Carnegie: Kapteyn's star has two planets, one possibly habit

[MargaritaMc]

Two planets orbit nearby ancient star
Washington, D.C.— An international team of astronomers, including five Carnegie scientists, reports the discovery of two new planets orbiting a very old star that is near to our own Sun. One of these planets orbits the star at the right distance to allow liquid water to exist on its surface, a key ingredient to support life. Their work is published by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Kapteyn's Star, named after the Dutch astronomer, Jacobus Kapteyn, who discovered it at the end of the 19th century, is the second fastest-moving star in the sky and belongs to the Galactic halo, an extended group of stars orbiting our Galaxy on very elliptical orbits. With a third of the mass of the Sun, this red-dwarf can be seen with an amateur telescope in the southern constellation of Pictor.

The astronomers—including Carnegie's Pamela Arriagada, Paul Butler, Steve Shectman, Jeff Crane, and Ian Thompson—used new data from the HARPS spectrometer at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla observatory, the Planet Finding Spectrometer at the Magellan/Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, and the HIRES spectrometer at Keck Observatory in Hawaii to measure tiny periodic changes in the motion of the star. The Doppler Effect enabled the scientists to deduce some properties of these planets, including their masses and orbital periods.

more at http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 060214.php

http://carnegiescience.edu/kaptyensstar_planets

And here is the arXiv pre-print
http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.0818

[neufer]

---

<<Singularity (2012), novel written by William H. Keith, Jr. as by Ian Douglas. Studies of the proper motion of Kapteyn's star, and its composition, suggest that it comes from the Omega Centauri globular cluster, which in turn is so anomalous among clusters—having an atypical stellar population and high metallicity—that it is thought to be the stripped core of a dwarf satellite galaxy captured a hundreds of millions of years ago by the Milky Way. The Kapteyn's system contains the gas-giant Bifrost, whose arid and ruin-haunted moon Heimdall, with planetary scale computers nano-etched into its stones, appears to have been the home of a billion-year old extragalactic super-civilization.>>

[BDanielMayfield]

Here’s S&T’s article about Kapteyn’s star’s planets:

Kapteyn’s star — a nearby star that likely formed outside this galaxy — hosts two planets more than twice as old as Earth.

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronom ... iscovered/

[bystander]

Queen Mary: Ancient worlds around Kapteyn's Star
PHL: Oldest Known Potentially Habitable Exoplanet Found

[BDanielMayfield]

This is a great finding: an eleven billion year old possibly habitable planet that came from outside the Milky Way that happens to be one of our next-door neighbors. The Kapteyn’s star system needs to be placed high up on the list of systems to investigate.

This confirms something that we had no reason to doubt; that the universe has been making planets for an enormously long time. Thus the Fermi Paradox: “Where is everybody?”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_Paradox