Friday, July 29, 2011

Deep Space | Want to See a Galaxy No Human Has Ever Seen?

"The odds are that when you log on, that first galaxy you see will be one that no human has seen before." -- Christopher Lintott, Adler Planetarium, Chicago

Galaxy Zoo is a large-scale online astronomy project that invites the public to help classify over one million galaxies by assessing images gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDDS). It is a massive citizen science undertaking that was launched in 2007.

According to their website, "Within 24 hours of launch, the site was receiving 70,000 classifications an hour, and more than 50 million classifications were received by the project during its first year, from almost 150,000 people."

So far, more than quarter of a million citizen scientists have participated. And now, they are looking for help in classifying images of galaxies taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

So if you want to peer into the universe's deep cosmological past, you're invited to take a peek. And since the pictures have been taken by robotic cameras and filed electronically, the vast majority of these galaxies have never been viewed by human eyes.

As Christopher Lintott of Adler Planetarium in Chicago says, "Odds are that when you log on, that first galaxy you see will be one that no human has seen before."

GET INVOLVED
  • Join Galaxy Zoo and help astronomers classify galaxies
  • Find out what's in the sky tonight (Sky and Telescope)
  • Download this month's free evening sky map (Skymaps)
ACTION ALERTS
SOME REASONS TO SMILE
  • House of Representatives has rejected Extinction Rider (Center for Biological Diversity)
  • After at least 17 years without the companionship of his own kind, Tilin, a Hamadryas baboon at a sanctuary in Berkshire, UK, finally has a friend who speaks his own language, Tina, who is between 5-7 years old (Animal Defenders International)
SOME RELATED POSTS
 MARK YOUR CALENDAR
CHECK OUT PAST SERIES
  • Gray Matters: Thinking about thinking (June 2011)
  • Flower Power: Stopping to smell the angiosperms (May 2011)
  • Animal Cruelty: Looking at the devil within (April 2011)
  • Chemical Month: Exploring the vast laboratory of our daily lives (March 2011)
  • Africa Month: Visiting the world's second-largest continent (February 2011)
  • Reports from 2050: Imagining the future (January 2011)
  • Victory Month: Looking at the victories of 2010, made possible by you (December 2010)
  • Tree Month: Climbing the perennial woody plants that appeared 375 million years ago (November 2010)
  • Food Month: Considering what we put in our mouths (October 2010)
image: Hubble Space Telescope (source: Galaxy Zoo)
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Thursday, July 28, 2011

Deep Space | Amateur Astronomer Discovers New Planetary Nebula

"Explaining the puffs left behind when medium-sized stars like our sun expel their last breaths...keeps us up at night." -- Orsola De Marco, Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia

Who says you need to be a professional astronomer to make a cosmic discovery? Certainly not Matthias Kronenberger.

He's an amateur stargazer from Austria who recently discovered a new planetary nebula -- a glowing shell of ionized gas emitted by certain types of stars before they die.

Orsola De Marco of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, describes this phenomenon as the "puffs left behind when medium-sized stars like our Sun expel their last breaths."

Now named Kronenberger 61, or Kn 61, the nebula is located near the northern constellation of Cygnus the Swan in a small patch of sky that is being monitored by NASA’s Kepler planet-finding mission. Its discovery will help astronomers understand the future and death of the Sun.

The area of the sky in question is about the size of your hand held at arm's length. Kepler is continuously focused on this tiny area, staring at more than 150,000 stars in the hope of finding a slight change in brightness -- something that would indicate the presence of an orbiting companion planet.

Kronenberger is a member of "Deep Sky Hunters," an amateur group helping professional astronomers comb through the Kepler field looking for planetary nebula candidates. Kn 61 is the sixth one found so far.

"Without this close collaboration with amateurs, this discovery would probably not have been made before the end of the Kepler mission," said George Jacoby of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization and the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. "Professionals, using precious telescope time, aren’t as flexible as amateurs who did this using existing data and in their spare time."

TONIGHT, LOOK UP
TODAY, TAKE ACTION
VICTORY ALERTS
SOME RELATED POSTS
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
CHECK OUT PAST SERIES
  • Gray Matters: Thinking about thinking (June 2011)
  • Flower Power: Stopping to smell the angiosperms (May 2011)
  • Animal Cruelty: Looking at the devil within (April 2011)
  • Chemical Month: Exploring the vast laboratory of our daily lives (March 2011)
  • Africa Month: Visiting the world's second-largest continent (February 2011)
  • Reports from 2050: Imagining the future (January 2011)
  • Victory Month: Looking at the victories of 2010, made possible by you (December 2010)
  • Tree Month: Climbing the perennial woody plants that appeared 375 million years ago (November 2010)
  • Food Month: Considering what we put in our mouths (October 2010)
image: Gemini Observatory/AURA
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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Deep Space | Auriga's Wheel: When Galaxies Collide

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." -- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, 1980

Auriga is a constellation in the northern sky that takes its name from the Latin word for "charioteer" (i.e., a chariot driver), its stars forming a shape associated with a charioteer's pointed helmet.

Now, star-gazers at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, have found a very strange galaxy that they have dubbed "Auriga's Wheel."

Officially named 2MASX J06470249+4554022, Auriga's Wheel is the 128th known ring galaxy, a odd type of galaxy formed when a smaller galaxy crashes through the center of a larger galaxy, creating a distinctive ring shape. At 1.5 billion light-years away, Auriga's Wheel is the farthest known ring galaxy.

According to the paper reporting this "serendipitous discovery," the collision occurred about 50 million years ago. A visible bridge of stars and gas connects the two galaxies.

In Greek mythology, Auriga is the mythological Greek hero Erichthonius of Athens, the chthonic son of Hephaestus raised by Athena, the goddess of war. He is credited with the invention of the quadriga, the four-horse chariot. If this celestial charioteer has somewhere to go, his galactic chariot will be able to cover quite a distance: The ring of Auriga's Wheel is huge. It has a radius of about 10 kiloparsecs, which means it takes about 32,615 years for light to travel from its center to its edge.

TONIGHT, LOOK UP
  • Find out what's in the sky tonight (Sky and Telescope)
  • Download this month's free evening sky map (Skymaps)
TODAY, TAKE ACTION
  • Help save the James Webb Space Telescope
  • Due 7/29: Tell US National Marine Fisheries Service: Enforce the law, stop the drowning of turtles at shrimp fisheries
  • Tell Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute: Stop your plans to kill 300 monkeys and beagles (In Defense of Animals)
  • Due 8/29: Say YES to creating protected wilderness areas in Colville National Forest in Washington (Conservation Northwest)
  • NY activists: Tell Gov. Cuomo to reward big businesses for uniting profitability with social activism (Care2)
  • Tell Faroe Islands Prime Minister: Stop slaughtering pilot whales
  • Say NO to the most anti-environmental legislation in years (Wilderness Society)
  • Tell Secretary Salazar: Protect the Last Few Mexican Wolves From Traps (Wildearth Guardians)
  • Say NO to hard rock mines poisoning grizzlies (National Wildlife Federation Action Fund)
  • Tell Australia: Stop cruel live animal exports, join the Global Humane Chain
  • If your four-person family skips steak once a week, it's like taking your car off the road for nearly three months (Grist)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
SOME REASONS TO SMILE
  • Bowing to consumer pressure, McDonald's lowers amount of fries in children's meals and adds fruit (New York Times)
  • Welcome Prince! A new bull elephant has arrived at the PAWS Performing Animal Welfare Sanctuary (PAWS)
  • After receiving 51,000+ emails, John West will stop using destructive fish aggregation devices for their canned tuna (Greenpeace)
  • World's 3rd largest sportswear company Puma to eliminate hazardous chemicals from supply chain by 2020 (Greenpeace)
  • Photo tribute to J1, oldest male killer whale in the southern resident population, around 60 years old (Center for Whale Research)
  • Two endangered species get a second chance (Care2)
SOME RELATED POSTS
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
CHECK OUT PAST SERIES
  • Gray Matters: Thinking about thinking (June 2011)
  • Flower Power: Stopping to smell the angiosperms (May 2011)
  • Animal Cruelty: Looking at the devil within (April 2011)
  • Chemical Month: Exploring the vast laboratory of our daily lives (March 2011)
  • Africa Month: Visiting the world's second-largest continent (February 2011)
  • Reports from 2050: Imagining the future (January 2011)
  • Victory Month: Looking at the victories of 2010, made possible by you (December 2010)
  • Tree Month: Climbing the perennial woody plants that appeared 375 million years ago (November 2010)
  • Food Month: Considering what we put in our mouths (October 2010)
image: Auriga's Wheel as seen in the g (left) and r (right) filters from Subaru. (Credit: Blair Conn et. al.)
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Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Deep Space | Infinity Symbol Discovered in Center of Milky Way, Scientists Baffled

"We have a new and exciting mystery on our hands, right at the center of our own galaxy." -- Sergio Molinari, Institute of Space Physics, Rome

Astronomers have discovered that a suspected ring of dense, cold gas and dust at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is oddly warped in the shape of an infinity symbol -- and they have no idea why.

The new infrared image was taken by the Herschel Space Observatory and has shown this ring with the greatest clarity yet, revealing a strange twist of gas. An HSO press release calls it "bizarre," adding that astronomers are "scratching their heads." The ring lies in the center of the bar-shaped region of stars at the center of the galaxy, stretching across space for 300 light-years at a temperature of minus 433 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Astronomers were shocked by what they saw -- the ring, which is in the plane of our galaxy, looked more like an infinity symbol with two lobes pointing to the side," according to the press release. "In fact, they later determined the ring was torqued in the middle, so it only appears to have two lobes. To picture the structure, imagine holding a stiff, elliptical band and twisting the ends in opposite directions, so that one side comes up a bit." [Click here for an annotated version of the image, tracing the shape of the infinity symbol.]

"We have looked at this region at the center of the Milky Way many times before in the infrared," said Alberto Noriega-Crespo, a scientist at NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the co-author of a new paper about the ring in Astrophysical Journal Letters. "But when we looked at the high-resolution images using Herschel's sub-millimeter wavelengths, the presence of a ring is quite clear," said Noriega-Crespo.

"This is what is so exciting about launching a new space telescope like Herschel," said Sergio Molinari of the Institute of Space Physics in Rome, Italy, lead author of the new paper. "We have a new and exciting mystery on our hands, right at the center of our own galaxy."

How bars and rings form in spiral galaxies is not well understood, but one theory is that they are created by gravitational interactions between galaxies. It may be possible that this strange formation was caused by the gravitational pull of the Milky Way's "galactic twin," our nearby neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. In fact, both spiral galaxies are on a collision course, currently moving towards each other at the speed of about 100 kilometers per second. The merging of the twin galaxies will begin in about 2 billion years, before the death of the Sun.

"The two galaxies will swing around each other a couple of times, intermingling their stars as gravitational forces stir them together," according to astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CFA).

"About 5 billion years from now, Andromeda and the Milky Way will have completely combined to form a single, football-shaped elliptical galaxy. The Sun will be an aging star nearing the red giant phase and the end of its lifetime. It and the solar system likely will reside 100,000 light-years from the center of the new galaxy -- 4 times further than the current 25,000 light-year distance."

And what will happen to the infinity symbol? Well, as the astronomers at the CFA said, "Any descendants of humans observing the future sky will experience a very different view. "

TONIGHT, LOOK UP
  • Find out what's in the sky tonight (Sky and Telescope)
  • Download this month's free evening sky map (Skymaps)
TODAY, TAKE ACTION
SOME REASONS TO SMILE
SOME RELATED POSTS
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
CHECK OUT PAST SERIES
  • Gray Matters: Thinking about thinking (June 2011)
  • Flower Power: Stopping to smell the angiosperms (May 2011)
  • Animal Cruelty: Looking at the devil within (April 2011)
  • Chemical Month: Exploring the vast laboratory of our daily lives (March 2011)
  • Africa Month: Visiting the world's second-largest continent (February 2011)
  • Reports from 2050: Imagining the future (January 2011)
  • Victory Month: Looking at the victories of 2010, made possible by you (December 2010)
  • Tree Month: Climbing the perennial woody plants that appeared 375 million years ago (November 2010)
  • Food Month: Considering what we put in our mouths (October 2010)
image: The image was taken using two of Herschel's instruments -- the photodetector array camera and spectrometer (70-micron-light is coded blue; 160-micron light is coded green) and the spectral and photometric imaging receiver (350-micron light is red). (Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech)
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Monday, July 25, 2011

Deep Space | Massive Water Reservoir Found Over 12 Billion Light-Years Away

"Water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times." -- Matt Bradford, NASA

Astronomers have detected the largest and farthest known reservoir of water in the universe.

The water is equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world's oceans and is located more than 12 billion light-years away, according to a NASA press release. It is surrounding APM 08279+5255, a quasar in the constellation Lynx powered by an enormous black hole that is steadily consuming a surrounding disk of gas and dust.

"The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water," said Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the leader of one of the teams that made the discovery.

"It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times," Bradford said.

Could this massive amount of water be harboring life? Astrobiologists have focused on the planets Venus and Mars; the moons of Jupiter, such as Europa; the moons of Saturn, such as Titan and Enceladus; and extrasolar planets, such as Gliese 581 c, g and d as being potential locations where life might have arisen -- or continue to exist -- due to the presence of water.

But getting up close to APM 08279+5255 means traveling at the speed of light for 12 billion years. And even if we were able to visit one day, it might no longer be there. After all, the infrared images taken of the quasar by the Hubble Space Telescope took 12 billion years to get here.

TONIGHT, LOOK UP
  • Find out what's in the sky tonight (Sky and Telescope)
  • Download this month's free evening sky map (Skymaps)
TODAY, TAKE ACTION
SOME REASONS TO SMILE
  • Peruvian president Alan Garcia signed into law a ban of wild animals in circuses (Animal Defenders International)
  • Taiwan bans steel-jawed traps (PETA)
  • ASPCA removes nearly 300 animals from a hoarder (ASPCA)
  • Benefits of Living in a Tiny Home: Time, Money, Peace of Mind (Mother Earth News)
  • Across the country, people are discovering that it's surprisingly easy to recycle household water (MotherEarthNews)
  • The week's cutest animal photos (baby hippos and snow leopards) (HuffPostGreen)
  • More than 30 nations have signed global research alliance on agri-research & climate mitigation (Business.Scoop.co.nz)
SOME RELATED POSTS
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
CHECK OUT PAST SERIES
  • Gray Matters: Thinking about thinking (June 2011)
  • Flower Power: Stopping to smell the angiosperms (May 2011)
  • Animal Cruelty: Looking at the devil within (April 2011)
  • Chemical Month: Exploring the vast laboratory of our daily lives (March 2011)
  • Africa Month: Visiting the world's second-largest continent (February 2011)
  • Reports from 2050: Imagining the future (January 2011)
  • Victory Month: Looking at the victories of 2010, made possible by you (December 2010)
  • Tree Month: Climbing the perennial woody plants that appeared 375 million years ago (November 2010)
  • Food Month: Considering what we put in our mouths (October 2010)
image: This artist's concept illustrates a quasar, or feeding black hole, similar to APM 08279+5255, where astronomers discovered huge amounts of water vapor. Gas and dust likely form a torus around the central black hole, with clouds of charged gas above and below. X-rays emerge from the very central region, while thermal infrared radiation is emitted by dust throughout most of the torus. While this figure shows the quasar's torus approximately edge-on, the torus around APM 08279+5255 is likely positioned face-on from our point of view. (Credit: NASA/ESA)
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Friday, July 22, 2011

Deep Space | Are There Parallel Universes?

"Some of my physicist colleagues find the multiverse theory alarming." -- Alex Vilenkin, Tufts University

The idea that our known universe (the one that the scientific community generally agrees started with the Big Bang around 13.7 billion years ago) may actually be just one universe of many that together make up everything that exists, is a contentious one.

One of the primary criticisms of the various "multiverse" theories is that they can't be tested empirically; they simply fall outside current scientific methodology. But Alex Vilenkin, Director of the Institute of Cosmology and the L. and J. Bernstein Professor of Evolutionary Science at Tufts Universe, disagrees.

Vilenkin's 2006 best-selling book Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes, according to the prologue, "describes a new cosmological theory that says that every possible chain of events, no matter how bizarre or improbable, has actually happened somewhere in the universe -- and not only once, but an infinite number of times."

Now, in an article published this week online on Scientific American, Vilenkin makes the case again -- and offers a way in which this theory can be tested.

"Surprisingly, observational tests of the multiverse picture may in fact be possible," Vilenkin says. "Anthony Aguirre, Matt Johnson, Matt Kleban and others have pointed out that a collision of our expanding bubble with another bubble in the multiverse would produce an imprint in the cosmic background radiation -- a round spot of higher or lower radiation intensity. A detection of such a spot with the predicted intensity profile would provide direct evidence for the existence of other bubble universes. The search is now on, but unfortunately there is no guarantee that a bubble collision has occurred within our cosmic horizon."

Vilenkin also says that the observation in the 1990s of "dark energy" -- a mysterious energy that is causing an acceleration in the rate of expansion of the universe -- "could be our first evidence that there is indeed a huge multiverse out there," noting that this discovery has "changed many minds" about the possibility of alternate universes.

But though many scientists remain skeptical of the multiverse concept, it seems that the general public is keenly interested. After his book received so much public attention, Vilenkin had to hire four bodyguards and "moved to an undisclosed location to avoid paparazzi," according to the book's prologue.

Perhaps he can find some solace in the possibility that in some other universe, the paparazzi aren't nearly as annoying as they are here in ours.

TONIGHT, LOOK UP
  • Find out what's in the sky tonight (Sky and Telescope)
  • Download this month's free evening sky map (Skymaps)
TODAY, TAKE ACTION
SOME REASONS TO SMILE
  • Last night, President Alan Garcia signed into law a ban of wild animals in circuses in Peru (Animal Defenders)
  • Hundreds of endangered gibbons discovered in Vietnam (Care2)
  • Elephant population rising in Uganda (All Africa)
SOME RELATED POSTS
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
CHECK OUT PAST SERIES
  • Gray Matters: Thinking about thinking (June 2011)
  • Flower Power: Stopping to smell the angiosperms (May 2011)
  • Animal Cruelty: Looking at the devil within (April 2011)
  • Chemical Month: Exploring the vast laboratory of our daily lives (March 2011)
  • Africa Month: Visiting the world's second-largest continent (February 2011)
  • Reports from 2050: Imagining the future (January 2011)
  • Victory Month: Looking at the victories of 2010, made possible by you (December 2010)
  • Tree Month: Climbing the perennial woody plants that appeared 375 million years ago (November 2010)
  • Food Month: Considering what we put in our mouths (October 2010)
image: The quantum-mechanical "Schrödinger's cat" paradox according to the many-worlds interpretation. In this interpretation every event is a branch point; the cat is both alive and dead, even before the box is opened, but the "alive" and "dead" cats are in different branches of the universe, both of which are equally real, but which cannot interact with each other (Wikimedia Commons)
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Thursday, July 21, 2011

Deep Space | ARTEMIS, Modern Goddess of the Photon Hunt

"We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present." -- Victor Hugo

Today in 356 BC, the Temple of Artemis, a Greek temple dedicated to the goddess of the hunt, was destroyed by arson. Now, over 2,300 years later, the ARTEMIS project is also hunting, but not for deer like its namesake deity, but for electromagnetic radiation, streams of photons emanating from deep within the Milky Way galaxy.

ARTEMIS -- which stands for the French and rather lengthy "Architectures de bolometres pour des Telescopes a grand champ de vue dans le domaine sub-Millimetrique au Sol," is a large bolometer camera in the submillimeter range that was installed last year at the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), a radio telescope located in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.

In other words, ARTEMIS takes images of microwave signals arriving at Earth from deep space. A project of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), it has helped astronomers study star formation and debris disks, disks of cosmic dust that are orbiting stars, about 900 of which have been identified since 2001.

One of the regions that ARTEMIS has imaged is NGC 3576 (shown here), a minor nebula about 9,000 light-years away in the Sagittarius arm of our Milky Way galaxy. It is a high-mass star-forming region that is not observable by telescopes in the Northern hemisphere.

The ancient Greek poet Callimachus wrote that the young Artemis "amuses herself on mountains with archery." Today's young ARTEMIS is also a hunter, but hangs out on a desert with a high-powered camera.

TONIGHT, LOOK UP
  • Find out what's in the sky tonight (Sky and Telescope)
  • Download this month's free evening sky map (Skymaps)
TODAY, TAKE ACTION
SOME REASONS TO SMILE
  • In a major victory for sharks, Taiwan's national fisheries agency decided to require sharks caught at sea to be landed "fins-naturally-attached" beginning next year (Humane Society International)
  • New York Mayor Bloomberg gives $50 million to Sierra Club to fight coal-fired power plants (Washington Post)
  • "The Exultant Ark" examines animal pleasure with pictures by photographers from around the world (New York Times)
  • Two rescued senior dogs on their way to new lives (Humane Society of the United States)
SOME RELATED POSTS
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
CHECK OUT PAST SERIES
  • Gray Matters: Thinking about thinking (June 2011)
  • Flower Power: Stopping to smell the angiosperms (May 2011)
  • Animal Cruelty: Looking at the devil within (April 2011)
  • Chemical Month: Exploring the vast laboratory of our daily lives (March 2011)
  • Africa Month: Visiting the world's second-largest continent (February 2011)
  • Reports from 2050: Imagining the future (January 2011)
  • Victory Month: Looking at the victories of 2010, made possible by you (December 2010)
  • Tree Month: Climbing the perennial woody plants that appeared 375 million years ago (November 2010)
  • Food Month: Considering what we put in our mouths (October 2010)
image: First image of NGC3576 at 450 microns, a Southern hemisphere region of high-mass star formation that is not observable with Northern telescopes (Institut de Recherche sur les Lois Fondamentales de l'Univers)
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Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Deep Space | Two Suns Locked in a Dance of Death

"I nearly fell out of my chair at the telescope." -- Warren Brown, Smithsonian

Astronomers have spotted two white dwarf stars circling each other so fast -- 370 miles per second (600 km/s) -- that "if there were aliens living on a planet around this star system, they would see one of their two suns disappear every 6 minutes" as they eclipse each other, said Mukremin Kilic, a Smithsonian astronomer and co-author of the study about this remarkable discovery, in a Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics press release (aptly titled "Evolved Stars Locked in Fatalistic Dance").

But the two stars aren't just circling (and continually eclipsing) each other, they are spiraling closer together. At the moment, they are orbiting each other every 12 minutes. The bigger star has such a powerful gravitational pull on the smaller one that it causes bulges in its mass that would be the equivalent of tides on Earth 120 miles high.

By observing their "fatalistic dance," astronomers will get rare opportunity to test both Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity and the origin of some unusual supernovae. And in about 900,000 years -- a fraction of time in astronomical terms -- they will merge, possibly exploding in a supernova.

"I nearly fell out of my chair at the telescope when I saw one star change its speed by a staggering 750 miles per second in just a few minutes," said Smithsonian astronomer and lead author Warren Brown.

In the poem "Danse Macabre" from his 1857 book Les Fleurs du Mal, French poet Charles Baudelaire writes, "In every clime and under every sun, Death laughs at ye, mad mortals, as ye run." But now it seems that even suns can also engage in a "dance of death."

TONIGHT, LOOK UP
  • Find out what's in the sky tonight (Sky and Telescope)
  • Download this month's free evening sky map (Skymaps)
TODAY, TAKE ACTION
SOME REASONS TO SMILE
A FEW RELATED POSTS
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
CHECK OUT PAST SERIES
  • Gray Matters: Thinking about thinking (June 2011)
  • Flower Power: Stopping to smell the angiosperms (May 2011)
  • Animal Cruelty: Looking at the devil within (April 2011)
  • Chemical Month: Exploring the vast laboratory of our daily lives (March 2011)
  • Africa Month: Visiting the world's second-largest continent (February 2011)
  • Reports from 2050: Imagining the future (January 2011)
  • Victory Month: Looking at the victories of 2010, made possible by you (December 2010)
  • Tree Month: Climbing the perennial woody plants that appeared 375 million years ago (November 2010)
  • Food Month: Considering what we put in our mouths (October 2010)
image: Artist's conception of two white dwarf stars on the brink of a merger (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
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Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Deep Space | Eclipse of Nearby "Super-Earth" Spotted

"Everyone’s been waiting for a system like this." -- Josh Winn, MIT

A team of astronomers led by MIT physicist Josh Winn has observed a "super-Earth" eclipsing its star, which is "right around the corner," at least in astronomical terms.

Only 40 light years away, 55 Cancri e is twice as big as Earth and over eight times as massive.

According to an April 2011 study led by Winn, the exoplanet is most likely "a rock-iron composition supplemented by a significant mass of water, gas, or other light elements," similar to Earth.

Though exoplanets are main suspects for possible extraterrestrial life, the kind of life we have on Earth would not survive on 55 Cancri e: Its surface temperature is about 2,700 degrees Celsius.

But this star system has a lot of value. As the star is relatively close to Earth, it appears 100 times brighter than other stars with known exoplanets.

"Everything we do in astronomy is starving for more light," Winn says in an MIT news release. "The more light a star gives you, the more chances you have of learning something interesting…and everyone’s been waiting for a system like this that you can study in great detail."

"It’s still going to be hard to learn everything about this planet," says Winn. "But at least we have what might be the best system in the sky to study it."

TONIGHT, LOOK UP
  • Find out what's in the sky tonight (Sky and Telescope)
  • Download this month's free evening sky map (Skymaps)
TODAY, TAKE ACTION
SOME REASONS TO SMILE
  • The New Vegan CEO (Care2)
  • Maritime countries agree on first-ever shipping emissions regulation (Guardian)
  • Nearly 3,000 fewer New Yorkers died of cancer last year compared to a decade ago (Associated Press)
A FEW RELATED POSTS
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
CHECK OUT PAST SERIES
  • Gray Matters: Thinking about thinking (June 2011)
  • Flower Power: Stopping to smell the angiosperms (May 2011)
  • Animal Cruelty: Looking at the devil within (April 2011)
  • Chemical Month: Exploring the vast laboratory of our daily lives (March 2011)
  • Africa Month: Visiting the world's second-largest continent (February 2011)
  • Reports from 2050: Imagining the future (January 2011)
  • Victory Month: Looking at the victories of 2010, made possible by you (December 2010)
  • Tree Month: Climbing the perennial woody plants that appeared 375 million years ago (November 2010)
  • Food Month: Considering what we put in our mouths (October 2010)
image: A rendering of the silhouette of 55 Cancri e transiting its parent star, compared to the Earth and Jupiter transiting our sun. (image credit: Jason Rowe, NASA/Ames; Jaymie Matthews, UBC)
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