Really Rocket Science

Great work by astronomers Adam Kraus (University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy) and Michael Ireland (Macquarie University and the Australian Astronomical Observatory) in finding the youngest planet ever.

“LkCa 15 b is the youngest planet ever found, about 5 times younger than the previous record holder,” said Kraus. “This young gas giant is being built out of the dust and gas. In the past, you couldn’t measure this kind of phenomenon because it’s happening so close to the star. But, for the first time, we’ve been able to directly measure the planet itself as well as the dusty matter around it.”

Kraus will be presenting the discovery at an Oct. 19 meeting at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The meeting follows the acceptance of a research paper on the discovery by Kraus and Ireland by The Astrophysical Journal.

The optical sleight of hand used by the astronomers is to combine the power of Keck’s Adaptive Optics with a technique called aperture mask interferometry. The former is the use of a deformable mirror to rapidly correct for atmospheric distortions of starlight. The latter involves placing a small mask with several holes in the path of the light collected and concentrated by a giant telescope. With that, the scientists can manipulate the light waves.

“It’s like we have an array of small mirrors,” said Kraus. “We can manipulate the light and cancel out distortions.” The technique allows the astronomers to cancel out the bright light of stars. They can then resolve disks of dust around stars and see gaps in the dusty layers where protoplanets may be hiding.

“Interferometry has actually been around since the 1800s, but through the use of adaptive optics has only been able to reach nearby young suns for about the last 7 years.” said Dr. Ireland. “Since then we’ve been trying to push the technique to its limits using the biggest telescopes in the world, especially Keck.”

The discovery of LkCa 15 b began as a survey of 150 young dusty stars in star-forming regions. That led to the more concentrated study of a dozen stars.

“LkCa 15 was only our second target, and we immediately knew we were seeing something new,” said Kraus. “We could see a faint point source near the star, so thinking it might be a Jupiter-like planet we went back a year later to get more data.”

In further investigations at varying wavelengths, the astronomers were intrigued to discover that the phenomenon was more complex than a single companion object.

“We realized we had uncovered a super Jupiter-sized gas planet, but that we could also measure the dust and gas surrounding it. We’d found a planet at its very beginning” said Kraus.

Drs. Kraus and Ireland plan to continue their observations of LkCa 15 and other nearby young stars in their efforts to construct a clearer picture of how planets and solar systems form.

Mirrors. Go figure.

Want to know how this was done? Get the details.

WTF is HUDF? Hubble Ultra Deep Field, KWIM?

It’s the deepest ever. Seriously:

The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) is an image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, composited from Hubble Space Telescope data accumulated over a period from September 24, 2003, through to January 16, 2004. It is the deepest image of the universe ever taken,[1] looking back approximately 13 billion years (between 400 and 800 million years after the Big Bang), and it will be used to search for galaxies that existed at that time. The HUDF image was taken in a section of the sky with a low density of bright stars in the near-field, allowing much better viewing of dimmer, more distant objects. The image contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies. In August and September 2009, the Hubble’s Deep Field was expanded using the infrared channel of the recently attached Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). When combined with existing HUDF data, astronomers were able to identify a new list of potentially very distant galaxies.[2]

Located southwest of Orion in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax, the image covers 11.0 square arcminutes. This is just one-seventieth the solid angle subtended by the full moon as viewed from Earth, smaller than a 1 mm-by-1 mm square of paper held 1 meter away, and equal to roughly one thirteen-millionth of the total area of the sky. The image is oriented so that the upper left corner points toward north (−46.4°) on the celestial sphere.

This would look good on your wall.

Missed the images from Mars over the last three years? Don’t worry, there’s a video.

If you’ve ever dreamed of visiting Mars, buckle up: The following video of NASA’s Mars Opportunity Rover crawling the surface of the red planet between September 2008 and August 2011 is about as close as you’re going to come at this point.

Opportunity’s panoramic still-image camera captured 309 photos as the rover crawled 13 miles to get from Martian Victoria to another, larger crater, the 14-mile-diameter Endeavor, where the rover is currently still located, busy inspecting Martian rocks. The still images were then stitched together to create the video slideshow. A soundtrack was also added by taking data from Opportunity’s accelerometers and speeding it up by 1,000 times to achieve an audible frequency.

If you’ve ever seen the movie Dune (1984), you’ll recall the dramatic worm sightings when you see the Mars terrain…

Good show, I say!

Today’s Daily Mail (U.K.) writes of Damian Peach, Astronomer Photographer of the Year (2010)…

From detailed solar flares to an amazing image of Jupiter and two of its moons, this tour of our solar system has been captured by an amateur British astronomer in his back garden.

Damian Peach, an electronic engineer from Selsey, West Sussex, has spent the last ten years documenting the changing face of our solar system.

Spending a relatively modest £10,000 on a high-speed telescope and electrical equipment, Mr Peach’s crystal clear images are good enough to rival those of Nasa and the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

So much so that in 2010, he became the only Briton to win the prestigious Astronomy Photographer Of The Year Award for his composite photograph of Jupiter’s moons, Ganymede and Io, orbiting the stormy surface of the gas giant.

Mr Peach said: ‘It’s just fantastic that it’s possible to do something like this from your own back garden.

‘This has been made possible by recent leaps in technology. These days surprisingly good results are possible with small telescopes and low cost webcams.

‘The results possible for home astronomers now were not achievable until the 1990s by even the largest telescopes on Earth.

‘The resolution possible with large amateur telescopes could now be considered of a professional quality in what the images reveal on the planets.’

Great job, mate!

You can skip this step and go directly to the million-dollar images the space agencies put out, and get a monster-size print for a few bucks.

Today’s image comes to us courtesy of the Spitzer Space Telescope…

This composite image of NGC 281 contains X-ray data from Chandra (purple) with infrared observations from Spitzer (red, green, blue). The high-mass stars in NGC 281 drive many aspects of their galactic environment through powerful winds flowing from their surfaces and intense radiation that heats surrounding gas, “boiling it away” into interstellar space. This process results in the formation of large columns of gas and dust, as seen on the left side of the image. These structures likely contain newly forming stars. The eventual deaths of massive stars as supernovas will also seed the galaxy with material and energy.

Read more about NGC 281.

动画演示“天宫一号”发射全过程

China’s Tiangong-1 is set to launch into low-earth orbit today, with the hopes of some day building a space station to rival the ISS.

Do they have a plan to dominate space? Not really. Dr. Morris Jones of Australia explains all in Space Daily…

This module is a small space laboratory with a single docking port. It is not the first module of a large Chinese space station, as some media reports are saying.

Tiangong 1 will test some of the technologies that will be used to build a large Chinese space station in the future, but it is not even a prototype of the modules that will be used to build the station.

Tiangong 1 will be used as a rendezvous and docking target for the unmanned Shenzhou 8 spacecraft, which will launch before the end of this year. China has never docked two spacecraft before. Shenzhou 8 will stay docked with Tiangong 1 for about three weeks, and will then send its descent module to a soft landing back on Earth.

If all has gone well with this flight, we can expect Shenzhou 9 to fly to Tiangong 1 in 2012, this time with astronauts aboard. They will live aboard the laboratory and their docked Shenzhou spacecraft for a short mission, then come home. Later in 2012, the Shenzhou 10 mission will also fly to Tiangong 1, delivering its second (and probably final) crew.

At this stage, we don’t know how many astronauts will be aboard Shenzhou 9 or 10. A maximum of three crewmembers can fly aboard one of these spacecraft. It’s possible that there will be two or three astronauts on these expeditions. At least one of the missions is expected to carry China’s first female astronaut.

Tiangong 1 is a vital step in China’s quest to develop a space station, but it must be seen as an intermediate program. Two more Tiangong laboratories are expected to be launched by China in the years ahead, gradually testing more technology for the space station.

Tiangong 3 is expected to have more than one docking port, and will possibly see another regular Tiangong module docked with it before a crew is launched there.

When China’s space station is finally assembled in orbit around 2020, the Tiangong spacecraft will see a new lease of life. It will be refitted to serve as a cargo carrier, delivering food and other supplies to the astronauts aboard the space station.

Yes, it’s a wonderful program, and we’ve been waiting a long time to see Tiangong fly. But please don’t confuse it with the next step in China’s space program. When the final space station is built, it will eclipse the modestly sized Tiangong laboratory in terms of size, performance and achievements.

Good luck!

Via Discovery News…

This gorgeous video was made by science teacher James Drake using images downloaded from The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. This is a great online resource with basically all of the images taken from orbit, categorized into a searchable database by region and date. He used a free program calledVirtualDub to create the final edit.

PHOTOS: Inside Atlantis’ Final Space Station Mission

James explains on YouTube: “This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.”

My favorite parts are the golden reflections of the cities’ lights on the solar panels of the ISS and the strobelike flashes of lightning visible in some of the clouds.

In Upstate New York on Saturday (Columbia County), the clouds went away to show a beautiful view of the stars. Light pollution was at a minimum and one of my friends, who spent some time skiing in New Zealand, commented on how the view from the Southern Hemisphere is completely different.

How appropriate that the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) on 24 September 2011 was from Mangaia, one of the Cook Islands…

Explanation: From Sagittarius to Carina, the Milky Way Galaxy shines in this dark night sky above planet Earth’s lush island paradise of Mangaia. Familiar to denizens of the southern hemisphere, the gorgeous skyscape includes the bulging galactic center at the upper left and bright stars Alpha and Beta Centauri just right of center. About 10 kilometers wide, volcanic Mangaia the southernmost of the Cook Islands. Geologists estimate that at 18 million years old it is the oldest island in the Pacific Ocean. Of course, the Milky Way is somewhat older, with the galaxy’s oldest stars estimated to be over 13 billion years old. (Editor’s note: This image holds the distinction of being selected as winner in the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition in the Earth and Space category.)

I simply must visit New Zealand some day, but I’ll settle for watching USA vs. Italy today in the Rugby World Cup — in New Zealand.

Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s SUPERNOVA!!

Tonight, light from a white dwarf star that exploded 21 million years ago, give or take, and is brighter than all the stars in the universe combined, can be seen around the Big Dipper with a pair of binoculars. May your night sky be clear.

Here’s Peter Nugent, an astronomer and senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, with the details…

This is what you’re looking for, known as PTF11kly.

Besides an over-the-top Flash site, the Juno mission to Jupiter is pretty fascinating. It began years ago, culminating in a spectacular launch the other day. Since it’s got a long way to go, strap-on solid rocket boosters were called in to help make really move on up…

Now all we need to do is wait five years to get there.

Besides a very interesting payload system, it carries three LEGO figurines…

NASA’s Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft will carry the 1.5-inch likeness of Galileo Galilei, the Roman god Jupiter and his wife Juno to Jupiter when the spacecraft launches this Friday, Aug. 5. The inclusion of the three mini-statues, or figurines, is part of a joint outreach and educational program developed as part of the partnership between NASA and the LEGO Group to inspire children to explore science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

In Greek and Roman mythology, Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief. From Mount Olympus, Juno was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter’s true nature. Juno holds a magnifying glass to signify her search for the truth, while her husband holds a lightning bolt. The third LEGO crew member is Galileo Galilei, who made several important discoveries about Jupiter, including the four largest satellites of Jupiter (named the Galilean moons in his honor). Of course, the miniature Galileo has his telescope with him on the journey.

LEGO is cool.