Category Archives: Astronomy

Astronomers now routinely discover planets orbiting stars outside of the solar system theyre called exoplanets. But in summer 2022, teams working on NASAs Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite found a few particularly interesting planets orbiting in the habitable zones of their parent stars.

One planet is 30% larger than Earth and orbits its star in less than three days. The other is 70% larger than the Earth and might host a deep ocean. These two exoplanets are super-Earths more massive than the Earth but smaller than ice giants like Uranus and Neptune.

Im a professor of astronomy who studies galactic cores, distant galaxies, astrobiology and exoplanets. I closely follow the search for planets that might host life.

Earth is still the only place in the universe scientists know to be home to life. It would seem logical to focus the search for life on Earth clones planets with properties close to Earths. But research has shown that the best chance astronomers have of finding life on another planet is likely to be on a super-Earth similar to the ones found recently.

Most super-Earths orbit cool dwarf stars, which are lower in mass and live much longer than the Sun. There are hundreds of cool dwarf stars for every star like the Sun, and scientists have found super-Earths orbiting 40% of cool dwarfs they have looked at. Using that number, astronomers estimate that there are tens of billions of super-Earths in habitable zones where liquid water can exist in the Milky Way alone. Since all life on Earth uses water, water is thought to be critical for habitability.

Based on current projections, about a third of all exoplanets are super-Earths, making them the most common type of exoplanet in the Milky Way. The nearest is only six light-years away from Earth. You might even say that our solar system is unusual since it does not have a planet with a mass between that of Earth and Neptune.

Another reason super-Earths are ideal targets in the search for life is that theyre much easier to detect and study than Earth-sized planets. There are two methods astronomers use to detect exoplanets. One looks for the gravitational effect of a planet on its parent star and the other looks for brief dimming of a stars light as the planet passes in front of it. Both of these detection methods are easier with a bigger planet.

Over 300 years ago, German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued that Earth was the best of all possible worlds. Leibnizs argument was meant to address the question of why evil exists, but modern astrobiologists have explored a similar question by asking what makes a planet hospitable to life. It turns out that Earth is not the best of all possible worlds.

Due to Earths tectonic activity and changes in the brightness of the Sun, the climate has veered over time from ocean-boiling hot to planetwide, deep-freeze cold. Earth has been uninhabitable for humans and other larger creatures for most of its 4.5-billion-year history. Simulations suggest the long-term habitability of Earth was not inevitable, but was a matter of chance. Humans are literally lucky to be alive.

Researchers have come up with a list of the attributes that make a planet very conducive to life. Larger planets are more likely to be geologically active, a feature that scientists think would promote biological evolution. So the most habitable planet would have roughly twice the mass of the Earth and be between 20% and 30% larger by volume. It would also have oceans that are shallow enough for light to stimulate life all the way to the seafloor and an average temperature of 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius). It would have an atmosphere thicker than the Earths that would act as an insulating blanket. Finally, such a planet would orbit a star older than the Sun to give life longer to develop, and it would have a strong magnetic field that protects against cosmic radiation. Scientists think that these attributes combined will make a planet super habitable.

By definition, super-Earths have many of the attributes of a super habitable planet. To date, astronomers have discovered two dozen super-Earth exoplanets that are, if not the best of all possible worlds, theoretically more habitable than Earth.

Recently, theres been an exciting addition to the inventory of habitable planets. Astronomers have started discovering exoplanets that have been ejected from their star systems, and there could be billions of them roaming the Milky Way. If a super-Earth is ejected from its star system and has a dense atmosphere and watery surface, it could sustain life for tens of billions of years, far longer than life on Earth could persist before the Sun dies.

To detect life on distant exoplanets, astronomers will look for biosignatures, byproducts of biology that are detectable in a planets atmosphere.

NASAs James Webb Space Telescope was designed before astronomers had discovered exoplanets, so the telescope is not optimized for exoplanet research. But it is able to do some of this science and is scheduled to target two potentially habitable super-Earths in its first year of operations. Another set of super-Earths with massive oceans discovered in the past few years, as well as the planets discovered this summer, are also compelling targets for James Webb.

But the best chances for finding signs of life in exoplanet atmospheres will come with the next generation of giant, ground-based telescopes: the 39-meter Extremely Large Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and the 24.5-meter Giant Magellan Telescope. These telescopes are all under construction and set to start collecting data by the end of the decade.

Astronomers know that the ingredients for life are out there, but habitable does not mean inhabited. Until researchers find evidence of life elsewhere, its possible that life on Earth was a unique accident. While there are many reasons why a habitable world would not have signs of life, if, over the coming years, astronomers look at these super habitable super-Earths and find nothing, humanity may be forced to conclude that the universe is a lonely place.

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Super-Earths are bigger, more common and more habitable than Earth itself and astronomers are discovering more of the billions they think are out...

Starwatch chart

Bid farewell to the harvest moon this week as it cruises through Gemini, the twins, for a close encounter with the star Pollux.

In the early hours of 20 September, the moon will be a beautiful waning crescent with 30% of its visible surface illuminated. As the week goes on, and the moon draws closer to the sun, the illuminated percentage will drop and the moon will rise later and later until it disappears into the morning twilight. It will then be reborn a few days later in the evening sky as a new moon.

The chart shows the view looking north-east at 01.00 BST on 20 September, when the moon will be close to Pollux, one of the twins in Gemini. The further west you are located, the closer the conjunction will appear to be.

According to Greek mythology, Pollux and his twin half-brother, Castor, were Argonauts, who sailed with Jason on his quest to retrieve the golden fleece. In traditional Chinese astronomy, these stars belong to the North River mansion, the equivalent of a western zodiacal constellation. The pairing is visible from the southern hemisphere in the pre-dawn hours in the north-north-eastern sky.

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Starwatch: Goodbye, harvest moon, its time to visit the twins - The Guardian

Maarten Schmidt, Francis L. Moseley Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus, at Caltech, passed away on Saturday, September 17, 2022. He was 92 years old. Schmidt is well known for his 1963 discovery of quasarsextremely bright and distant cosmic objects powered by active supermassive black holes.

Schmidt was born in December of 1929, in Groningen, the Netherlands. He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Groningen, a PhD from Leiden University in 1956, and a Doctor of Science degree from Yale in 1966.

After earning his PhD, Schmidt did postdoctoral work at the Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar observatories for two years as a Carnegie Fellow. He then returned to the University of Leiden for one year before moving to the United States.

Schmidt joined Caltech in 1959 as an associate professor of astronomy. He became full professor in 1964, Institute Professor in 1981, and Moseley Professor in 1987. He retired and became Moseley Professor, Emeritus, in 1996. He had also served as the executive officer for astronomy from 1972 to 1975, chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy from 1976 to 1978, and director of the Hale Observatories from 1978 to 1980.

After first coming to Caltech, Schmidt focused on mass distribution and dynamics of galaxies. During this period, he published a paper titled "The Rate of Star Formation," in which he outlined a relationship between gas density and star formation rate in a given region. This relationship came to be known as the Schmidt law.

Schmidt is best known for his discovery of quasars and his measurement of their great distances from Earth. While studying the light spectra of radio sources, he noticed that a cosmic object called 3C 273 produced spectral lines that had been shifted to the red end of the spectrum, or "red shifted," indicating that the object was approximately 3 billion light-years away, well outside our galaxy. Because the faraway object shone too brightly to be a star, Schmidt came to the realization that the "quasi-stellar object" was the core of a forming galaxy, in which swirling disks of matter surround a supermassive black hole.

Since this pivotal observation in 1963, thousands of quasars have been identified. These objects only existed in the early universe but are visible from Earth today because of the time it takes for light to travel over such enormous distances. Schmidt's work gave astronomers a deep insight into the history of our universe.

Schmidt is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Kavli Prize for Astrophysics (2008); the Bruce Medal (1992); the James Craig Watson Medal (1991); the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1980); the Henry Norris Russel Lectureship (1978); and the Helen B. Warner Prize (1964). He was also on the cover of Time magazine on March 11, 1966.

He is survived by his three daughters: Anne, Marijke, and Elizabeth.

A full obituary will follow at a later date.

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Caltech Mourns the Passing of Maarten Schmidt, 1929-2022 - Caltech

Artists illustration of a small Saturn-like planet discovered in the system LkCa 15. The planet resides within dense rings of dust and gas that surround a bright yellow star. Material accumulates in a clump and arc-shape, about 60 degrees away from the planet. Note: This illustration is not to scale. Credit: M.Weiss/Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

A new technique has been developed by astronomers to identify small planets hidden in protoplanetary disks.

According to astronomers and astrophysicists, planets are born in protoplanetary disks rings of dust and gas that surround young, newborn stars. Although hundreds of these disks have been detected throughout the universe, observations of actual planetary birth and formation have proved difficult within these environments.

Astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) have now developed a new way to detect these elusive newborn planets. With it, they have uncovered smoking gun evidence of a small Neptune or Saturn-like planet lurking in a disk. The results were described on September 14 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Directly detecting young planets is very challenging and has so far only been successful in one or two cases, says Feng Long, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics who led the new study. The planets are always too faint for us to see because theyre embedded in thick layers of gas and dust.

Instead, scientists must hunt for clues to infer a planet is developing beneath the dust.

In the past few years, weve seen many structures pop up on disks that we think are caused by a planets presence, but it could be caused by something else, too, Long says. We need new techniques to look at and support that a planet is there.

Long decided to re-examine a protoplanetary disk known as LkCa 15 for her study. Located about 518 light years away, the disk sits in the Taurus constellation on the sky. Previously, researchers reported evidence for planet formation in the disk using observations with the ALMA Observatory.

After diving into new high-resolution ALMA data on LkCa 15, obtained primarily in 2019, Long discovered two faint features that had not previously been detected.

About 42 astronomical units out from the star or 42 times the distance Earth is from the Sun Long discovered a dusty ring with two separate and bright bunches of material orbiting within it. The material took the shape of a small clump and a larger arc, which were separated by 120 degrees.

To figure out what was causing the buildup of material, Long examined the scenario with computer models. She discovered that their size and locations matched the model for the presence of a planet.

This arc and clump are separated by about 120 degrees, Long says. That degree of separation doesnt just happen its important mathematically.

Long points to positions in space known as Lagrange points, where two bodies in motion such as a star and orbiting planet produce enhanced regions of attraction around them where matter may accumulate.

Were seeing that this material is not just floating around freely, its stable and has a preference where it wants to be located based on physics and the objects involved, Long explains.

In this case, the arc and clump of material Long detected are located at the L4 and L5 Lagrange points. Hidden 60 degrees between them is a small planet causing the accumulation of dust at points L4 and L5.

According to the results, the planet is roughly the size of Neptune or Saturn, and around one to three million years old. (Thats relatively young when it comes to planets.)

Due to technology constraints, directly imaging the small, newborn planet may not be possible any time soon. However, Long believes further ALMA observations of LkCa 15 can provide additional evidence supporting her planetary discovery.

She also hopes her new approach for detecting planets with material preferentially accumulating at Lagrange points will be utilized in the future by astronomers.

I do hope this method can be widely adopted in the future, she says. The only caveat is that this requires very deep data as the signal is weak.

Long recently completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Astrophysics and will join the University of Arizona as a NASA Hubble Fellow this September.

Reference: ALMA Detection of Dust Trapping around Lagrangian Points in the LkCa 15 Disk by Feng Long, Sean M. Andrews, Shangjia Zhang, Chunhua Qi, Myriam Benisty, Stefano Facchini, Andrea Isella, David J. Wilner, Jaehan Bae, Jane Huang, Ryan A. Loomis, Karin I. berg and Zhaohuan Zhu, 14 September 2022, The Astrophysical Journal Letters.DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ac8b10

Co-authors on the study are Sean Andrews, Chunhua Qi, David Wilner and Karin Oberg of the CfA; Shangjia Zhang and Zhaohuan Zhu of the University of Nevada; Myriam Benisty of the University of Grenoble; Stefano Facchini of the University of Milan; Andrea Isella of Rice University; Jaehan Bae of the University of Florida; Jane Huang of the University of Michigan and Ryan Loomis of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

This study involved high-resolution ALMA observations taken with Band 6 (1.3mm) and Band 7 (0.88mm) receivers.

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Astronomers Uncover New Evidence of Baby Planet in the Making - SciTechDaily

Enlarge / Photograph showing the emission nebula, Eta Carina (formerly Eta Argus) taken using the astrographic telescope at the Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. Located at the center of this intricate nebula is a massive but unstable star that one day will explode spectacularly.

SSPL/Getty Images

Recently, the European Space Agency released the third installment of data from the Gaia satellite, a public catalog that provides the positions and velocities of over a billion stars. This is our most recent attempt to answer some of the most long-standing questions in astronomy: How are stars (and nebulae) spread out across the sky? How many of them are there, how far away are they, and how bright are they? Do they change in position or brightness? Are there new classes of objects that are unknown to science?

For centuries, astronomers have tried to answer these questions, and that work has been laborious and time-consuming. It wasn't always easy to record what you could see in your telescope lensif you were lucky enough to have a telescope at all.

Now imagine the emergence of a new technique that, for its time, offered some of the benefits of the technology that enabled the Gaia catalogs. It could automatically and impartially record what you see, and anyone could use it.

That technique was photography.

This article tells the story of how photography changed astronomy and how hundreds of astronomers formed the first international scientific collaboration to create the Carte du Ciel (literally, "Map of the Sky"), a complete photographic survey of the sky. That collaboration resulted in a century-long struggle to process thousands of photographic plates taken over decades, with the positions of millions of stars measured by hand to make the largest catalog of the night sky.

Unfortunately, the Carte du Ciel project came at a time when our ability to collect measurements of the natural world was not matched by our capacity to analyze them. And while the project was in progress, new instruments made it possible to study physical processes in distant celestial objects, tempting scientists away from the survey by offering the chance to create new models to explain the world.

For the astronomers working on the Carte du Ciel, no model yet existed that could abstract the positions of millions of stars into a theory of how our galaxy evolved; the researchers instead only had an intuition that photographic techniques could be useful to map the world. They were right, but it took most of a century and the entire careers of many astronomers for their intuition to bear fruit. Advertisement

Enlarge / The Astrographic Telescope used at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich for the Carte du Ciel photographic sky survey. The instrument consists of two refracting telescopes mounted together on an equatorial mounting. One was used to take the photograph while the other was for ensuring accurate tracking during the long exposures necessary for the poorly light-sensitive films then available.

SSPL/Getty Images

For centuries, astronomers had struggled to record what they saw in the night sky with notes and hand-drawn sketches. Peering through the distorted optics of early instruments, it was not always easy to draw what you could see. You might ''observe'' things that weren't there at all; those canals and vegetation on Mars that poor Schiaparelli drew from his Milanese observatory were nothing more than an optical illusion, caused in part by the turbulent atmosphere. Only a few very highly trained astronomers, like Caroline and William Herschel, could instantly spot a new star in a familiar galaxya signal of some distant cataclysmic event?

Photography could change all that. Arago instantly realized the immense potential of this technique: Images taken in the depths of night could be analyzed comfortably and quantitatively in the light of day. Measurements could be precise, and they could be checked repeatedly.

Daguerre received a pension and allowed Arago to open-source the details of his procedure, leading to an explosion of portrait studios in Paris and around the world. But as it turned out, Daguerre's method was simply not sensitive or practical enough for capturing anything besides the brightest stars, the Sun, or the Moon. The next hot new technology, wet-plate collodion emulsions, was not much better; the plates would dry out during the long exposures required to capture faint astronomical objects.

Astronomers had to wait 40 years, until the 1880s, for very sensitive dry photographic plates to finally become available.

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How an enormous project attempted to map the sky without computers - Ars Technica

Its a rare thing when every single part of an astronomy news story is super cool, but here we are. Youll want to stick around for all of this.

A telescope the size of the planet has observed a binary red dwarf star system for 14 years, nailing down the positions of the two stars to incredible accuracy, and happened to discover a planet more massive than Jupiter orbiting one of them in a plane hugely tilted to the orbits of the stars around each other.

Oh, yes. This is my kind of story [link to paper].

The star system is called GJ 896, and its a pair of low-mass red dwarfs 20.37 light-years from Earth and yes, as Ill get to, the distance is known that accurately. The more massive of the two, GJ 896A, is about 0.44 times the mass of the Sun, and its companion star, GJ 896B, is much smaller at 0.165 solar masses. So both are dinky. Even though theyre among the closest stars known to the Sun, theyre so faint you need a telescope to see them at all.

Between 2006 and 2011, and again in 2020, these stars were observed using the Very Long Baseline Array, a collection of radio dishes spread across Earth. They observe at the same time, and their data are then combined in a way that makes their vision as keen as if they were a single dish the size of the planet. This technique, called interferometry, has been used for decades, and perhaps is currently most famous as used by the Event Horizon Telescope to look at the black holes in the center of the Milky Way and M87.

The resolution of a telescope its ability to very accurately measure the position of an object, or separate two objects in the sky depends in part on its size, so a telescope over 10,000 km wide has phenomenal resolution. The observations of GJ 896 are accurate to about 60 microarcseconds, a very tiny angle in the sky. There are 3,600 arcseconds in a degree, for example, and the Moon is 0.5 degrees = 1,800 arcseconds across. A microarcsecond is a millionth of an arcsecond, so this resolution is like being able to see a cell phone sitting on the Moons surface.

Even older, lower resolution observations were accurate enough to see the orbital motion of the two stars around each other. The orbital period is about 229 years, and theyre separated by about 4.5 billion kilometers from each other, the same distance Neptune is from the Sun.

The new measurements are easily enough to pick up the parallax induced by the Earths motion around the Sun. As we go around the Sun we see the stars from one angle and then a different angle six months later. This parallax is the same idea as holding your thumb in front of your face and closing first one eye then the other; your thumb will appear to move against the background. This technique is used to get the distances to stars, and in fact is why the distance to GJ 896 is so well determined.

Once that effect is subtracted, and the orbital motion of the two stars around each other is subtracted, something very strange can be seen: The primary star, GJ 896A, is corkscrewing through space, making one cycle around every 284.4 days. The cause must be something small orbiting it, its gravity tugging on the star and causing it to spiral through the galaxy. Given the period of the tug, the astronomers have determined its a planet with about 2.3 times the mass of Jupiter.

The planet itself is invisible, but the effects of its gravity can be seen in the positions of GJ 896A over time. The process of measuring a stars position is called astrometry, and its very rare indeed to find a planet using this method. This one, called GJ 896Ab, is one of the very few to have been found this way.

And it gets better: Very careful measurements of the planets orbit show it orbits the star in a plane wildly tilted to the orbital plane of the two stars, tipped by 148. Thats weird. Like, really weird.

All the major planets in the solar system orbit in more or less the same plane. A handful of exoplanets have been found to orbit at large angles to other planets on their systems, and its not clear why. Perhaps one planet migrated too close to another and the gravitational interaction slingshot it into the tilted orbit. Maybe over time the gravitational influence of the second star pumped the inclination of the planets orbit until its tilt changed to where it is now. Or maybe it had something to do with the way the planet and stars formed in the first place. We dont know yet.

And mind you, the planet itself is weird. We know of lots of planets orbiting red dwarf stars, but far and away the majority of them are small, Earth-sized planets. Very few are gas giants, let alone with more than twice the mass of Jupiter. This system is bizarre in almost every way we look at it, which of course makes it more fun to study.

This is the first time the full three-dimensional motions of a binary star and an exoplanet orbiting one of them have been determined. That in itself is pretty cool, but when you add everything else in, this becomes one of the most interesting star/planet systems we know. And the cherry on top is that its so close to us we can actually study it in some detail.

Its proximity makes me wonder, too. If such systems were super-rare in the galaxy, youd expect the nearest one to be thousands of light-years away. The fact that GJ 896 is one of the closest star systems to the Sun in the entire galaxy implies these sorts of things are common. The only way we can find out is to study as many binary red dwarfs as we can, and keep watching GJ 896 closely. Hopefully longer-term observations will solve the mystery of the planets tilted orbit, why its so big, and just how this wild and wonderful system came to be.

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Bad Astronomy | Exoplanet around GJ 896 is as bizarre as they come | SYFY WIRE - Syfy

Comets are comets, and asteroids are asteroids except when they're not. Some asteroids appear to be active, forming the familiar comae, and even tails, of their cometary cousins. Astronomers know of only a few dozen examples of these active asteroids, but they suspect more are out there and you can join the hunt. The asteroids you spot could unlock secrets about the history of the solar system.

Asteroids are relatively simple. The leftover bits of stillborn rocky planets, they are rich in carbon, iron and other heavier elements. They're basically just big balls of rock.

Comets, however, are much more active. They're a mixed bag of ices and looser, lighter materials that formed in the outer edges of the solar system during its infancy. Because of their lighter elements, when comets get too close to the sun, they become agitated, with the light elements sublimating from the surface to form a coma, and sometimes even a tail of gas that can stretch for millions of miles.

Related: Comets vs. asteroids: How do these rocky objects compare?

So asteroids and comets are very different. But in 1950, astronomers found the first-ever signs of activity around an unexpected place. They discovered that asteroid (4015) Wilson-Harrington has a coma, just like a comet does. But the object definitely wasn't a comet. It most certainly was an asteroid, given that it had a mostly rocky composition.

In the past 70 years, astronomers have identified fewer than 30 active asteroids, and they still present a major mystery to our understanding of the evolution of the solar system. So how did these small, rocky bodies get enough of the light elements to form a coma or a tail?

The active asteroids are telling us something important about the history of the solar system. For example, one of the major outstanding mysteries in planetary evolution is how Earth got its water. Our planet originally formed with a lot of water, but most of it either boiled off when Earth's surface was molten or got locked up deep within the mantle. To get water on the planet's surface requires some sort of delivery system. Comets are one obvious vehicle, but there may not have been enough of them wandering through the inner solar system to do the job.

Maybe active asteroids did the job of enriching Earth, but we have so few examples in the modern solar system that it's too hard to tell.

Thankfully, these active asteroids are not alone. There's another distinct population of small bodies inhabiting the solar system: the Centaurs. These asteroid-like objects sit between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune. Astronomers think the Centaurs were once members of the Kuiper Belt, a ring of small objects well beyond the orbit of Neptune, that wandered in too close and got captured by the gravity of the giant planets.

The Centaurs themselves share characteristics with both asteroids and comets, forming a sort of hybrid population. Fewer than 20 of them produce visible comae just like comets do. This is especially puzzling, since many of those active Centaurs spend most of their time beyond the orbit of Jupiter, where it should be too cold to sublimate any frozen light elements.

This small but distinct population of active asteroids and Centaurs presents astronomers with many mysteries. For instance, how are the Centaurs active despite being so far from the sun? What do these active objects tell us about the history of light elements during the formation of the solar system?

To answer these questions, we need more data. Surely, more active asteroids are out there, but they are notoriously difficult to detect. Not only are the asteroids relatively small, dim and distant from the sun, but signs of their activity are exceedingly faint. It takes dedicated time and attention to search through catalogs of asteroid images, hunting for signs of a coma or a tail.

This is definitely a task beyond the capabilities of even the most sophisticated automated algorithms which means it's up to us to find new active asteroids.

A paper recently published to the preprint database arXiv discusses a new citizen-science project to hunt for active asteroids. The project takes images of asteroids from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). Even though the DES telescope was not designed to hunt for asteroids, its imaging capabilities turn out to make it an ideal asteroid finder.

However, to find more active asteroids, somebody needs to look at the images and decide if there's any sign of activity. And here's where you come in: You simply visit activeasteroids.net and click to get started. After a brief tutorial, you can begin flipping through images of asteroids and deciding if you think they're active.

Don't worry; the fate of astronomy doesn't rest entirely on your shoulders. Your answers will be compared against others before getting passed on to the researchers.

With a larger catalog of known active asteroids, astronomers hope to begin characterizing these objects and studying them in more detail. From there, they can begin to understand what these active asteroids might tell us about the history of the solar system.

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Help find weird comet-like asteroids that could reveal solar system secrets - Space.com

After enrolling in a special topics astronomy course offered at the University of Michigan-Flint, Patrick Ross, a 2015 graduate with a bachelor's degree in physics, found himself fascinated with the field of astrophysics. The combination of interesting coursework and strong faculty mentorship is what drove Ross to embark on a six-year journey from intern to manager at Flint's Longway Planetarium.

When Ross began his academic journey at UM-Flint, he started looking for ways to connect with faculty and immerse himself in research. He found those opportunities through Rajib Ganguly and James Alsup, both associate professors of physics. The pair were focused on the areas of quasars, which are massive celestial objects emitting large amounts of energy, and black holes.

"Being able to sit down directly with the faculty as an undergraduate student and have a research group to look at problems in astronomy was very unique and influential in where I chose to go with my degree," said Ross.

During his undergraduate work, Ross began an internship as a part-time presenter, introducing and talking about show content at Longway. The experience helped build his passion for astronomy and his interest in continuing education. That interest would propel Ross to earn a master's degree in physics from Texas A&M University-Commerce. While in graduate school, he worked at Ritter Planetarium in Toledo, Ohio, and later found himself back in Texas in a management position at the A&M Commerce Planetarium and Observatory.

While working in Texas, Ross got a tip from Ganguly the planetarium manager position at Longway was available. Ross applied shortly after and was hired. He oversees a team of staff and educators, as well as the portable planetarium that travels from the main venue to schools outside the Flint area, thereby bringing the Longway experience to school-aged children throughout the region. Ross is also responsible for all new program content like the more recent James Webb Space Telescope images that he has included in their shows.

"Working at the planetarium is great," said Ross. "You have a very diverse group of people working together, from scientists who are published and well-known in the field, to educators with various backgrounds."

As for his time and experiences at UM-Flint, Ross believes that immersing himself in the opportunities presented by faculty is what made him successful and is an approach that current students could also benefit from.

"[Students should] find a research group or professors that will let [them] participate in a project that interests them so that they can not only learn more about the subject, but learn more about the workflow of research," he said. "It's a great experience to see what the other side of the degree looks like if you continue into the field. Diversify your research groups if you can in order to get different perspectives. Last but not least, learn computer science and learn how to code. It's becoming more important than ever in the field to have those types of skills."

Ross attributes his success in graduate school to his coding skills so that he was able to dive right into the research, while many in his cohort were still learning the ropes.

He plans to continue his career in the planetarium field and hopes to find a PhD program that bridges the gap between science and public outreach in the future.

Originally posted here:

UM-Flint alum puts the stars within reach at Longway Planetarium - University of Michigan-Flint

Its that time of year again. The days are getting shorter and the temperatures cooler. That means fall is just around the corner, and it kicks off with the Fall Equinox pumpkin spice enthusiasts and astronomers rejoice.

The astronomical event of the Fall Equinox (or Spring Equinox for those in the Southern Hemisphere) happens at a certain time every year. This year the autumnal equinox will occur on Thursday, September 22 at 9:04 p.m., Eastern. It will happen at the same point in time all across the Northern Hemisphere.

It is no mystery that the Earth is in constant motion around the Sun. On September 22, the Earth will be at a point in its orbit around the Sun in which the Sun will be aligned with Earths celestial equator. The celestial equator is the point in space that is directly above Earths equatorial line; the invisible line marks the halfway point between the North and South poles.

On the equinox, not only is the Sun aligned directly with the middle of the Earth, but the day and night are also of equal length. The name equinox is derived from the Latin term aequus, meaning equal, and nox, meaning night. The days become shorter until the Winter Solstice, when the Suns points more toward the Southern Hemisphere.

The tilt of the Earth with respect to the Sun during each equinox. Shutterstock

The autumnal equinox marks the beginning of the days becoming shorter in the Northern Hemisphere, as the sun is aligned more towards the South. The reverse happens in the Southern Hemisphere as countries in that part of Earth experience their spring equinox, the days becoming longer.

This phenomenon is due to Earths tilt, or axis, which never changes, staying at 23.4 degrees. When Earth is at a point in its orbit around the sun where the sun is directly aligned or just around the celestial equator, our planet experiences equal day and night. In the case of the autumnal equinox for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the orbit of Earth moves into where the position of the Northern Hemisphere points away from the Sun. Meanwhile, the Southern Hemisphere begins to be pointed towards the sun, which kicks off spring.

Picture zooming out into space, looking back at Earth and the Sun as a system. The Earth is titled 23.4 degrees to one side, rotating within 24 hours, creating a day, while it continues on its 365-day journey around the sun, giving us our year. The Northern Hemisphere is moving away the Suns direction, which makes the nights longer and days shorter.

Many well-known winter constellations are beginning to appear earlier in the night. With the nights getting longer, its the perfect time to observe the constellations before winter approaches.Brooke Edwards

With the days getting shorter, there are many more opportunities for astronomy; one positive to a time of year many view as negative! Two days after the Fall Equinox, the New Moon will appear in the sky. This means the Moon will be completely covered in shadows, giving amateur astronomers a chance to see fainter objects that might normally be drowned out by the light of the moon at other phases. Astronomy buffs will also have a chance to view the Draconid and Orionid meteor showers in October.

The cycle will start all over again a year from now. The next autumnal equinox falls on September 23, 2023, at 2:49 a.m., Eastern.

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Fall Equinox 2022: Date, time, and opportunities for astronomy during this yearly event - Inverse

The new observations provide new insight into the process of planet and star formation. They will be used to validate upcoming James Webb Space Telescope observations that will peer even further into the relatively nearby region of space.

"It was thrilling being the first, together with my colleagues of the 'PDRs4All' James Webb Space Telescope team, to see the sharpest images of the Orion Bar ever taken in the near-infrared," explained Carlos Alvarez, a staff astronomer at Keck Observatory and co-author of the study.

The researchers, whose work will be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, and is available in preprint format on arXiv.org, say the Orion Nebula is the closest massive star formation region to Earth, meaning that this investigation into its PDR the region heated by starlight could provide valuable clues about the way stars and planets are formed.

"Observing photo-dissociation regions is like looking into our past," said Emilie Habart, an Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale associate professor at Paris-Saclay University and the lead author of a paper on this study. "These regions are important because they allow us to understand how young stars influence the gas and dust cloud they are born in, particularly sites where stars, like the sun, form."

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Astronomers capture the most detailed image ever of a star formation zone in Orion's 'sword' - Interesting Engineering