TWEEN MOTION

Newest Planet has Found

By: Spencer Hunt

Ohio State University astronomers helped a Louisville researcher find a Saturn-like planet that's so close to its star that a "year" lasts just under eight days.

Karen Collins, a Louisville doctoral student, announced the discovery this afternoon, during the American Astronomical Society’s national meeting in Indianapolis. OSU astronomers and planet hunters Scott Gaudi and Thomas Beatty were part of Collins' team.

Named KELT-6b, the planet is located in the constellation Coma Berenices, about 700 light years from our solar system.

The planet was first observed by relatively inexpensive earth-bound telescopes that essentially work like high-end digital cameras. KELT stands for Kilosquaredegree Extremely Little Telescope .

As the new planet's name implies, KELT-6b is the sixth planet discovered by these telescopes. It is much like the first planet, KELT-1b, which was identified last year.

Located 825 light years away in the constellation Andromeda, KELT-1b is 30 times bigger than Jupiter. Its orbit is so small that its year lasts a mere 29 hours.

How can we seen the rainbow

How can we seen the rainbow

Rainbows happen when sunlight and rain combine in a very specific way.  The beams of sunlight separate into the colors we see in the rainbow as they enter a raindrop.  Sunlight is actually made up of different colors that we don't usually see.  When a beam of sunlight comes down to Earth, the light is white.  But, if the light beam happens to hit raindrops on the way down at a certain angle, the different colors that make up the beam separate so that we can see them -- in the form of a rainbow. 

The angle for each color of a rainbow is different, because the colors slow down at different speeds when they enter the raindrop. The light exits the raindrop in one color, depending on the angle it came in, so we see only one color coming from each raindrop. Light at different angles coming through many raindrops form the rainbow that we see, in stripes of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.