Monthly Archives: August 2022

Some of us are old enough to remember the excitement and wonder of the launching of the two Voyager spacecrafts in 1977. Those two have traveled and entered into interstellar space. If you wonder how their equipment is functioning, a back-up system of thrusters on Voyager 2 kicked on in 1994 after 17 years of waiting to be needed. There are still signals reaching earth from them. And those are low-bid products. The engineers and scientists who dreamed them into reality really did an amazing job.

When you are out taking that stroll around the neighborhood or jogging along one of the walking trails of your town, make time to look up. About two hours after dark you will be able to see Jupiter and Saturn in the east-southeast among the stars of the constellation Pisces. Above will be the Great Square of Pegasus, or the baseball diamond where the Little and Pony Leaguers wound up their stellar seasons recently.

Pegasus is an ancient constellation and its lower left corner points directly toward Jupiter now. Continuing from that line would point towards the celestial sea that includes the constellations of Cetus, the whale; Pisces, the two fish that in myths were Aphrodite (Venus) and her son Eros (Cupid) who were trying to escape to safety; Aquarius, the water-bearer; Capricornus, the sea-goat; and Eridanus, the river, that still flows into the Persian Gulf.

These constellations date back to Mesopotamia (Iran) and Eridanus is the Euphrates River, which is before the Greeks or Romans even were city-states themselves. Astronomy is the oldest science of all. It is the basis of geometry as well. Ponder that as your student complains about history, geometry, or science homework. Remind them it is ancient history and also as current as our space programs out on Boca Chica beach.

It is a shame we have so much light pollution now that these constellations can seldom be seen, much less recognized. When we talk about energy saving, fewer lights almost everywhere would be a big saving.

If you are fortunate to have a dark sky view, then you might use a decent telescope to scan the region of the tail of Cygnus to locate the North America nebula. Yes, the nebula does resemble our continent but mainly the U.S. part. As sky-watchers have always done, the objects discovered are given names of familiar places or things. What wonders will be discovered with the new James Webb Space Telescope remain to be seen. Millions, perhaps billions of previously unseen galaxies are emerging from the images JWST has already shared. And it has been a month in use. Hubble opened our eyes to billions of galaxies; JWST will do even more.

The moon is waxing now, with more of its surface which is reflecting sunlight facing Earth as the two revolve around the sun in their constant dance. Full moon is 14 days after the new moon. The new moon is lost in the glare of the sun, while the full moon is directly opposite the sun. Since our moons orbit is tilted five degrees off from Earths orbital path, we dont have eclipses every month. Hooray for geometry.

Since the moons appearance changes daily, as does its location in the sky, this might be a good time to begin keeping a chart of how the moon appears from night to night-or from day to day. Yes, it can be seen in the daytime, but when? Try to figure out the pattern and use it for a unique science fair project. I know school just started, but longer-term projects are more interesting to judges. And this one would be easily done.

Until next week, KLU.

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Astronomy, the oldest science of al - Brownsville Herald

Ah, the sounds of late summer. Pass a pool, and hear the happy yelps of kids splashing around. Sit outside at night, and bask in the soothing buzz of cicadas hidden in the trees. Open the internet, and hear the terrifying howling of outer space.

Thank NASA for that last one. The space agency recently shared a clip online of sound coming from a cluster of galaxies about 250 million light-years from Earth. NASA, always eager to show off its capacity to produce cosmic wonder, presented the audio enthusiastically, as if to say, Wow, check out this cool thing! And although the transformation of space phenomena into something detectable by our human ears certainly seems like an exciting exercise, the reality iswell, have a listen.

The noise sounds like a ghostly wail, or the horror-movie music just before a jump scare, or, as several people have pointed out, the cries of countless souls trapped in eternal darkness. Just nothing good; less awe-ful, and more awful. Does space really sound this scary?

The answer is, sort of. And there is a perfectly horror-free explanation for it. Some parts of space are full of hot gas, including the medium between the distant, sparkly galaxies huddled together. In 2002, when a NASA space telescope named Chandra studied the Perseus cluster, it detected wavelike movements in the gas, propagating outward like ripples in water. The ripples, scientists determined, were produced by the supermassive black hole in the clusters central galaxy. When the black hole sucks in cosmic material, it burps some outexplosive behavior that pushes around the gas nearby. The resulting waves, astronomers concluded, were sound waves, with a frequency much too deep for any of us to hear.

It wasnt until recently that Kimberly Arcand, Chandras visualization scientist, decided to shift those impossibly low cosmic notes into the audible range. She wanted the public, and particularly those who are blind or have reduced vision, to be able to experience the wonder of the Perseus cluster with senses besides sight. Arcand told me she was inspired by Wanda Daz-Merced, a blind astrophysicist who developed a program to convert sunlight into sound so that she could hear a solar eclipse sweeping across the United States in 2017. Arcand and her team extracted the sound data from Chandras observations and then, with some mathematical work and sound editing, brought them into the range of human hearing, a couple hundred quadrillion times higher than the original frequency. The result: a spooky, cosmic wail.

Arcand and her team at Chandra have previously made a variety of celestial images into music through a process known as sonification, but those projects were based on light, not sound. Consider the glittering, star-filled center of our Milky Way galaxy. To hear it, scientists assigned different sonic features to the cosmic material in a snapshot of the galaxy. Stellar stuff at the top of the image corresponds to higher pitches; the brightest bits play at top volume. Short notes represent stars, and a drawn-out hum indicates clouds of gas and dust. The image features observations in multiple wavelengths, which scientists used to make a more beautiful song: xylophone for X-rays, violin for optical light, piano for infrared.

The melody of our galactic center sounds lovely, peaceful. Most of the sonifications in Chandras library do too, even the clips that lack instrumental elements and feature only a jumble of notes. They are nothing like the primal scream of the Perseus cluster, which the Chandra team released in May this year. The Perseus one is perhaps the most evocative because it is actually based on sound waves, Arcand said. Its more objective, which makes the noise feel a bit more real. At the same time, the cosmic wail wouldnt sound exactly like this if you could hang out in the Perseus galaxy cluster with a helmet and superpowered hearing. The spooky audio is a combination of the sound waves emanating from the central galaxy in different directions, not a single scream in time. Still, this is as close as we know how to get, she said.

When I asked Arcand what she thought about the sound freaking people out, she cracked up. I just feel bad, she said. Arcand grew up singing in choirs, and for her, the Perseus audio is musical, like a dramatic tune from an emotional, sweeping Hans Zimmer track. She has worked on the Chandra mission for more than two decades, and being so intimately familiar with the data, she was unlikely to be spooked by it, even when it sounds like, you know, that. I didnt hear anything scary in it, she said, but I totally understand that other people have a different perspective. Scientists and sound engineers could certainly edit the clip to make it less creepy, mixing in some chimes or nice harp chords. But this is space putting on a little performance, and we may as well experience it as the artist intended.

Read more from the original source:

The Spookiest Sound in Astronomy - The Atlantic

In the search for extrasolar planets, astronomers and astrobiologists generally pursue a policy of follow the water. This comes down to searching for planets that orbit with a stars circumsolar habitable zone (HZ), where conditions are warm enough that liquid water can flow on its surface. The reason is simple: water is the only known solvent capable of supporting life and is required by all life on Earth. However, since the 1970s, scientists have speculated that there may be a class of rocky planets in our Universe that are completely covered in water.

With the explosion in confirmed exoplanets, scientists have been eager to find examples of this type of planet, so they study them more closely. Thanks to an international team of researchers led by the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at the Universit de Montral, an exoplanet orbiting within its systems HZ was recently discovered that could be completely covered in deep oceans. This ocean world (aka. Waterworld) could reveal things about the nature of habitability when it is the subject of follow-up observations using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The international team was led by Charles Cadieux, a Ph.D. student at the Universit de Montral and a member of IREX. He was joined by a team of fifty-five astronomers and astrophysicists from Canada, France, the U.S., Japan, Brazil, Hungary, Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, Germany, and Russia. The team represents institutions such as the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, the NASA Ames Research Center, the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI), and many universities and institutes.

As they explain in their paper, which appeared on August 12th in The Astrophysical Journal, the exoplanet (TOI-1452 b) orbits within a binary system located in the Draco constellation about 100 light-years from Earth. The system is made up of two M-type (red dwarf) stars that orbit each other very closely, at 97 astronomical units (AUs), or about two and a half times the distance between the Sun and Pluto. The possibility that an exoplanet orbits one of these stars was originally ventured based on data obtained by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

Based on the TESS data, the astronomers noted that the exoplanet experienced a slight decrease in brightness every 11 days, from which they estimated that it has a diameter about 70% larger than Earths. Cadieux and his colleagues then conducted follow-up observations (a function routinely performed by the iREx) using the Plantes Extrasolaires en Transition et en Occultation (PESTO) camera on the 1.6-meter telescope at the Observatoire du Mont-Mgantic (OMM) part of the Universit de Montral.

Because of their low brightness and proximity, TOI-1452s two stars appeared as a single point of light when observed by TESS. However, PESTOs resolution is high enough to distinguish the two objects, and the images it obtained confirmed that an exoplanet does orbit TOI-1452. Subsequent observations were performed by a team from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) using the 8.2-meter optical-infrared Subaru Telescope in Maunakea, Hawaii. As co-author Ren Doyon, a Universit de Montral Professor and the Director of iREx and of the OMM explained in an IREX press release:

Im extremely proud of this discovery because it shows the high calibre of our researchers and instrumentation. It is thanks to the OMM, a special instrument designed in our labs called SPIRou and an innovative analytic method developed by our research team that we were able to detect this one-of-a-kind exoplanet.

The OMM played a crucial role in confirming the nature of this signal and estimating the planets radius, Cadieux added. This was no routine check. We had to make sure the signal detected by TESS was really caused by an exoplanet circling TOI-1452, the largest of the two stars in that binary system.

After confirming the presence of an exoplanet and obtaining estimates on its size, the team turned to the un SpectroPolarimtre Infra-Rouge (SPIRou) instrument, a near-infrared spectropolarimeter installed on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. Designed largely in Canada, SPIRou is ideally-suited to studying low-mass stars like TOI-1452s binary components because they are brightest in the infrared wavelength. Despite this, it still took more than 50 hours of observation time to produce estimates of the planets mass (nearly five times that of Earth).

The next great challenge was the data analysis, which was performed using the line-by-line (LBL) analytic method developed by researched tienne Artigau and Neil Cook (also with iREx). This allowed the team to identify the weak signal produced by the exoplanet in the SPIRou data. Finally, Ph.D. students Farbod Jahandar and Thomas Vandal of Universit de Montral analyzed the SPIRou data to learn more about the host stars composition, which is useful for constraining the planets internal structure. Based on their estimates of its radius, mass, and density measurements, the astronomers theorize that TOI 1452 b is likely a rocky planet.

However, these same estimates led them to conclude that TOI 1452 b could be covered in a thick layer of water, similar to the largest moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and other icy bodies in the outer Solar System. This is supported by interior modeling conducted by University of Torontos Mykhaylo Plotnykov and Diana Valencia, which suggests that water may make up as much as 30% of TOI 1452 bs mass, which is also similar to satellites like Jupiters moons Europea, Ganymede, and Callisto, and Saturns moons Titan, Dione, and Enceladus.

In recent years, astronomers have detected hundreds of similar exoplanets with radii and masses between Earth and Neptune but significantly lower densities. This suggests that a large fraction of these exoplanets mass is made up of volatiles such as water, leading to the nickname ocean planets. As Cadieux explained, this latest discovery may be the first such planet discovered:

TOI-1452 b is one of the best candidates for an ocean planet that we have found to date. Its radius and mass suggest a much lower density than what one would expect for a planet that is basically made up of metal and rock, like Earth.

Given that TOI-1452 b orbits within its host stars HZ, it is unlikely to have an icy surface, which means it could have oceans several kilometers in depth. This makes TOI-1452 b a perfect candidate for further observations using the JWST, as it is one of the few known temperate planets that also exhibits the characteristics of an ocean planet. Its proximity to Earth also makes it a good candidate for atmospheric characterization, something Webb is very proficient at as demonstrated by the spectra it obtained twice from WASP-59 (confirming the presence of water and carbon dioxide).

To make matters even better, TOI-1452 is located in a region of the sky that Webb can observe year-round, making it perfectly positioned for follow-up observations. Our observations with the Webb Telescope will be essential to better understanding TOI-1452 b, said Doyon, who is also the Principal Investigator of the Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), the Canadian Space Agencys contribution to the JWST. As soon as we can, we will book time on the Webb to observe this strange and wonderful world.

Further Reading: IREX

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Astronomers Find a Waterworld Planet With Deep Oceans in the Habitable Zone - Universe Today