Monday, July 5, 2010

Planetary Neighbor

Friends,

The picture below is the first of planet orbiting a star outside of our solar system. I have been waiting for this since I was a youth...and I did not think it would happen in my lifetime, to be honest. The sun in this picture...which is similar to our own...is located just 500 light years away in the constellation Scorpius, which is not very far, especially when we consider that our own Milky Way galaxy is 100, 000 light years in diameter. The planet, however, is about 8 times the size of Jupiter in our own solar system, but the kicker is that its orbit is about 300 times the distance of our earth to Sun distance. So, if we do the math...we are 93 million miles from the sun, so this would make this newly discovered planet about 28 billion miles from it's sun -- pretty wild.

Blessings, Don


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