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Astronomers have found thousands of potential exoplanets and many stars with massive disks of gas and dust that suggest planets are forming, but not much of the stuff intermediate between dust and planets, such as asteroids, planetesimals and comets. UC Berkeley astronomer Barry Welsh has looked closely at a number of stars with dust disks and found evidence that they also have comets.
Tag: stars
Intelligent civilizations rarer than one in a million
February 8, 2013:
After looking for intelligent radio signals from 86 stars with known planets, UC Berkeley scientists have, for the first time, calculated the odds of finding intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy. Fewer than one in a million stars probably are advanced enough for us to detect, though that means there are still potentially millions of such civilizations in the galaxy.
Planet makes weird loops around dusty star
January 12, 2013:
UC Berkeley astronomer Paul Kalas has studied the star Fomalhaut for years because of its resemblance to our own solar system 4 billion years ago. New observations using the Hubble Space Telescope reveal that an already-known planet circling Fomalhaut has a highly eccentric orbit that suggests the presence of other planets.
Farthest supernova yet for measuring cosmic history
January 9, 2013:
The Supernova Cosmology Project, based at Berkeley Lab and headed by UC Berkeley physicist and Nobel Laureate Saul Perlmutter, has discovered the most distant supernova yet that can be used in cosmological studies. Announced at the American Astronomical Society meeting, it will help answer questions about dark energy and the fate of the universe.
Explosion of galaxy formation lit up early universe
September 4, 2012:
The universe was dark until the first stars began to form, but the universe really lit up once massive hydrogen clouds began birthing galaxies of stars. A new study by postdocs Oliver Zahn and Christian Reichardt, using data from the South Pole Telescope, finds that this period, called the Epoch of Reionization, was later and more explosive than thought.
