Posted on 08/12/2009 8:31:39 AM PDT by posterchild
Planets orbit stars in the same direction that the stars rotate. They all do. Except one.
A newfound planet orbits the wrong way, backward compared to the rotation of its host star. Its discoverers think a near-collision may have created the retrograde orbit, as it is called.
The star and its planet, WASP-17, are about 1,000 light-years away. The setup was found by the UK's Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) project in collaboration with Geneva Observatory. The discovery was announced today but has not yet been published in a journal.
"I would have to say this is one of the strangest planets we know about," said Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT who was not involved in the discovery.
What's going on A star forms when a cloud of gas and dust collapses. Whatever movement the cloud had becomes intensified as it condenses, determining the rotational direction of the star. How planets form is less certain. They are, however, known to develop out of the leftover, typically disk-shaped mass of gas and dust that swirls around a newborn star, so whatever direction that material is moving, which is the direction of the star's rotation, becomes the direction of the planet's orbit.
WASP-17 likely had a close encounter with a larger planet, and the gravitational interaction acted like a slingshot to put WASP-17 on its odd course, the astronomers figure.
"I think it's extremely exciting. It's fascinating that we can study orbits of planets so far away," Seager told SPACE.com. "There's always theory, but there's nothing like an observation to really prove it."
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Not till Pluto is reinstated!
That is racist
not really related, but this is another space wasp:
Have a Hot Time on WASP-12b
Sky & Telescope | Monday, December 22, 2008 | Kelly Beatty
Posted on 12/28/2008 3:21:05 PM PST by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2155321/posts
Name the planet obama!
Hope that since it’s going the wrong way on a one way street it gets taken out!
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Read it again.
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I thought there was a planet in OUR solar system that had a retrograde orbit. Mars? Venus?
Uranus has an axis that rotates sideways... is that what you were thinking of?
Thanks Wendy. I read about it years ago in Velikovsky, to be honest, but you know how memory is...
Not the one I had in mind, but so many answers are possible to that one.....;-D
That’s right. :’)
Whoops, missed yours, looks like it’s been answered though. :’) I’ll let things hang out a little and suggest that any / some undiscovered unknown outer planets move in retrograde.
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