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Our Solar System Could Be Special

Researchers from the UK believe that our Solar System could have formed differently from many other star systems, making places like our home much more rare in the Universe. After examining the 100 or so known extrasolar planetary systems, they found that they probably formed in a manner different from our own Solar System – in a way that’s hostile to the formation of life. Planets could form in several different ways, and how the Earth formed is actually quite rare. It will still be 5 more years or so before astronomers have equipment with the resolution to confirm this.

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Deeper Analysis of Phoebe Flyby

Scientists working with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have stitched together photos taken by the spacecraft to build a complete picture of Phoebe, a moon of Saturn that the spacecraft passed on June 11. The tiny moon is likely an ancient collection of ice, rock and carbon-containing compounds similar to Pluto and Neptune’s moon Triton. Planetesimals like this could be very common in the outer reaches of the Solar System, as they were ejected during the early formation of the planets. Phoebe was probably captured early on by Saturn, perhaps 4 billion years ago.

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Look for Dust to Find New Earths

Instead of looking directly for Earth-sized planets, it might be easier to just try to find the ring of dust that is the fingerprint of terrestrial planet formation. This is according to a new computer model created by astronomers from the Smithsonian Center and Astrophysics and the University of Utah. Their model predicts that stars with disks will be a little brighter in the infrared spectrum than stars without disks; astronomers should be able to predict the size of its planets just from the brightness of its disk in infrared. The recently-launched Spitzer space telescope should be the perfect tool to measure these disks.

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Why is Mars So Dry?

Since Earth and Mars were probably formed much the same way; through the accretion of rocky material from the inner solar system, they should have roughly the same amount of water, but Mars is pretty much bone dry compared to the Earth. So what happened to make it so dry? Some scientists believe that Mars used to have the same amount of water as Earth, but it evaporated into space. Others believe that the Red Planet never had much water in the first place; that it started out as a collection of dry materials from the asteroid belt.

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Rosetta Launch Date Approaching

At the end of February 2004, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft is expected to launch on board an Ariane 5 launcher from the space centre in Kourou, French Guiana. Rosetta will travel 675 million kilometres, including multiple planet flybys to reach Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014 – it will orbit the comet and then actually land on its surface. This journey will be a long time coming, since Rosetta has been in development since 1997, and missed several launch opportunities.