Hundreds of comets found orbiting star

[Judi Lynn]

Hundreds of comets found orbiting star
Posted on » Thursday, October 23, 2014


PARIS: Astronomers using an ultra-sensitive telescope in the Chilean desert said yesterday they had mapped hundreds of comets orbiting a star 63 light years from Earth.

The feat marks the most complete census of so-called exocomets, or comets in other solar systems, they said.

Reporting in the journal Nature, a French-led team pored over nearly 1,000 observations of a youthful star, Beta Pictoris, that were made over a period of eight years.

The images were taken with a highly-sensitive instrument, HARPS, at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla facility in Chile's bone-dry Atacama desert.

Out of these observations, the team identified a total 493 comets, the most ever netted in an extra-solar probe.

More:
http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/NewsDetails.aspx?storyid=388309

[arcane1]

1. How cool!! I didn't realize we had found ANY!

What a time to be alive. Can you imagine if the money we spent on war was spent on medicine and astronomy??

[longship]

2. Awesome! Chile has many of the great instruments now. R&K nt

[Warren DeMontague]

3. If we have an Oort cloud, probably they do too.

[Cha]

4. WOW.. I bet it's beautiful beyond belief! Mahalo, Judi Lynn~