Host: Fraser Cain
Guests: David Dickinson, Amy Shira Teitel, Jason Major, Nicole Gugliucci
David:
The Geminid meteors
China landing on the Moon
Space Station Coolant Issues
Fraser:
The Year in Space Calendar Giveaway on Universe Today
Kerbal Space Program game on sale on Steam TODAY!
UT’s Phases of the Moon App on iOS is FREE Monday, 12/16/2013
Jason:
Jets on Europa
Star not a star
Lakes on Titan
Amy:
Exoplanet with the biggest orbit
Nicole:
New Cosmoquest Android App – Earth or not Earth?
Molecular cloud M51
We record the Weekly Space Hangout every Friday at 12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern. You can watch us live on Google+, Universe Today, or the Universe Today YouTube page.
The extremely distant exo-planet that orbits it’s star at 650 AU must have an incredibly long orbital period. How do we know that the orbit isn’t elliptical and thus could have formed nearer its star. Seems like it would eliminate some of the objections to it’s existence.
Even if formed near the star, and then ejected into an almost parabolic trajectory (a stretched ellipse limits the parabolic trajetory of escape), one would have to explain how it was ejected – and ejecting a 11 Mjup planet requires a similar amount of mass.
I doubt there is enough data on the orbit to determine anything at this point, so it might be a highyl elliptical orbit, or maybe not an orbit at all (rogue planet).