Astronomical Stargazer Thread

[BansheeOne]

UV image of aurora borealis on Jupiter overlaid on visible light image of the planet, courtesy of Hubble.

 

[Ivanhoe]

UV image of aurora borealis on Jupiter overlaid on visible light image of the planet, courtesy of Hubble.

 

 

That's not a natural aurora, it is atmospheric response to a target designator beam.

[DB]

It proves that Jupiter is Jewish.

[Mobius]

What about MeerKat? Jeez, South Africa, MeerKat.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/first-image-released-worlds-super-radio-telescope-175305457.html?ref=gs

[Mobius]

It proves that Jupiter is Jewish.

No is holy. Some Christian images portray Jesus and Mary with bright ring of light above their head like glowing crowns.

Edited July 17, 2016 by Mobius

[Panzermann]

 

 

It proves that Jupiter is Jewish.

No is holy. Some Christian images portray Jesus and Mary with bright ring of light above their head like glowing crowns.

You mean halo. All saints are portrayed this way in christian iconography.

 

 

But it really looks like Jupiter is wearing a cap.

[BansheeOne]

An Earth-like Planet Might Be Orbiting Proxima Centauri

By Carl Engelking | August 12, 2016 11:31 pm

 

Microsoft added the “Start” button to Windows in 1995, which was the same year scientists discovered the first exoplanet orbiting a star like ours – technically, astronomers found several terrestrial planets orbiting a pulsar in 1992.

 

But in 20 years, give or take, we’ve grown spoiled by the abundance of exoplanets in the universe. Kepler, the planet-hunter, has confirmed over 2,200 of them. Today, it’s safe to assume nearly every star has its companions.

 

The ante for hyping a new exoplanet discovery is a little higher these days, but if rumors are true, this one makes the grade: astrophysicists from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) plan to announce they’ve spotted an Earth-like exoplanet orbiting the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, in its habitable zone. This, according to an anonymous source quoted in a report that appeared Friday in Der Spiegel.

 

“The still nameless planet is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid water on its surface—an important requirement for the emergence of life,” the source said.

 

[...]

 

Big News, If It’s True

 

At just over 4 light-years from Earth, Proxima Centauri is our sun’s nearest neighbor, and it’s part of a triple-star system that includes the better known Alpha Centauri. The star’s proximity has made it an obvious target for many past exoplanet searches. All of them have come up short, which makes the most recent rumors all the more remarkable.

 

If the early reports ring true, scientists will announce this Earth-like planet near the end of August. Discover has reached out to an ESO spokesperson for comment.

 

Reason to Hold Our Breath

 

Although media reports say the rumored planet orbits in a region that’s potentially favorable for life, these smaller stars are less stable, and Proxima Centauri is known to have violent flares at times. Its occasional tantrums have made astronomers skeptical of finding life around red dwarf stars in the past.

 

However, skepticism has softened some in recent years, and SETI recently launched a major initiative to search for life around 20,000 red dwarfs, as these stars are the most common in the Milky Way galaxy.

 

Still, Proxima Centauri is only “close” on a cosmic scale. It would still take humans far too long to reach the planet with current technologies. Flying laser-sailing nanocraft to the yet-to-be-confirmed planet might be our next best bet, and that’s a pretty solid “plan b”.

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2016/08/12/earth-like-planet-alpha-centauri/

 

There was no word on whether the putative planet might be inhabited by tailed blue humanoids.

[sunday]

http://larryniven.wikia.com/wiki/Wunderland

[Soren Ras]

 

An Earth-like Planet Might Be Orbiting Proxima Centauri

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2016/08/12/earth-like-planet-alpha-centauri/

 

There was no word on whether the putative planet might be inhabited by tailed blue humanoids.

 

Yeah, they probably live in harmony with their trees and shit, damn hippies.

 

"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world because they'd never expect it. "

Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts (1992)

 

--

Soren

Edited August 13, 2016 by Soren Ras

[Corinthian]

 

Yeah, they probably live in harmony with their trees and shit, damn hippies.

 

"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world because they'd never expect it. "

Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts (1992)

 

--

Soren

 

 

 

 

There's this children's show that has these two aliens going to different worlds to solve problems. I saw one episode and I thought "Man, those worlds are just ripe for invasion."

 

[Panzermann]

Corinthian you warmonger. You do not invade anymore nowadays. You bring democracy.

 

---

 

Is this odd looking stone you have found a meteorite? follow this simple flow chart: http://meteorites.wustl.edu/check-list.htm

 

see also http://meteorites.wustl.edu/realities.htmand http://meteorites.wustl.edu/what_to_do.htm

[Corinthian]

Corinthian you warmonger. You do not invade anymore nowadays. You bring democracy.

 

 

---

 

Is this odd looking stone you have found a meteorite? follow this simple flow chart: http://meteorites.wustl.edu/check-list.htm

 

see also http://meteorites.wustl.edu/realities.htmand http://meteorites.wustl.edu/what_to_do.htm

 

I'm old fashioned.

 

 

Also see:

 

http://xkcd.com/1723/

[Panzermann]

there did the link come from? A friend had sent it to me. I should read xkcd more often.

 

---

 

another "earth like" planet. In our direct neighborhood!

 

PROXIMA B IS OUR NEIGHBOR BETTER GET USED TO IT!

AUGUST 24, 2016 PALE RED DOT

 

 

It is true. We are convinced that there is a planet orbiting Proxima now. The evidence goes as follows : a signal was spotted back in 2013 on previous surveys (UVES and HARPS). The preliminary detection was first done by Mikko Tuomi, our in-house applied mathematician and his Bayesian codes. However, the signal was not convincing as the data was really sparse and the period was ambiguous (other possible solutions at 20 and 40 days, plus a long period signal of unknown origin). We followed up Proxima in the next years but our two observing runs were 12 days, barely sufficient to secure a signal which ended up being 11.2 days. So the Pale Red Dot was designed with the sole purpose of confirming or refuting its strict periodicity, plus carefully monitor the star for activity induced variability. We got very lucky with the weather so we obtained 54 out of 60 observations. The photometric monitoring telescopes (ASH2 and several units of Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope network), worked flawlessly so we could see the effect of spots, flares and rotation of the star, which also had a footprint on the spectra. However, nothing indicated that spurious variability would be happening at 11.2 days.

(...)

 

 

graphs and.the rest here: https://palereddot.org/proxima-b-is-our-closest-neighbor-better-get-used-to-it/

[Panzermann]

ESO press release pertaining the new neighbour:

 

Planet Found in Habitable Zone Around Nearest Star

Pale Red Dot campaign reveals Earth-mass world in orbit around Proxima Centauri

24 August 2016

 

 

Astronomers using ESO telescopes and other facilities have found clear evidence of a planet orbiting the closest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri. The long-sought world, designated Proxima b, orbits its cool red parent star every 11 days and has a temperature suitable for liquid water to exist on its surface. This rocky world is a little more massive than the Earth and is the closest exoplanet to us - and it may also be the closest possible abode for life outside the Solar System. A paper describing this milestone finding will be published in the journal Nature on 25 August 2016.

 

Just over four light-years from the Solar System lies a red dwarf star that has been named Proxima Centauri as it is the closest star to Earth apart from the Sun. This cool star in the constellation of Centaurus is too faint to be seen with the unaided eye and lies near to the much brighter pair of stars known as Alpha Centauri AB .

During the first half of 2016 Proxima Centauri was regularly observed with the HARPS spectrograph on the ESO 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla in Chile and simultaneously monitored by other telescopes around the world [1] . This was the Pale Red Dot campaign, in which a team of astronomers led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé, from Queen Mary University of London, was looking for the tiny back and forth wobble of the star that would be caused by the gravitational pull of a possible orbiting planet [2] .

 

As this was a topic with very wide public interest, the progress of the campaign between mid-January and April 2016 was shared publicly as it happened on the Pale Red Dot website and via social media. The reports were accompanied by numerous outreach articles written by specialists around the world.

Guillem Anglada-Escudé explains the background to this unique search: The first hints of a possible planet were spotted back in 2013, but the detection was not convincing. Since then we have worked hard to get further observations off the ground with help from ESO and others. The recent Pale Red Dot campaign has been about two years in the planning.

 

The Pale Red Dot data, when combined with earlier observations made at ESO observatories and elsewhere, revealed the clear signal of a truly exciting result. At times Proxima Centauri is approaching Earth at about 5 kilometres per hour normal human walking pace and at times receding at the same speed. This regular pattern of changing radial velocities repeats with a period of 11.2 days. Careful analysis of the resulting tiny Doppler shifts showed that they indicated the presence of a planet with a mass at least 1.3 times that of the Earth, orbiting about 7 million kilometres from Proxima Centauri only 5% of the Earth-Sun distance [3] .

 

Guillem Anglada-Escudé comments on the excitement of the last few months: "I kept checking the consistency of the signal every single day during the 60 nights of the Pale Red Dot campaign. The first 10 were promising, the first 20 were consistent with expectations, and at 30 days the result was pretty much definitive, so we started drafting the paper!"

 

Red dwarfs like Proxima Centauri are active stars and can vary in ways that would mimic the presence of a planet. To exclude this possibility the team also monitored the changing brightness of the star very carefully during the campaign using the ASH2 telescope at the San Pedro de Atacama Celestial Explorations Observatory in Chile and the Las Cumbres Observatory telescope network. Radial velocity data taken when the star was flaring were excluded from the final analysis.

 

Although Proxima b orbits much closer to its star than Mercury does to the Sun in the Solar System, the star itself is far fainter than the Sun. As a result Proxima b lies well within the habitable zone around the star and has an estimated surface temperature that would allow the presence of liquid water. Despite the temperate orbit of Proxima b, the conditions on the surface may be strongly affected by the ultraviolet and X-ray flares from the star far more intense than the Earth experiences from the Sun [4] .

 

Two separate papers discuss the habitability of Proxima b and its climate. They find that the existence of liquid water on the planet today cannot be ruled out and, in such case, it may be present over the surface of the planet only in the sunniest regions, either in an area in the hemisphere of the planet facing the star (synchronous rotation ) or in a tropical belt (3:2 resonance rotation ). Proxima b's rotation, the strong radiation from its star and the formation history of the planet makes its climate quite different from that of the Earth, and it is unlikely that Proxima b has seasons.

This discovery will be the beginning of extensive further observations, both with current instruments [5] and with the next generation of giant telescopes such as the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT ). Proxima b will be a prime target for the hunt for evidence of life elsewhere in the Universe. Indeed, the Alpha Centauri system is also the target of humankinds first attempt to travel to another star system, the StarShot project.

Guillem Anglada-Escudé concludes: "Many exoplanets have been found and many more will be found, but searching for the closest potential Earth-analogue and succeeding has been the experience of a lifetime for all of us. Many peoples stories and efforts have converged on this discovery. The result is also a tribute to all of them. The search for life on Proxima b comes next..."

 

Notes

(...)

https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1629/

 

---

 

[Mobius]

The problem with red dwarfs is that they have episodes where they omit a lot of radiation in the form of flares. So if the planet has to be close for there to be liquid water it gets a high dose of radiation. The planet would need a strong magnetic field to protect any life from flares and such.

http://www.space.com/6560-life-thrive-red-dwarf-star.html

[Panzermann]

But this earth size rock tells us that there must be more out there.

 

Many planet systems we have found have crushed assumptions we had about star systems. Giant planets close to the central star. Crazy orbits. And what not. We are really lucky to.have this boring solar system that has its planets orbiting on very steady courses.

 

 

 

with the Kepler telescope there is a crazy gain in discoveries:

 

 

from: http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasas-kepler-mission-announces-largest-collection-of-planets-ever-discovered

[Ssnake]

Planets are abundant, and appear to be the norm in star systems rather than the exception. That we're discovering more and more of them once that netter instruments are available can't surprise anyone.

 

What I hate about NASA style clickbait headlines is that the story inevitably fails to live up to the hype.

 

• "We discovered life on Mars!" (Well, we found a stone with peculiar markings that we believe are bacteria, but there's no way to prove that; however, the stone really is from Mars.)
• "We discovered water on the moon!" (Well, we detected traces of it when smashing a piece of metal into a dark and cold place at the south pole, but even there the water concentration is at a thousandth of the Great Sahara desert, and that's the best we can come up with)
• "We discovered a planet in the habitable zone!" (Unfortunately for all that we can say and reasonably assume, it isn't actually habitable)
• "Pioneer 10 has left the solar system" (and then it left it again, and again, and again, and again ... without ever coming back)

 

That's not to say that the individual discoveries aren't worth reporting. But they really need to tone down the style of breathless reporting.

[Corinthian]

It's all marketing to ensure they get funding....

[Panzermann]

It's all marketing to ensure they get funding....

I think so too. Very american. And the attention span of US politicians seems to degrade, so they crank it up another notch. An arms race for attention. Ever more escalating. When will it break?

 

Not that the rest of the world wasn't in the same struggle.

[Ssnake]

All I'm saying, for me this crosses the threshold beyond which I'm less inclined to support more funding.

 

 

They need to make up their minds if they want to sell headlines (become a journalist, then), to control the budget (become a politician), or to be scientists (stick to the facts, then).

Of course, journalists who just react to trigger words like "habitable" (zone) in a predictive manner ("a second earth has been found !!!1!!") compound on the problem. But if you just know how the media react and then tailor your press releases to generate a maximum of (false) response, you are complicit in the game.

[JWB]

Scientists discover a ‘dark’ Milky Way

 

http://news.yale.edu/2016/08/25/scientists-discover-dark-milky-way

[Mobius]

Scientists discover a ‘dark’ Milky Way

 

http://news.yale.edu/2016/08/25/scientists-discover-dark-milky-way

 

Considering how much dark matter there is one wonders why dark galaxies aren't the norm.

[Ivanhoe]

 

It's all marketing to ensure they get funding....

I think so too. Very american. And the attention span of US politicians seems to degrade, so they crank it up another notch. An arms race for attention. Ever more escalating. When will it break?

 

Not that the rest of the world wasn't in the same struggle.

 

 

Not just politicians. Voters have ever shorter attention spans, poor critical thinking skills, etc. Which were not much of a problem in the past, because bad politicans and bad government had a rather small impact on life. These days, not so much.

[Corinthian]

Scientists discover a ‘dark’ Milky Way

 

http://news.yale.edu/2016/08/25/scientists-discover-dark-milky-way

 

 

Only now? I discovered it at the supermarket years ago:

 

[Panzermann]

 

 

Scientists discover a dark Milky Way

 

http://news.yale.edu/2016/08/25/scientists-discover-dark-milky-way

 

Considering how much dark matter there is one wonders why dark galaxies aren't the norm.

We cannot see the dark matter. That is why it is called dark. For the estimated values of mass in the universe there must be lots of dark galaxies. So very probably there are many.