From Dust to Dust: A Planet Too Close to Its Star

Astronomers have used the Kepler Observatory (a giant camera in space that is searching for evidence that planets orbit other stars) to make a remarkable discovery.  They found a planet taking only a little more than 15 hours to orbit its star.  Think about that figure!  Our own Earth takes 365 ¼ days -- what we call one year -- to orbit the Sun. Even heat-scorched Mercury takes 88 days to go around our star.  A planet whose “year” is only 15 hours must orbit extremely close to the star and must thus be exposed to searing heat.  

Indeed this planet is so close that the heat of its star appears to be evaporating its rocky surface and creating a cloud of dust, which we can see blocking the star light on each orbit. This planet is doomed to become nothing but dust in the next 200 million years or so, calculations show.  The temperatures at its surface are estimated to be 3300 degrees Fahrenheit.  

The star and planet are about 1500 light years away, so we are not likely to be visiting them any time soon.  But if you go, be sure you take a good asbestos space suit.  

For more on the story, see: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/features/2012/Kepler_Detects_Potential_Evaporating_Planet_feature.html

Coming in June: SETIcon

Next month, the nonprofit SETI Institute (the organization devoted to the search for life in the universe) will be holding a big weekend public event in the San Francisco Bay Area which I will be part of. For those of you who will be (or could be) in the area, here is more information about some of the remarkable people who will be joining me:

SETIcon II: A Weekend Where Science and Imagination Meet
June 22 - 24, 2012
Hyatt Regency Hotel, Santa Clara, California

See: http://www.seticon.org for more information

Guests will include:

* Frank Drake, the astronomer who undertook the first project to listen for extra-terrestrial radio messages and founded the SETI field
* Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and former associate administrator for science missions at NASA
* Robert J. Sawyer, award-winning science fiction writer -- who has written some of the best novels about alien contact
* Rosaly Lopes, planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab and one of the world's experts on volcanoes on other worlds
* Jill Tarter, the leader of the quest to find signals from alien civilizations -- on whom Jodie Foster's character in the film "Contact" is based

* Mae Jemison, Shuttle astronaut and the first African-American woman in space (who played Lieutenant Palmer on "Star Trek: Next Generation")
* Geoff Marcy, astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who is considered the foremost planet hunter in the world today
* Alex Filippenko, part of the team that received the 2011 Nobel Prize for discovering the "dark energy" that is speeding up the expansion of the entire universe
* Robert Picardo, television actor who has appeared in "Star Trek: Voyager," "Stargate," "China Beach," and other programs
* Debra Fischer, of Yale University, co-discoverer of the first system of planets around another star

* Seth Shostak, host of "Big Picture Science", Huffington Post columnist, and the public scientist at the SETI Institute
* Alex Hall, the senior director of the $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize
* Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer-prize winning author and historian of the atomic bomb
* Scott Hubbard, Stanford, NASA's first Mars Program Director and the former director of NASA's Ames Research Center
* David Morrison of NASA, who has been the point person in debunking the myth of Doomsday 2012

* plus members of the Kepler Mission science team, authors, artists, and many of the key scientists from the SETI Institute.

(Confession: I have the pleasure and privilege of being the Vice-chair of the Institute's Board of Trustees.  However, I am not being paid to be at the convention or for anything I do for the Institute, so I am not gaining financially in any way by sharing this information with you. I always like to be very clear about such things.)

The Moon Over Lick Observatory

Photo by Rick Baldridge (Peninsula Astronomical Society)



"Super-moon" This Weekend (Sort of)

This weekend, two characteristics of the Moon will conspire to make it look a little brighter and a little bigger than usual. It might just give you an extra reason to take a night stroll with someone with whom you like to spend time in the dark. At about the same time, the Moon with be full and closest to the Earth in its slightly oval orbit. This means the full Moon Saturday night will be somewhat more spectacular than in a typical month. It has no bad effects on us, but it will be nice to look at. (The media are calling it a super-moon, which is a bit of an exaggeration, but it's worth glancing up at, if your evening is clear.)

Even the very responsible story from NASA is a bit strong, but it's probably the best reference to learn more:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/02may_supermoon/

If you worry that the full Moon is connected with "lunacy" and crazy behavior, and this close moon will only make things worse, fear not! Many experiments have now shown that there is NO connection between strange behavior, crimes, or births and the full moon. If you want to learn more, you can check out my resource guide to astronomical "pseudo-science" at: 
http://www.astrosociety.org/education/resources/pseudobib.html

Hope your Saturday night is a heavenly one!

A Magnificent Cluster of Stars Captured

I wanted to share a remarkable new Hubble Space Telescope image with you. In the accompanying picture, you see a magnificent cluster of over 250,000 stars, a grouping whose catalog number is M9. (This designation comes from a list Charles Messier made long ago of fuzzy objects of interest in the sky.)  The colorful cluster is in the direction of the center of our Milky Way galaxy, some 25,000 light years away. (This means that, traveling at the speed of light, it would take you 25,000 years to travel there!) What's fascinating about this Hubble image -- taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys -- is how clearly we can see individual stars in this crowded, distant group. (The cluster is so far away and so small that it takes up about as much of the sky as the head of pin, held at arms' length.)

The stars in this cluster are typically older than the Sun and contain fewer of the heavier elements that make life and technology on Earth possible. Such clusters, called globular clusters, are thought to be among the oldest objects in our Milky Way Galaxy.  We study the globular clusters like M9 to learn more about the archaeology of our home galaxy and how things were in our neighborhood long before the Sun and the Earth ever existed.

Is Asteroid 2011 AG5 A Threat To Planet Earth

There have been internet and media reports that an asteroid whose orbit crosses Earth's orbit will be a threat to our planet in the year 2040. Like several previous stories about death-dealing asteroids, this one exaggerates the threat tremendously for its shock value. (More and more it seems, competition among the many media channels forces everyone to exaggerate the importance of all kinds of news stories!)

We only have very limited observations of this relatively small and dim piece of cosmic rock. With those limited observations, experts have put its chances of hitting us at 1 chance in 625. Already, that number doesn't make me rush out and take out extra insurance on my home. But the key here is that we will know the asteroid's orbit much better after September 2013, when it will be well placed for observing. At that time, with more of its orbit clear to us, we will be able to say far better what its chances of hitting us are. Most likely, the chances will become even slimmer, as they have for most such objects in the recent past.

That's not to say that some asteroid will not hit us again sometime in the future. We have good evidence that Earth-crossing asteroids have blasted craters on our planet in the past. But we have to examine each candidate carefully and not rush to judgment as some web sites did in the present case. Luckily we have time between now and 2040 to gather more information.

For a responsible report on Asteroid 2011AG5, see:
http://www.universetoday.com/93877/will-asteroid-2011-ag5-hit-earth-in-2040/

Asteroids that threaten Earth are rare but real.  To find out more about this intriguing topic, here are some responsible general web sites:

http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/ (Organized by astronomer David Morrison, of NASA)

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/  (From the Jet Propulsion Laboratories)

Find Your Favorite Composer, Painter, or Author on Mercury

The MESSENGER mission (orbiting the little planet Mercury) is taking remarkable close-up images.  One of the most intriguing features seen in these pictures was recently named after one of my favorite composers -- Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Double-ringed crater Rachmaninoff, seen on the image I have attached, is about 180 miles across and seems relatively young.  Note how the central circle is smoother (has fewer smaller impact craters in it), which indicates to the mission scientists that volcanic flows from inside the planet may have covered that inside region after the original double crater formed.

Rachmaninoff, a Russian-born early-20th-century composer, wrote some of the most romantic pieces of classical music, including his wonderfully over-the-top Second Piano Concerto.  The story is told that (after the negative reviews of his first symphony), Rachmaninoff became depressed and unable to write further music.  Friends took him to see a psychologist who used hypnotic suggestion to convince Rachmaninoff that he was a great composer and would write a great piece of music.  The interaction with Dr. Dahl gave him a new measure of confidence and he wrote the second piano concerto, which would become his most famous and beloved composition.

By international agreement, craters on Mercury are named after "deceased artists, musicians, painters, and authors who have made outstanding or fundamental contributions to their field and have been recognized as historically significant figures for more than 50 years."

To see if your favorite composer, painter, or author has been honored with a crater on the planet Mercury, you can search for his or her name in the To see if your favorite composer, painter, or author has been honored with a crater on the planet Mercury, you can search for his or her name in the Advanced Search feature in the "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature":
http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/nomenclature/AdvancedSearch

For target, select Mercury, for Feature Type, select "crater, craters." Then just type in your favorite composer, author, or painter into the Feature Name field. (Remember the people have to have been dead for a while, so don't look for living favorites, only for people whose reputations have become established after their deaths.)

For more on the results from the ongoing Messenger mission, see:
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/

Thirty Billion Planets in the Milky Way

On this photo you see, from right to left, noted astronomy popularizer Donald Goldsmith, leading SETI scientist Jill Tarter, planet hunter Geoff Marcy, and Geoff's wife, chemist Susan Kegley. I took this snapshot last evening, at a banquet sponsored by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (where I was tickled to be one of the honorees). Dr. Marcy (of the University of California, Berkeley, who is arguably the leading discoverer of planets in the world) spoke about the ongoing hunt for planets with the Kepler spacecraft. He and the mission team have more reason for optimism than ever, it appears. Based on the first two years of Kepler investigation, they think there might be some 30 billion planetary systems in the Milky Way Galaxy. He called it a "tsunami of planets" in the Kepler data. 

Many of the Kepler stars have more than one planet (just like the Sun does.) A star they call Kepler 11 has six planets and they are "co-planar" -- meaning if you pass a sheet of paper through their orbits, all six planets lie in the same sheet of paper. This indicates that the system of planets formed from a flattened doughnut of a "mother cloud", just like our own solar system did. 

And most exciting, as the Kepler teams finds and examines more and more planet candidates, they are finding that SMALLER planets are more common than bigger ones. So, while earlier techniques, that were better at finding big planets like Jupiter, found many Jupiters out there, now (with Kepler) it is becoming clear that smaller planets may make up a greater fraction of the planets in our Galaxy. Since we think smaller planets are probably better candidates for the kind of life that builds computers and does Facebook, this is good news for those who would like a universe in which we humans are not the only intelligent species.