As our technology develops we are getting a better and better understanding of our solar system and its surrounding neighbours. New technology is allowing us to not only see farther systems clearer, but look at different ranges of light surrounding stars such as radio waves. These new observations don’t always align with what we previously expected.
The abstract nature of the sky is what first drew people to astronomy hundreds of years ago, but unfortunately it also means that the answers are not always clear, and we rely on distant observations to show us the secrets of the universe. With the help of our knowledge of physics we are able to understand a lot about the sky, and stars trillions of kilometers away.
A star in visible northern sky in the fall called Fomalhaut, gained the attention of Jacob White and his research team at the University of British Columbia due to it’s very prominent ring of debris, which are the remnants of exoplanet formation.
Fomalhaut: Photo by NASA, ESA and P. Kalas (University of California, Berkeley, USA) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
However, this wasn’t the end of the story for Jacob and his team. While they were trying to characterize the debris rings they looked at the brightness of the star, but what they found defied expected behaviour. In fact, Fomalhaut is actually over 30% less bright than what was expected. To hear Jacob explain what this means for stars like Fomalhaut, and learn about the research he is pursing in the future you can listen to the following podcast:
Making conclusions about objects to vastly distant to us is clearly a sensitive task, but research like has been done by Jacob and his team are allowing us to be more confident in our results. In the last few years we have discovered the vast majority of all known exoplanets, but we need to understand the host stars like Fomalhaut to be able to know which of these planets might be promising in our search for extraterrestrial life. With the vastness of the universe even our greatest minds like Stephen Hawking believe that we are most likely not alone in the universe. So instead of a question of if they exist, it maybe a question of if our technology can one day reach them, or theirs to us.
-By: Sarah Ries, Shuoyi Ma, and Angus Lee
