Hubble Reinforces Planet Formation Theory

eldavojohn writes "Physorg is running an interesting article on the most recent of Hubble's accomplishments. It has provided us evidence supporting that which Emmanuel Kant proposed over 200 years ago — that planets do indeed form from disks of gas and dust that surround stars. The trick, apparently, was observing many cases where a star's planet forms on the exact same circumstellar disk as the dust and gas. Hubble also aided the researchers in determining the weight of many extrasolar planets. Some had contended that these were not planets but rather brown dwarf stars — which is determined by measuring their weight." Update: 10/12 23:08 GMT by T : That's not the only theory Hubble's recent observation's have supported: read on below for a bit more.

somegeekynick writes "Hubble has spotted a bunch of little galaxies, nicknamed Spiderweb, over 10 billion light-years away in the process of merging. This observation supports the so-called 'bottom-up' theory of galaxy formation, according to which smaller clumps of matter collided and merged with each other to form larger galaxies during early stages of the universe's evolution."

Mass != Weight

[Daniel_Staal]

The article means mass, not weight: A star's weight is effetively zero, as it is in a microgravity environment. It's mass is trillions of kilograms.

Sorry, just needed to be pendantic for a moment.

Re:Mass != Weight

[balsy2001]

You are many orders of magnitude off on the mass of a star. The mass of the earth is 5^24 kilograms, so use that as a reference point The sun is ~ 1 billion times the mass of the earth.

Re:Mass != Weight

[balsy2001]

So I should have checked my facts BEFORE submitting. The mass of the sun ~ 333000 times the mass of the earth.

Re:Hear Here

[Ruie]

Yes! And then a big nose! Will we really have to wait 1000 years for somebody to invent a Smelloscope?

Actually, this has been done in a number of ways. Nose is just an instrument to analyze chemical composition of substances. An incomplete list of existing techniques:

• Original Mars landers had chemical tests on board (in particular to test for presence of life)
• Comet dust gathering probes
• Radiation-based chemical composition testing (Mossbauer spectrometer)
• spectrometers: X-ray, radio (hydrogen line, ammonia line, etc - though, afaik these are mostly Earth based), optical

This is just off the top of head, I am sure I am forgetting some - and don't know about many others.

Re:Replacement?

[iamlucky13]

FYI (my apologies for the gratuitous use of wikipedia)

Hubble Space Telescope [wikipedia.org]
Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope [wikipedia.org]
Chandra X-ray Observatory [wikipedia.org]
Infrared Space Observatory [wikipedia.org]
Corot Space Telescope [wikipedia.org]
MOST Telescope [wikipedia.org]
Astro-F Space Telescope [wikipedia.org]
Swift Gamma Ray Telescope [wikipedia.org]
Kepler Space Telescope [wikipedia.org]
SOHO [wikipedia.org]

These are some of the more interesting ones currently operating or scheduled to come online before 2010. As you see, the different space agencies actually operate quite a few space-based observatories, each with different capabilities and goals. When any one of them is decommissioned, they lose a little bit of their overall capability, but that's life. Nobody made as much fuss, for example, when the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory was deorbited, despite its significant contributions to cosmology.

Also, the astronomers who were upset about the idea of Hubble being abandoned were almost universally agreed that if push comes to shove, they would much rather give up the Hubble than have any more features cut from the JWST.