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Mars Base

Library of Congress Acquires Sagan's Personal Collection, Thanks to Seth MacFarlane - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...tion-thanks-to-seth-macfarlane

scibyte53 cosmos CarlSagan SethMacFarlane

shared by Mars Base on 27 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Carl Sagan’s personal archive — a comprehensive collection of papers contained within 798 boxes — was delivered to the Library of Congress recently for sorting… thanks in no small part to “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane
  • MacFarlane provided an “undisclosed sum of money” to the Library to purchase the collection from Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan, who had kept the papers preserved in storage
  • MacFarlane has been working to bring Sagan’s Cosmos series back to television, with Neil deGrasse Tyson reprising Sagan’s role
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Tyson who introduced MacFarlane to Druyan, and apparently got a peek at the astrophysicist’s impressive collection of papers, which “ranges from childhood report cards to college term papers to eloquent letters written just before his untimely death in 1996 at age 62.”
  • organization, a process expected to take several months
  • files labeled F/C, for ‘fissured ceramics,’ Sagan’s code name for letters from crackpots
Mars Base

NewsDaily: Seth MacFarlane brings his love of science to TV - 0 views

www.newsdaily.com/...ings-his-love-of-science-to-tv

scibyte115 cosmos scibyte116

shared by Mars Base on 14 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Seth MacFarlane, creator of "Family Guy"
  • is bringing
  • "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey," a 13-part series that will debut March 9 on Fox. It will also air on the National Geographic Channel.
Mars Base

Super-Earth joins ranks in life-supporting zone | Atom & Cosmos | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/..._ranks_in_life-supporting_zone

scibyte71 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 14 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Astronomers
  • have found a new candidate: a world seven times as massive as Earth in a nearby solar system.
  • planet orbits a star about 42 light-years away in the constellation Pictor
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • thought to harbor only three planets
  • sensitive data-filtering methods revealed the presence of three more
  • farthest-out of these lies in a “sweet spot
  • detected the new planets from changes in the light of the host star as the planets’ gravity tugged on it.
  • Instead of analyzing all the light from the star
  • the scientists split the light into different wavelengths to pick out the planets’ signals from those
  • able to look more deeply into the data and detect weaker signals
  • Nothing is known yet about the new planet’s physical and geochemical properties
  • a good target for a space-based imaging mission,
  • because it is so close to Earth
Mars Base

Distant planets' atmospheres revealed | Atom & Cosmos | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...t_planets_atmospheres_revealed

scibyte86 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 15 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Astronomers have gotten the most detailed look yet at the atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system
  • The study is among the first to directly analyze the chemical makeup of an exoplanet
  • In the past, astronomers inferred the existence of exoplanets and their gases by looking for subtle changes in the light streaming from the planet’s star
  • ...42 more annotations...
  • Now, with improved instruments, a team
  • has detected light coming directly from a planet light-years away
  • The data have high enough resolution to reveal not only the presence but the abundance of carbon monoxide and water in the planet’s atmosphere
  • Such information could shed light on how the planet formed
  • studies could also reveal the presence of life on a distant planet, but the planet’s size and orbit have already ruled it out as a habitable world
  • In 2008
  • the first image of a multiplanet system outside the solar system, showing three gas giants orbiting the star HR 8799
  • HR 8799 is about 130 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Pegasus
  • The planets are scorching hot, making them bright enough for astronomers to detect directly
  • In 2010, the researchers imaged a fourth planet around HR 8799
  • In the new study
  • focused on one of these planets, HR 8799c.
  • Five to 10 times as massive as Jupiter, HR 8799c sits about eight times farther away from its star than Jupiter does from the sun
  • Because of that great distance, the astronomers could block the star’s light and record infrared light
  • Because different gases absorb and emit light in distinct ways, the team could identify carbon monoxide and water but found no methane, which scientists had thought might be present.
  • In another new study
  • researchers simultaneously collected infrared light from the atmospheres of all four planets
  • A team led by
  • an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, found hints of ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide and acetylene in the planets’ atmospheres
  • The chemistry of each planet varies
  • different from anything in our own solar system
  • Although the teams looked at different wavelengths of light, which pick up different types of molecules, the two studies appear consistent
  • by peering at just one planet, Konopacky’s team obtained more detailed data that allowed the researchers to get a sense of how much carbon and oxygen is in HR 8799c’s atmosphere
  • Knowing the ratio of carbon to oxygen in the atmosphere may reveal how the planet formed
  • Astronomers have two competing theories of how planets arise from the disk of gas and dust encircling a young star
  • In the gravitational instability model, some of the gas and dust suddenly clumps and collapses, simultaneously creating a planet’s core and atmosphere
  • In this scenario, the chemical composition of a planet should match that of its star
  • In the other model, known as core accretion, planet building is a two-step process
  • First, material from the disk accumulates into a core.
  • Later, the core captures gases swirling in the disk to form an atmosphere.
  • In this case, the carbon-to-oxygen ratio of the planet may differ from the star because the accretion of cores may deplete the disk of certain elements
  • Compared with its star, HR 8799c appears to have slightly more carbon relative to oxygen, suggesting the planet originated via core accretion
  • surmise that when the disk around HR 8799 formed, water froze into particles of ice.
  • The bits of ice collided to form the planet’s core, leaving behind little water vapor, and therefore less oxygen, when the planet accumulated its atmosphere later on
  • Other researchers are not convinced by this conclusion
  • “We don’t really understand planetary formation enough to make a strong case either way,”
  • the data from both new studies may help astronomers refine their simulations of planetary formation
  • astronomers have directly imaged planets around three distant stars
  • researchers are poised to capture light from many more planets
  • Project 1640,
  • is looking for Jupiter-sized planets around some 200 stars
  • “Ultimately, with better instruments, people will be able to use these methods on Earthlike planets.”
Mars Base

Gone perhaps, but Kepler won't soon be forgotten | Atom & Cosmos | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/..._Kepler_wont_soon_be_forgotten

scibyte95 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 25 May 13 - No Cached
  • When scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scheduled a conference called “Exoplanets in the Post-Kepler Era,” they figured that era would still be several years away
  • . When
  • Kepler into space
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • astronomers knew that the galaxy contained at least 350 exoplanets, nearly all of them the size of Jupiter or larger
  • Kepler’s then spent four years
  • added nearly 3,000 planets
  • It will take at least several weeks before they beam commands up to the $600-million telescope, and they admit that a fix is a long shot.
  • Kepler engineers
  • strategizing about how to remotely repair one of two broken reaction wheels that precisely point the telescope
  • astronomers are convinced that the Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of planets, roughly one for every star, with at least 17 billion of them Earth-sized
  • NASA’s next exoplanet-hunting mission, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which is scheduled for a 2017 launch
  • Whereas Kepler has fixed its gaze on distant stars, TESS will focus on bright, nearby stars so that powerful telescopes like the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will be able to probe the atmospheres of planets that TESS discovers
  • s TESS
  • while less sensitive than Kepler, will nonetheless uncover plenty of planets in our neighborhood, including a handful of Earth-sized worlds
  • Astronomers
  • Other astronomers
  • are still optimistic. They have a year of data from the telescope left to analyze
  • quite possibly including an Earth-sized planet orbiting a sunlike star at a distance suitable for life
  • Astronomers hope to pair size measurements of planets observed by telescopes such as TESS with mass readings from ground-based scopes that look for subtle wobbles in stars’ motion caused by the gravitational pull of orbiting planets.
  • Several years ago
  • radial velocity, could pick out only hulking planets that delivered a hard yank to their stars
  • lately the technology has improved so drastically that in October 2012, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher instrument
  • spotted what appears to be a planet only slightly heavier than Earth tightly orbiting Alpha Centauri B, a sunlike star a mere 4.4 light-years away
  • Kepler’s main goal was to determine the frequency of Earthlike planets in the galaxy
  • have enough data to make an intelligent extrapolation about what that number is, but
  • actually determining that number
Mars Base

Dark matter detector reports hints of WIMPs | Atom & Cosmos | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...etector_reports_hints_of_WIMPs

scibyte91 DarkMatter

shared by Mars Base on 16 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ultracold crystals designed to catch particles of dark matter deep underground have come up with three potential detections
  • The researchers do not have enough evidence to say they have discovered dark matter particles
  • Theoretical physicists have put forth some ideas for particles that might constitute dark matter, including one called a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • The experiment that made the newly reported detections is designed to pick up the signal of a WIMP as Earth passes through the galaxy
  • The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search consists of a network of silicon and germanium crystals cooled to near absolute zero
  • in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota, a former iron mine more than 700 meters beneath the surface
  • If WIMPs exist, one should very occasionally slam into the nucleus of a silicon or germanium atom, causing a release of energy and a detectable vibration in the crystal
  • The hundreds of meters of earth above the experiment prevent other particles, such as protons and neutrons, from reaching the crystals and triggering a false positive
  • between July 2007 and September 2008, two of the experiment’s 11 silicon crystal detectors picked up three signals consistent with those expected from WIMP interactions
  • If the signals were caused by WIMPs
  • estimates the dark matter particle would weigh in at about 10 times the mass of the proton, well below many theoretical estimates
  • While the crystals’ underground setup provides plenty of shielding, some non-WIMP particles, such as electrons on the crystals’ surface, can cloud the results
  • it’s extremely unlikely that three events would show up from non-WIMP sources.
  • the energy released by the potential WIMPs is at the very lower limit of the detectors’ sensitivity
  • making erroneous WIMP detections more likely
  • concerns that the two crystals that picked up the signal could be more susceptible to false positives than the rest
  • In 2009, CDMS published a paper reporting that its germanium detectors had snagged two potential WIMPs, but further analysis revealed them to be surface electrons
  • more convinced if the detectors had picked up 10 or 12 signs of WIMPs, rather than just three
  • definitive detection would require multiple experiments worldwide to converge on the same characteristics for a dark matter particl
  • One in Italy called DAMA, short for Dark Matter, has made bold claims of dark matter detection that have drawn skepticism from many scientists
  • Other experiments have claimed to find signals at masses similar to this latest CDMS calculation but have not definitively said they have observed WIMPs
  • each experiment uses a different detection technique and has its own protocol for distinguishing WIMPs from background noise, making it hard to compare results
  • As for CDMS, the silicon detectors that found these signals are no longer collecting data
  • Researchers recently upgraded the Soudan facility with supersensitive germanium detectors
  • Over the next few years, the germanium detectors will move to a new, deeper underground home in Sudbury, Ontario, about 2 kilometers below the surface
Mars Base

Most Earthlike planets yet seen bring Kepler closer to its holy grail | Atom & Cosmos |... - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...epler_closer_to_its_holy_grail

scibyte91 scibyte92 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 19 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • five-planet system around a star called Kepler-62, some 1,200 light-years away in the constellation Lyra
  • Astronomers found the planets by analyzing nearly three years’ worth of data
  • Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f are far more accommodating. They are 1.6 and 1.4 times the diameter of Earth
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • early evidence supports the optimistic view that at least 62f is rocky
  • biggest uncertainty about both planets is their composition
  • an astronomer at the University of Washington
  • not involved in the research
  • Kepler-62e
  • may be too close to its star – and therefore too hot – to sustain life
  • if 62e is a rocky planet, it’s almost certainly tidally locked with its star, with one half of its surface always illuminated and the other perpetually dark
  • Kepler 62 is about two-thirds the size of the sun and several hundred degrees Celsius cooler
  • Finding planets in the habitable zones of larger stars
  • harder because those planets have relatively long orbits and barely cast a shadow as they pass across the faces of their suns
  • another study
  • led by
  • NASA Ames Research Center
  • identified two planets around a sunlike star called Kepler-69, some 2,700 light-years away
  • One of the planets is 1.7 times the size of Earth and teeters on the inner edge of the habitable zone
  • probably too hot for life
  • almost certainly a super-Venus rather than a super-Earth
  • even a planet 75 percent larger than Earth is potentially habitable
  • Next-generation missions like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which NASA approved earlier this month for launch in 2017, will take on the task of finding nearer planets that astronomers can study in depth
Mars Base

News in Brief: Comet's water still hanging around on Jupiter | Atom & Cosmos | Science ... - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...till_hanging_around_on_Jupiter

scibyte92 comet

shared by Mars Base on 26 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • In July 1994, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plowed into Jupiter
  • The comet also left behind
  • millions of gallons of water. Water from the impact still makes up at least 95 percent of the water in the planet’s upper atmosphere
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Telescopes had previously spotted water in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, some 100 kilometers above the planet’s ammonia cloud tops, but those surveys could not determine where the water came from
  • create a high-resolution map of water vapor distribution throughout Jupiter’s atmosphere
  • used the E
  • astronomers
  • researchers
  • found that the concentration of water peaked in the planet’s southern hemisphere, right in the region where the comet struck
  • More water also appeared at higher altitudes around the planet, which
  • supports the comet as its origin.
  • Water from other sources such as Jupiter’s icy moons would likely spread out more evenly around the planet and would gradually filter down to lower altitudes
Mars Base

NASA - The Day NASA's Fermi Dodged a 1.5-ton Bullet - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...bullet-dodge.html

scibyte92 Fermi

shared by Mars Base on 08 May 13 - No Cached
  • the U.S. Space Surveillance Network continued keeping tabs on Cosmos 1805 and every other artificial object larger than 4 inches across in Earth orbit. Of the 17,000 objects currently tracked, only about 7 percent are active satellites.
Mars Base

Russia meteor virtually impossible to see coming | Atom & Cosmos | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...ually_impossible_to_see_coming

scibyte82 RussianMeteor

shared by Mars Base on 17 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Scientists have begun piecing together the characteristics of the meteor that exploded over Russia on the morning of February 15, using data from seismic instruments that track earthquakes and microphones designed to detect sonic booms from nuclear explosions
  • The explosion had the equivalent of up to 500,000 tons of TNT
  • about 30 times the energy output of the Hiroshima atomic bomb
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • only 5 percent of the energy of the famous 1908 Tunguska meteor that downed trees over a 2,000-square-kilometer area in Siberia
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