KREUZADER (Posts tagged astronomy)

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Heavy metal planet brings the heat A planet orbiting the star was discovered in 2015 by the Wide-Angle Search for Planets, or WASP, a series of cameras with telephoto lenses that cover a huge swath of sky looking for transits: when a planet orbiting...

Heavy metal planet brings the heat

A planet orbiting the star was discovered in 2015 by the Wide-Angle Search for Planets, or WASP, a series of cameras with telephoto lenses that cover a huge swath of sky looking for transits: when a planet orbiting its star passes directly in front of it, dimming the star’s light by a fraction.

WASP-121b, as the planet is called, is just terrifying. It’s a little bit more massive than Jupiter (1.2 times) but is much larger, 1.9 times the diameter. That’s because it’s puffed up. And just why is it puffed up?

Because it’s hot. It orbits the star at a distance of less than 4 million kilometers — compare that to Earth’s orbit around the Sun of 150 million km. WASP-121b is so close it screams around the star in only 1.27 days, which is just 30.5 hours! Its year is barely more than an Earth day long.

It’s so close to the star that it sizzles; the average temperature is about 2100°C (3800°F). And that’s the average. The hottest spot on its day side cooks at over 3000°C (5400°F). That’s hotter than some stars!

astronomy space
Death by Spaghettification: ESO Telescopes Record Last Moments of Star Devoured by a Black Hole Using telescopes from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and other organisations around the world, astronomers have spotted a rare blast of light...

Death by Spaghettification: ESO Telescopes Record Last Moments of Star Devoured by a Black Hole

Using telescopes from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and other organisations around the world, astronomers have spotted a rare blast of light from a star being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole. The phenomenon, known as a tidal disruption event, is the closest such flare recorded to date at just over 215 million light-years from Earth, and has been studied in unprecedented detail. The research is published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Source: eso.org
astronomy black hole astrophysics european southern observatory space
First direct observation of exoplanet β Pictoris c Astronomers using the GRAVITY instrument at the VLT telescopes in Chile have now obtained the first direct confirmation of an exoplanet discovered by radial-velocity. As the planet “β Pictoris c” is...

First direct observation of exoplanet β Pictoris c

Astronomers using the GRAVITY instrument at the VLT telescopes in Chile have now obtained the first direct confirmation of an exoplanet discovered by radial-velocity. As the planet “β Pictoris c” is in a close orbit around its parent star, this is the first time that the faint glint of the exoplanet next to the glare of the star has been directly observed. With these observations, astronomers can obtain both the flux and dynamical masses of exoplanets, allowing them to put closer constrains on formation models for exoplanets.

Source: mpe.mpg.de
astronomy space
A terrestrial-mass rogue planet candidate detected in the shortest-timescale microlensing event Some low-mass planets are expected to be ejected from their parent planetary systems during early stages of planetary system formation. According to...

A terrestrial-mass rogue planet candidate detected in the shortest-timescale microlensing event

Some low-mass planets are expected to be ejected from their parent planetary systems during early stages of planetary system formation. According to planet-formation theories, such as the core accretion theory, typical masses of ejected planets should be between 0.3 and 1.0 M⊕. Although in practice such objects do not emit any light, they may be detected using gravitational microlensing via their light-bending gravity. Microlensing events due to terrestrial-mass rogue planets are expected to have extremely small angular Einstein radii (< 1 uas) and extremely short timescales (< 0.1 day). Here, we present the discovery of the shortest-timescale microlensing event, OGLE-2016-BLG-1928, identified to date (tE≈0.0288 day=41.5min). Thanks to the detection of finite-source effects in the light curve of the event, we were able to measure the angular Einstein radius of the lens θE=0.842±0.064 uas, making the event the most extreme short-timescale microlens discovered to date. Depending on its unknown distance, the lens may be a Mars- to Earth-mass object, with the former possibility favored by the Gaia proper motion measurement of the source. We rule out stellar companions up to the projected distance of 8.0 au from the planet. Our discovery demonstrates that terrestrial-mass free-floating planets can be detected and characterized using microlensing.

Source: arxiv.org
astronomy space
A New View of Jupiter’s Storms This latest image of Jupiter, taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on Aug. 25, 2020, was captured when the planet was 406 million miles from Earth. Hubble’s sharp view is giving researchers an updated weather report...

A New View of Jupiter’s Storms

This latest image of Jupiter, taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on Aug. 25, 2020, was captured when the planet was 406 million miles from Earth. Hubble’s sharp view is giving researchers an updated weather report on the monster planet’s turbulent atmosphere, including a remarkable new storm brewing, and a cousin of the famous Great Red Spot region gearing up to change color – again.

A unique and exciting detail of Hubble’s snapshot appears at mid-northern latitudes as a bright, white, stretched-out storm traveling around the planet at 350 miles per hour (560 kilometers per hour). This single plume erupted on Aug. 18, 2020 – and ground-based observers have discovered two more that appeared later at the same latitude.

Source: nasa.gov
nasa astronomy hubble space telescope jupiter
Astronomers Have Discovered a 2-km Asteroid Orbiting Closer to the Sun than Venus Astronomers have painstakingly built models of the asteroid population, and those models predict that there will be ~1 km sized asteroids that orbit closer to the Sun...

Astronomers Have Discovered a 2-km Asteroid Orbiting Closer to the Sun than Venus

Astronomers have painstakingly built models of the asteroid population, and those models predict that there will be ~1 km sized asteroids that orbit closer to the Sun than Venus does. The problem is, nobody’s been able to find one. Until now.

Astronomers working with the Zwicky Transient Facility say they’ve finally found one. But this one’s bigger, at about 2 km. If its existence can be confirmed, then asteroid population models may have to be updated.

A new paper presenting this result is up on arxiv.org, a pre-press publication site. It’s titled “A kilometer-scale asteroid inside Venus’s orbit.” The lead author is Dr. Wing-Huen Ip, a Professor of Astronomy at the Institute of Astronomy, National Central University, Taiwan.

The newly-discovered asteroid is named 2020 AV2. 2020 AV2 has an aphelion distance of only 0.65 astronomical units, and is about 2 km in diameter. Its discovery is surprising since models predict no asteroids this large inside Venus’ orbit. It could be evidence of a new population of asteroids, or it could just be the largest of its population.

Source: universetoday.com
astronomy asteroid venus
First possible “survivor” planet orbiting a white dwarf seen via NASA telescopes A potential planet… where no planet should be. An international team of astronomers utilizing NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and data obtained from the...

First possible “survivor” planet orbiting a white dwarf seen via NASA telescopes

A potential planet… where no planet should be.

An international team of astronomers utilizing NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and data obtained from the now-retired Spitzer space telescope have reported an astounding potential discovery of a surviving planet closely orbiting a white dwarf.

So what’s the big deal?  Scientists have found many exoplanets in close orbits of their parent stars.

Here’s the confusing part: The way a white dwarf is created destroys nearby objects either by incineration or gravitational destruction.

White dwarfs form when stars like the Sun near the end of their life cycles.  They swell up, expand to hundreds and even thousands of times their regular size, forming a red giant.

Eventually, that outer, expanded layer is ejected from the star and only a hot, dense white dwarf core remains.

So how did a planet, known as WD 1856 b, that is Jupiter-like get into such a close proximity that it completes an orbit of the white dwarf (that is only 18,000 km / 11,000 miles across) every 34 hours?

Source: nasaspaceflight.com
astronomy space nasa
How big money is powering a massive hunt for alien intelligence SETI researchers are used to negative results, but they are trying harder than ever to turn that record around. Breakthrough Listen, the $100 million, 10-year, privately funded SETI...

How big money is powering a massive hunt for alien intelligence

SETI researchers are used to negative results, but they are trying harder than ever to turn that record around. Breakthrough Listen, the $100 million, 10-year, privately funded SETI effort Siemion leads, is lifting a field that has for decades relied on sporadic philanthropic handouts. Prior to Breakthrough Listen, SETI was “creeping along” with a few dozen hours of telescope time a year, Siemion says; now it gets thousands. It’s like “sitting in a Formula 1 racing car,” he says. The new funds have also been “a huge catalyst” for training scientists in SETI, says Jason Wright, director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, which opened this year. “They really are nurturing a community.”

Breakthrough Listen is bolstering radio surveys, which are the mainstay of SETI. But the money is also spurring other searches, in case aliens opt for other kinds of messages—laser flashes, for example—or none at all, revealing themselves only through passive “technosignatures.” And because the data gathered by Breakthrough Listen are posted in a public archive, astronomers are combing through it for nonliving phenomena: mysterious deep-space pulses called fast radio bursts and proposed dark matter particles called axions. “There are untapped possibilities here,” says axion searcher Matthew Lawson of Stockholm University.

Perhaps the most important consequence of Breakthrough Listen is that it has nudged SETI, once considered fringe science, toward the mainstream. “Journals are relaxing and letting good technosignature papers be published,” says astrobiologist Jacob Haqq-Misra of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. “The giggle factor is reducing.” After nearly 3 decades of eschewing SETI, NASA organized a technosignature workshop in 2018. In June, it awarded a grant to model the detectability of possible technosignatures in the atmospheres of exoplanets, its first ever SETI-related grant not involving radio searches.

Source: sciencemag.org
seti astronomy radio astronomy
The First Surviving Photograph of the Moon: John Adams Whipple and How the Birth of Astrophotography Married Immortality and Impermanence In 1847, the Harvard College Observatory acquired a colossal telescope dubbed the Great Refractor. It would...

The First Surviving Photograph of the Moon: John Adams Whipple and How the Birth of Astrophotography Married Immortality and Impermanence

In 1847, the Harvard College Observatory acquired a colossal telescope dubbed the Great Refractor. It would remain the most powerful in America for twenty years. Enraptured by the imaging potential of the mighty instrument, observatory director William Bond befriended the daguerreotypist John Adams Whipple (September 10, 1822–April 10, 1891). Whipple thought of photography as a figurative art rather than a technical craft, but he applied it to the advancement of science. The two men began a series of collaborations that lit the dawn of astrophotography.

Four years into it, the thirty-year-old Whipple would awe the world with his stunning photographs of celestial objects — particularly his photographs of the Moon. Louis Daguerre himself had taken the first lunar photograph on January 2, 1839 — five days before announcing his invention, which marked the birth of photography — but his studio and his entire archive were destroyed by a fire two months later. Whipple’s remains the earliest known surviving photograph of the Moon — an image that continues to stun with its simple visual poetics even as technology has far eclipsed the primitive equipment of its photographer.

Whipple’s collaboration with Bond was the beginning of what would become the world’s largest collection of astrophotography plates at the Harvard College Observatory. From this vast visual library, a team of women known as the Harvard Computers would wrest pioneering insight into the nature of the universe, patiently analyzing and annotating the glass plates that today number half a million.

Source: brainpickings.org
moon astronomy astrophotography photography
Australian telescope finds no signs of alien technology in 10 million star systems A radio telescope in outback Western Australia has completed the deepest and broadest search at low frequencies for alien technologies, scanning a patch of sky known...

Australian telescope finds no signs of alien technology in 10 million star systems

A radio telescope in outback Western Australia has completed the deepest and broadest search at low frequencies for alien technologies, scanning a patch of sky known to include at least 10 million stars. 

Astronomers used the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope to explore hundreds of times more broadly than any previous search for extraterrestrial life.

The study, published today in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, observed the sky around the Vela constellation. But in this part of the Universe at least, it appears other civilisations are elusive, if they exist.

The research was conducted by CSIRO astronomer Dr Chenoa Tremblay and Professor Steven Tingay, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).

Dr Tremblay said the telescope was searching for powerful radio emissions at frequencies similar to FM radio frequencies, that could indicate the presence of an intelligent source.

Source: icrar.org
seti radio astronomy astronomy