ëThe new planet (right) orbits a relatively young star
Astronomers say they have obtained the first confirmed images of a planet beyond our own Solar System.
... An exoplanet image was released last year, but astronomers said it was unclear if the planet was orbiting its star or an object in the background.
However, the latest object is clearly orbiting GQ Lupi, say experts. û
1-2 x Jupiter in size, 100 AU's out,
-
U.Jena original (in German, w/ images)
and team homepage (in German), via UtahSkies,
BBC,
Space.COM
UPDATE -- Links to RAS NAM Proceedings and pre-print for this paper at
Hybrid Solar Eclipse April 8th
Strongest in So.Pacific, where it will go anular to total to anular;
and anular on land along a strip Panama - Colombia - Venezuela.
This will be a Partial (cresent) eclipse for much of Southern US + western South America, but misses NY, Chicago, Salt Lake.
Black holes do not exist - Dark Energy Stars instead!?
ëWhen most people think of black holes, they think of an area of space where matter can disappear. But that view is inconsistent with quantum mechanics.
In 1991, Laboratory physicist George Chapline suggested that this inconsistency could be avoided if the vacuum state of ordinary spaceââ¬âtime is assumed to be a kind of superfluid. The formation of black holes would correspond to a ââ¬Åsqueezingââ¬Â of the vacuumââ¬âa quantum process roughly analogous to the compression of an ordinary fluid.
More recently, Chapline and colleagues at Stanford University have extended this idea to account for the event horizon of a black hole. They proposed that near the event horizon surface of a black hole, ordinary space undergoes a continuous phase transition to a phase with a much larger vacuum energy than the cosmological vacuum energy inferred from observations of distant supernovae. The physicists have predicted that near the surface of a black hole, matter behaves in a markedly different way from what is predicted by classical general relativity.
û
- LLNL Release, arXiv-astro-ph paper
via Ars Technica
and Nature
and /.;
also
NASA colloquium abstract
This is an update on work reported in July 2003 SciAm.
