Science
Related: About this forumHundreds of comets found orbiting star
Hundreds of comets found orbiting star
Posted on » Thursday, October 23, 2014
PARIS: Astronomers using an ultra-sensitive telescope in the Chilean desert said yesterday they had mapped hundreds of comets orbiting a star 63 light years from Earth.
The feat marks the most complete census of so-called exocomets, or comets in other solar systems, they said.
Reporting in the journal Nature, a French-led team pored over nearly 1,000 observations of a youthful star, Beta Pictoris, that were made over a period of eight years.
The images were taken with a highly-sensitive instrument, HARPS, at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla facility in Chile's bone-dry Atacama desert.
Out of these observations, the team identified a total 493 comets, the most ever netted in an extra-solar probe.
More:
http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/NewsDetails.aspx?storyid=388309
arcane1
(38,613 posts)What a time to be alive. Can you imagine if the money we spent on war was spent on medicine and astronomy??