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It is estimated that South Africa’s new Science & Technology Train, which is currently under development, will reach 14 000 learners each year.
Transnet Rail Engineering at Koedoespoort will complete the train’s renovations.
SA experts discover planetary system
The South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) has announced that two astronomers have found evidence for the existence of two giant planets orbiting a binary star system. If confirmed, this would apparently be an example of a “really strange” planetary system.
SAAO explains that a binary system is one that has two suns, as seen in the Star Wars films such as “A New Hope”, where Luke Skywalker watches the twin suns set outside his uncle's home on the planet Tatooine.
“The two stars ... a white dwarf and a red dwarf, are so close that they take only a couple of hours to orbit each other and would fit comfortably within our Sun,” the SAAO/SALT media release explains. The system is oriented in such a way that the stars appear to eclipse each other once every orbit as viewed from Earth.
The discovery was made by doctors Stephen Potter and Encarni Romero-Colmenero and collaborators. The team noticed that the eclipses were not occurring on time, but were sometimes too early or too late.
This led them to hypothesise the presence of two giant planets whose gravitational effect would cause the stars' orbit to “wobble” and consequently slightly alter the measured time between eclipses.
The astronomers were also able to infer that the masses of the two planets must be at least six and eight times that of Jupiter and take 16 and five years respectively to orbit the two stars. The planets are too far away to be imaged directly.
The binary star system, known as UZ For, would be an extremely inhospitable environment, the observatory has said.
“Due to their close proximity, the gravity of the white dwarf is constantly stealing material from the surface of the red dwarf in a continuous stream. This stream crashes onto the white dwarf where it gets super-heated to millions of degrees and subsequently floods the entire planetary system with enormous amounts of deadly X-ray radiation.”
The discovery was made possible by new SAAO and Southern African Large Telescope (Salt) observations combined with archival data spanning 27 years, gathered from multiple observatories and satellites.
See: http://www.iol.co.za:80/scitech/science/discovery/sa-experts-discover-planetary-system-1.1084007