BETA PICTORIS: PLANETS? LIFE? OR WHAT?

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Term Paper Title	BETA PICTORIS: PLANETS? LIFE? OR WHAT?
# of Words	1602
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	6.41

BETA PICTORIS:  PLANETS?  LIFE?  OR WHAT?

BETA PICTORIS:  PLANETS?  LIFE?  OR WHAT?

JARA

ASTRONOMY 102 SEC 013

     The ultimate question is; Is there a possibility that life might exist on a
planet in the Beta Pictoris system?  First, one must ask, Are there planets in
the Beta Pictoris system?.  However, that question would be impossible to answer
if one did not answer the most basic questions first;  Where do planets come
from? and do the key elements and situations, needed to form planets, exist in
the Beta Pictoris system?.
     To understand where planets come from, one has to first look at where the
planets in our solar system came from.  Does or did our star, the sun, have a
circumstellar disk around it?  the answer is believed to be yes.
     Scientists believe that a newly formed star is immediately surrounded by a
relatively dense cloud of gas and dust. In 1965, A. Poveda stated, “That new
stars are likely to be obscured by this envelope of gas and dust (1).”  In 1967,
Davidson and Harwit agreed with Poveda and then termed this occurrence, the “
cocoon nebula” (1).  Other authors have referred to this occurrence as, a “
placental nebula” (1), noting that it sustains the growth of planetary bodies.
     For a long time, even before there was the term cocoon nebula, planetary
scientists knew that a cocoon nebula had surrounded the sun, long ago, in order
for our solar system to form and take on their currents motions (1).
     In 1755, a German, named Immanuel Kant, reasoned that “gravity would
make circumsolar cloud contract and that rotation would flatten it (1)."  Thus,
the cloud would assume the general shape of a rotating disk, explaining the fact
that the planets, in our solar system, revolve in a disk-shaped distribution.
      This idea, about the disk-shaped nebula that was formed around the early
sun, came to be known as the nebula hypothesis (1).  Then, in 1796, a French
mathematician named Laplace, proposed that the rotating disk continued to cool
and contract, forming planetary bodies (1).  Also, when investigating the
evolution of stars, it was proposed “that a star forms as a central condensation
in an extended nebula...  The outer part remains behind as the cocoon nebula (1)”
.  During the same study it was also indicated that under various conditions
such as:  rotation, turbulence, etc. the nucleus of the forming  star may divide
into two or more bodies orbiting each other (1).  This may be the explanation as
to why more than...

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