The dusty region was likely shaped by the same forces that produced the versions in our own solar system: the movements of planets, hidden somewhere in those concentric rings. They were surprised to find not one single ring of material, but three. Astronomers recently used the most powerful observatory in operation, the James Webb Space Telescope, to observe a star about 25 light-years away with a known asteroid belt. But when Kao went looking for one around her brown dwarf, voilà, there it was: a radiation belt, invisible to the human eye but billowing in radio wavelengths, in all its exoglory.Įxoasteroid belts are downright stunning, particularly in infrared wavelengths. No one had ever found one outside the solar system before. She couldn’t account for what was causing the aurora, so she turned to our own solar system for inspiration, and realized that planets with auroras also have radiation belts. ![]() Kao had previously studied this particular brown dwarf and found that its intense radio emissions produced auroras similar to our own northern lights. When Melodie Kao, an astronomer at UC Santa Cruz, went looking for exothings, she set her sights 20 light-years away, on a brown dwarf-a rather unusual object that is neither a star nor a planet, with a mass somewhere between the two. The study of exothings is a way of conversing with the rest of the cosmos and saying, “Oh, you’ve got one of those too?” And because any hypothetical life must live somewhere, exothings could someday answer one of our most existential questions: Are we alone? So it’s nice to look out across that sea, dark and unknowable, and occasionally spot other islands, other familiar shores. Not to be dramatic, but Earth is a small island in an endless sea. There is plenty of scientific possibility in the discovery of exothings, and also comfort. Read: Faraway planets don’t seem so distant anymore Just this week, astronomers announced that they have found an exoradiation belt, an invisible cocoon of charged particles, held in place by a planet’s magnetic field. The search for such celestial objects and structures has intensified in recent years. Exomoons haven’t been proved to exist, but astronomers believe that they are more numerous than exoplanets themselves. Astronomers have found exoauroras, exoasteroid belts, and even exorings, such as the ones that surround Saturn. ![]() The exo- prefix extends beyond the realm of planets. (Truly, telescopes have gotten really good.) Although most people probably can’t name an exoplanet-something like “HD 108236 b” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue-the fact that the cosmos is full of them is now well known. They’ve even recently captured evidence of an exoplanet getting swallowed up by its dying star. This world was called an exoplanet.Īstronomers have since discovered more than 5,300 exoplanets and counting, and they’re studying the atmosphere of these worlds to determine if the molecules suspended in their clouds could sustain life. By then, telescopes had become sufficiently advanced to reveal the hard evidence: A star about 50 light-years away was wobbling, a sign that a small world was tugging on it. Until the 1990s, that idea was no more than a hypothesis. ![]() Several centuries ago, as scientists began to embrace the startling idea that Earth was not the center of the universe, they also began to ponder its startling implication: that the stars in the night sky might be suns in their own right, orbited by their own worlds.
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