July 8, 2012

Good Morning,

A new study on planet formation has U.S. researchers reconsidering the facts. They've come to the conclusion that they have either underestimated how long it takes for stars to form planets or that there are more stars doing so than previously thought. Check out the first article for all the details.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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Study questions planet formation theories

ATHENS, Ga. - U.S. researchers say a study challenges current assumptions on planet formation, suggesting that planets might form much faster than previously thought. Either that, they said, or stars harboring planets could be far more numerous than astronomers have up to now believed. The study, by several U.S. universities and the Australian National University, made a curious and unexpected finding, that the cloud of dust circling a young star in a so-called stellar nursery has simply disappeared. "The most commonly accepted time scale for the removal of this much dust is in the hundreds of thousands of years, sometimes millions," study co-author Inseok Song of the University or Georgia said. "What we saw was far more rapid and has never been observed or even predicted. It tells us that we have a lot more to learn about planet formation." The star in the Scorpius-Centaurus stellar association 450 light years from Earth was observed in 1983 surrounded by a cloud of dust that had mostly disappeared when new observations were made in 2010, a UG release reported Wednesday. The speed of the disappearance surprised astronomers. "It's as if you took a conventional picture of the planet Saturn today and then came back two years later and found that its rings had disappeared," co-author Ben Zuckerman of UCLA said. Planet formation in a circumstellar disk is commonly thought to occur over hundreds of thousands of years. "If what we observed is related to runaway growth, then our finding suggests that planet formation is very fast and very efficient," Song said. "The implication is that if the conditions are right around a star, planet formation can be nearly instantaneous from [an] astronomical perspective."


Apple said readying smaller iPad

NEW YORK - Apple Inc.'s Asian component suppliers are preparing for production of an iPad tablet computer with a smaller screen, The Wall Street Journal said. The current iPad's screen measures 9.7 inches, unchanged since the first model was released in 2010, but the new tablet will have a screen of around 8 inches or less, sources told the Journal. Sources at the component suppliers reportedly said Apple has told them to be ready for mass production of the smaller tablet in September. Analysts said a smaller iPad could help Apple keeps its dominance in the tablet market against increasing competition. A smaller iPad would compete with Google's recently announced Nexus 7 with its 7-inch screen and with Amazon's Kindle Fire, which also comes in at 7 inches of screen real estate. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the reports, the Journal said.


NASA launches sun-scanning instrument

WHITE SANDS, N.M. - A rocket carrying an instrument to study changing magnetic fields on the sun was launched from the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico Thursday, NASA said. The Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Investigation, or SUMI, will study the intricate, constantly shifting magnetism in a hard-to-observe area of the sun's low atmosphere called the chromosphere, the space agency said in a release. The chromosphere is a thin layer of solar atmosphere sandwiched between the visible surface, the photosphere, and its atmosphere, the corona. The magnetic fields lie at the heart of how the sun can create huge explosions of light such as solar flares, and eruptions of particles such as coronal mass ejections, referred to as the solar "wind." While there are already instruments, both on the ground and in space, that can measure these fields, none of them can see the layer SUMI will observe, NASA said. Understanding the structure of the magnetic fields in this region will help scientists understand how the corona is heated and how the solar wind is formed, the release said. The flight of SUMI, lasted about 8 minutes, and is considered a test flight to make sure the instrument works and to assess possible improvements, researchers said. "With the knowledge we get from a successful SUMI mission, we can go on to build space-based instrumentation that will help us understand the processes that form flares and CME's and help us predict space weather," Jonathan Cirtain, a solar scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., said.


Feathers may have graced all dinosaurs

NEW YORK - A newly found fossil suggests feathers were more common on dinosaurs than previously thought, covering all predatory dinosaurs and maybe others, scientists say. The finding is based on a fossil dubbed Sciurumimus albersdoerferi, a description of which has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Sciurumimus sits deep within the evolutionary tree of dinosaurs, researchers said. "All of the feathered predatory dinosaurs known so far represent close relatives of birds," said paleontologist Oliver Rauhut of the Bayerische Staatssammlung fur Palaontologie und Geologie in Munich, Germany. "Sciurumimus is much more basal [deep] within the dinosaur family tree and thus indicates that all predatory dinosaurs had feathers." The fossil of a baby Sciurumimus was found in northern Bavaria and preserves remains of a filamentous plumage, indicating feathers covered the whole body, researchers said. "Everything we find these days shows just how deep in the family tree many characteristics of modern birds go, and just how bird-like these animals were," study author Mark Norell, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said. "At this point it will surprise no one if feather-like structures were present in the ancestors of all dinosaurs."

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