Gizmodo: solar system

First Historic Image of Planet 3106 Trillion Miles From Earth

Sean Fallon — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:40:00 EDT

Thanks to the distortion-reducing power of the ALTAIR adaptive optics system on the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, three University of Toronto scientists were able to capture images of the star 1RXS J160929.1-210524 from a distance of about 500 light years away. The image is believed to be the first ever of a planet in an alien solar system around a sun-like star. The discovery is made even more significant because the "planet" lies a tremendous distance away from its parent star—challenging currently accepted theories about star and planet formation. It will take up to 2 years of research to determine whether or not this object is, in fact, tied to the star by gravity. [Gemini via ScienceNews via DVICE]

NASA Preparing to Fire Solar System's Unluckiest Probe Ever Into the Sun

Jack Loftus — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:00:00 EDT

Believe it or not, humanity has never fired a probe directly into the Sun. By 2015, NASA hopes to check that interstellar bucket list item with Solar Probe+ (pronounced Solar Probe plus), a heat-resistant spacecraft "designed to plunge deep into the sun's atmosphere where it can sample solar wind and magnetism first hand." At first the mission sounds like a tough break for the little probe, especially as its older cousins play in a sandbox and tool around Saturn, but once you dig a bit deeper there's actually quite a bit left to learn about our parent star's lingering mysteries.

According to NASA, at its closest approach Solar Probe+ will be about 7 million km from the sun (image below). At that point, the probe's incredibly important carbon-composite heat shield must withstand temperatures greater than 1400 C. Oh, and there's the incessant blasts of radiation at "levels not experienced by any previous spacecraft" to contend with too.
And those mysterious alluded to earlier? NASA spells them out thusly:

Mystery #1—the corona: If you stuck a thermometer in the surface of the sun, it would read about 6000o C. Intuition says the temperature should drop as you back away; instead, it rises. The sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, registers more than a million degrees Celsius, hundreds of times hotter than the star below. This high temperature remains a mystery more than 60 years after it was first measured.

Mystery #2—the solar wind: The sun spews a hot, million mph wind of charged particles throughout the solar system. Planets, comets, asteroids—they all feel it. Curiously, there is no organized wind close to the sun's surface, yet out among the planets there blows a veritable gale. Somewhere in between, some unknown agent gives the solar wind its great velocity. The question is, what?

"To solve these mysteries, Solar Probe+ will actually enter the corona," said program scientist Lika Guhathakurta of NASA Headquarters. "That's where the action is." No kidding. Just be sure to bring the SPF 10,000, little guy. [NASA]

Planetarium-Tellurium Clock Tells Time, Position of Solar System

ybaranovsky — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 23:24:39 EDT

Looking like something Doc would own in Back to the Future, Richard Mille's Planetarium-Tellurium clock is a beautifully intricate device, able to provide extremely accurate details about the workings of our Solar System. The clock provides not only the exact positions of the Earth, Venus, Mercury, the Sun and the Moon (who needs the other planets, anyway?) but the current axis of the Earth, its position relative to the Sun, the rotation of the Moon, and even the current signs of the Zodiac.

Mille used a famed astronomer-physicist to help with the exact calculations, and the only data that's a bit faulty is the current axis of the Earth — which can get off by plus or minus one degree every 7.7 years (just faulty, faulty craftsmanship.) No price or release info just yet, but we're going to guess it's going to cost somewhere between a flux capacitator and a human kidney. [WatchLuxus via Technobob]