow ellipse-shaped orbits around the sun, swooping in from the distant Oort Cloud to kiss the inner solar system before heading back out again. This one, by contrast, will never return. Its orbital path suggests it sailed in from the direction of the constellation Lyra above the relatively flat plane of the solar system, looped around the sun, and is headed back out for eternity.

Lyra is near the direction the sun is moving within the Milky Way, says Luke Dones at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “That’s exactly what you’d expect; there should be more interstellar comets coming from the direction the sun is heading toward,” he says.
Just popping in

“It’s coming from very far away, but we can’t actually backtrack how far away it started. It could be that it’s coming from outside the solar system, but it’s really hard to tell,” says Simon Porter, also at the Southwest Research Institute. Further observations in the next couple weeks will make the picture clearer.

What’s more, a comet on such an extreme path doesn’t necessarily have to come from interstellar space. “It could have interacted with Jupiter or another planet in such a way that changed its orbit,” says Maria Womack at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

The comet’s origins are hard to pin down in part because of the nature of comets. “When you think of photos of comets, they’re a fuzzy blob. People have to make determinations of where they think the center is. Someone who is at the telescope has to make a call,” Womack says.

This necessary guesswork makes the measurements less precise, so astronomers want lots of observations before they’ll be convinced the comet really is from beyond our solar system, she adds.

Luckily, there are plenty of opportunities left to take a peek. The comet should be visible in powerful telescopes for at least another couple weeks, allowing amateurs and professionals alike to survey the icy visitor and determine its history.