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SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 12, 2023--

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Scientists have found a new planet they shouldn’t exist, after it seemed to miraculously survived the violent death of its star. Many planets, including our own, face almost certain doom when their stars reach the end of their lives and engulf them. When our own Sun dies, for instance, it will expand to 100 times and swallow the Earth. But the new study offers hope that at least some of those planets are able to survive. The newly discovered world, a Jupiter-like planet known as Halla, managed to survive the demise of its star Baekdu, in what should have been certain death. Astronomers found the planet and discovered through follow-up observations that Baekdu had previously expanded into a red giant. When it did, it would have inflated up to 1.5 times the distance between it and Halla, engulfing the star, and then shrunk back down to its current size. Despite that dramatic and violent event, Halla has managed to persist, sticking around so that astronomers could see it using telescopes in Hawaii. “Planetary engulfment has catastrophic consequences for either the planet or the star itself - or both. The fact that Halla has managed to persist in the immediate vicinity of a giant star that would have otherwise engulfed it highlights the planet as an extraordinary survivor,” said Marc Hon, the lead author of the study. The findings are published in a new paper, ‘A close-in giant planet escapes engulfment by its star’, in the journal Nature today. Halla was found in 2015, using what scientists call the “radial velocity method”, which monitors how stars move and uses that to understand how they might be tugged around by the planets that orbit them. In the years since, scientists found that the planet must have been engulfed by the star, and conducted follow-up observations to better understand the planet. Those observations confirm that the planet had been in its stable orbit for over a decade, and that it really existed. “Together, these observations confirmed the existence of the planet, leaving us with the compelling question of how the planet actually survived,” said IfA astronomer Daniel Huber, second author of the study. But scientists still do not know how it survived. One possibility is that it started on a larger orbit before moving closer to its star, but astronomers believe that is unlikely. Another is that Baekdu was actually once two stars. They may have merged during their death, sparing Halla from being merged at all, by stopping them getting big enough to engulf it. And a separate possibility is that Halla was actually born out of the collision of the two stars. That might have produced a gas cloud that actually gave birth to Halla, and so it may be the result of the demise of its star rather than a survivor of it. Read More Nasa rover spots bizarre donut shaped rock on Mars Strange alien planet could be trapped in edge of the Solar System SpaceX Starship completes six-engine static test fire at base in Texas

Elon Musk's start-up Neuralink on Thursday said it has gotten approval from US regulators to test its...

MUNICH--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 8, 2023--

Ancient remnants of a long-lost part of the Earth believed to be 120 million years old have been located by experts in Borneo. New discoveries about our planet are continuously being made by experts, from finding continents that have been missing for hundreds of years to discovering vast oceans hidden beneath the Earth’s crust. Now, a new amazing discovery revealed details of the 120-million-year-old tectonic plate, now named Pontus. A prediction of the crust’s existence came when Suzanna van de Lagemaat, a graduate geologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and her supervisor, Douwe van Hinsbergen, analysed geological data from mountains in the Asia-Pacific region. While studying rock formations in northern Borneo, Van de Lagemaat came across some clearcut signs of the ancient Pontus plate, explaining: “We thought we were dealing with relicts of a lost plate that we already knew about.” She continued: “But our magnetic lab research on those rocks indicated that our finds were originally from much farther north, and had to be remnants of a different, previously unknown plate.” Researchers estimate that the Pontus plate, which formed part of the world’s crust before the break up of supercontinent Pangaea, was around a quarter of the size of the Pacific Ocean, based on reconstructions of what it would have looked like 160 million years ago. Pontus sat beneath the vast ocean that separated Eurasia and Australia at the time. As Pangaeo separated, it’s believed the plate was swallowed up by other plates that carried countries such as The Philippines and Borneo to their current day locations. Van de Lagemaat’s research focussed on a complex region of tectonic plate activity known as the Junction Region. It runs between Japan, Borneo, the Philippines, New Guinea, and down to New Zealand. Through her research, she was able to use the data to create a clip reconstructing the tectonic plate movements that have occurred from the time of the dinosaurs up to the present day. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

By Sharon Bernstein BERKELEY, California In the 25 years since California voters banned all consideration of race in