The war prevented scientists from continuing to study space
Ukrainian astronomers discovered five new exocomets / Photo: NASA
Astronomers from the Main Astronomical Observatory of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv have recently discovered five new exocomets – comets orbiting a star from another system. And before that, astronomers confirmed the size of the largest comet in the universe.
They also independently confirmed several exocomets that had previously been discovered by other researchers, scientificamerican.com reports.
These newly discovered exocomets orbit the well-studied star Beta Pictoris, which is only 65 light-years from Earth – pretty close by cosmic standards.
The star Beta Pictoris is much younger than the Sun, only 10 to 40 million years old compared to 4.5 billion years in the solar system, making it useful for studying the early years of a planetary system.
Orbiting this star is a giant gas planet 11 times the size of Jupiter (called Beta Pic b) and a huge disk of dust nearly 40 billion miles in diameter known as the debris disk.
“Unfortunately, our group received only the first results in the science of exocomets. And then the war began. After the war, we will continue,” said Yakov Pavlenko, chief researcher of the MAO of Ukraine.
Source: Segodnya
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