A NEW EVOLUTIVE SCENARIO FOR THE JUPITER'S CORE?

Image: This artist's conception shows a Jupiter-sized planet forming from a disk of dust and gas surrounding a young, massive star. - NASA

Astronomers have discovered nearly 500 planetary systems each with multiple planets, and typically these systems include a few planets with masses several times greater than Earth's (super-Earths), orbiting closer to their star than Mercury is to the Sun, and Jupiter-like gas giants are also often found close to their star. [2]

In a recent paper (Raymond et al. 2016) the authors suggest an alternative scenario for the formation of the Jupiter's core: it may have formed in the innermost of the protoplanetary disk and it would later be migrated to the outer region via planet-disk interactions.

The migration of the Jupiter's core may have removed solids from the inner disk by resonance and it may thus explain the absence of terrestrial planets closer than Mercury. Finally it may also have influenced the formation of the Saturn's core.

[1] Raymond et al 2016 (accepted to MNRAS) - Did Jupiter's core form in the innermost parts of the Sun's protoplanetary disk? (arXiv)
[2] Jupiter - (Wikipedia)

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GAMMA-RAY EMISSION FROM THE SNR HB3

Image: At a distance of about 20,000 light years, G292.0+1.8 is one of only three supernova remnants in the Milky Way known to contain large amounts of oxygen. These oxygen-rich supernovas are of great interest to astronomers because they are one of the primary sources of the heavy elements (that is, everything other than hydrogen and helium) necessary to form planets and people. The X-ray image from Chandra shows a rapidly expanding, intricately structured, debris field that contains, along with oxygen (yellow and orange), other elements such as magnesium (green) and silicon and sulfur (blue) that were forged in the star before it exploded. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO The processes of particles acceleration to very high energies from the supernova shock region and diffusion in the interstellar medium of such particles has not been well understood so far. Gamma-ray observations in the GeV regime are a powerful probe of these mechanisms

THE HITCHCHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE LOCAL SUPERCLUSTER

Image: Virgo Supercluster. Credit: Andrew Z. Colvin The Virgo Supercluster is a region with a diameter of 33 megaparsecs (~1000 times larger the Milky Way's diameter) containing at least 100 galaxy groups and clusters.

Boulevard of Broken Rings

Credit: ESO/Perrot This Picture illustrates the remarkable capabilities of SPHERE (the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument), a planet-hunting instrument mounted on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile: It shows a series of broken rings of dust around a nearby star. These concentric rings are located in the inner region of the debris disc surrounding a young star named HD 141569A, which sits some 370 light-years away from us. In this image we see what is known as a transition disc, a short-lived stage between the protoplanetary phase, when planets have not yet formed, and a later time when planets have coalesced, leaving the disc populated only by any remaining - and predominantly dusty - debris. What we see here are structures formed of dust, revealed for the first time in near-infrared light by SPHERE - at a high enough resolution to capture remarkable detail! The area shown in this image has a diameter of just 200 times the Earth–Sun distan...

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