that line isn’t the horizon, it’s the edge of the shadow that separates day from night time. There’s no way to perceive it at ground level, but if you’re high in the air and the sun is near the horizon it’s visible.
Planet 8 Ursae Minoris b orbits a star some 530 light-years away that is in its death throes. A swollen red giant, the star would have been expected to expand beyond the planet’s orbit before receding to its present (still giant) size. In other words, the star would have engulfed and ripped apart any planets orbiting closely around it. Yet the planet remains in a stable, nearly circular orbit.
Could the planet have been captured after the ballooned red dwarf shrank? E.g. a wandering planet. Or could something have made its orbit shift, e.g. if it was farther out and now it’s closer in?
1" means 1 arcsecond, not 1 inch, for the Americans. 1 arcsecond is 1/60th of an arcminute. 1 arc minute is 1/60th of degree. So the 1" scale shown represents 1/3600th of a degree. The object is measured at 1.54 arcseconds
One possibility, raised by the physicist Lee Smolin and the philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, is that the laws of physics can evolve and change over time.
That sentence sent literal chills down my spine. Serious cosmic horror of the best kind here. It’s an exciting time to follow astrophysics.
That’s sad, but what a great success this mission was. Not everybody can get 100 times the planned utility out of their scientific missions like NASA does lol
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