Sunday, October 13Full Moon officially arrives at 5:08 p.m. EDT, but it will look completely illuminated all night. You can find it rising in the east shortly after sunset and peaking high in the south around 1 a.m. local daylight time. It dips low in the west by the time morning twilight starts to paint the sky. The Moon lies in southeastern Pisces near that constellations border with Cetus. Octobers Full Moon also goes by the name Hunters Moon. In early autumn, the Full Moon rises about half an hour later each night compared with a normal lag close to 50 minutes. The added early evening illumination supposedly helps hunters track down their prey.

Monday, October 14Although autumn began three weeks ago and the stars of winters Orion now rule the morning sky, the Summer Triangle remains prominent on October evenings. Look high in the west after darkness falls and your eyes will fall on the brilliant star Vega in the constellation Lyra the Harp. At magnitude 0.0, Vega is the brightest member of the triangle. The second-brightest star, magnitude 0.8 Altair in Aquila the Eagle, lies some 35 southeast of Vega. The asterisms dimmest member, magnitude 1.3 Deneb in Cygnus the Swan, stands about 25 east-northeast of Vega. For observers at mid-northern latitudes, Deneb passes through the zenith around 8 p.m. local daylight time, just as the last vestiges of twilight disappear.

Tuesday, October 15After a three-month hiatus lost in the Suns glare, Venus returns to view after sunset in mid-October. Its not easy to see, however it stands just 2 high in the west-southwest a half-hour after sundown. Luckily, the inner planet shines brilliantly at magnitude 3.8 and should show up if you have a haze-free sky and unobstructed horizon. Despite this pedestrian start to its evening apparition, Venus will be a glorious sight this coming winter and spring.

Wednesday, October 16Uranus reaches opposition in just two weeks, and it is already a tempting evening target. The ice giant world rises during twilight and climbs 30 above the eastern horizon by 9:30 p.m. local daylight time. The magnitude 5.7 planet lurks among the background stars of southern Aries. Use binoculars to find the planet 2.7 south of the similarly bright star 19 Arietis. A telescope reveals Uranus blue-green disk, which spans 3.7". To learn more about viewing Uranus and its outer solar system cousin, Neptune, see Observe the ice giants in Octobers Astronomy.

Thursday, October 17The variable star Algol in Perseus reaches minimum brightness at 5:27 a.m. EDT. If you start watching it late yesterday evening, you can see its brightness diminish by 70 percent (its magnitude drops from 2.1 to 3.4) over the course of about five hours. This eclipsing binary star runs through a cycle from minimum to maximum and back every 2.87 days. Algol appears in the northeast during the evening hours and passes nearly overhead around 2 a.m. local daylight time.

Friday, October 18Saturn remains a glorious sight this week. The ringed planet resides among the background stars of Sagittarius the Archer, a region that appears 25 high in the south-southwest as twilight fades to darkness and doesnt set until close to 11 p.m. local daylight time. Saturn shines at magnitude 0.5 and appears significantly brighter than any of its host constellations stars. Although a naked-eye view of the planet is nice, seeing it through a telescope truly inspires. Even a small instrument shows the distant worlds 16"-diameter disk and spectacular ring system, which spans 37" and tilts 25 to our line of sight.

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The Sky This Week from October 11 to 20 - Astronomy Magazine

If you could take a tour of our cosmic neighborhood, what would be on your itinerary? The massive geysers of the ice moon Enceladus? A lava channel on Venus longer than the Nile River? What about the 12-mile high Verona Rupes on Uranus moon, Miranda the tallest cliff in the solar system? While these destinations may be out of reach, the astronomers who study them will be near at hand Oct. 18 for the Astronomical Society of the Pacifics Earth to Space event at San Francisco State University.

The days activities are free and open to the public and will feature a talk on the top tourist attractions of the solar system along with other space-focused educational talks and activities. The conference will also highlight the uncertain future of one particular planet: our own.

We want to bring the astronomical perspective to issues of climate change and the Earth, said Professor of Physics and Astronomy Adrienne Cool, an event organizer. Earth is a planet its the only planet were ever going to have, actually.

Cool says astronomers offer unique insight into the urgency of climate change. Astronomers are extremely conscious of the fact that we are a tiny, tiny mote in very empty space, she explains. We deal with that all the time: the extraordinary isolation and vulnerability of this planet that we all live on. Sharing that perspective is one of the ways the Astronomical Society of the Pacific aims to connect people with science at this conference.

Linda Shore, CEO of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and an SF State alumna (B.A., 63; M.S., 86), says she expects the event will help the public see the relevance of astronomy to their everyday lives, encourage scientists to engage with their communities and help science educators expand their own knowledge and improve how they facilitate science learning. Thats always been the mission of the society, Shore explains: bringing together people from all walks of life to celebrate the awe and wonder of the night sky.

To spread that wonder, scientists and environmental policy experts will give talks at the event on topics ranging from the history of lunar exploration to the search for distant planets. Attendees will be able to hunt for sunspots with solar telescopes, experience a planetarium show and visit the Universitys observatory after dark to view planets and galaxies in the sky (weather permitting). Students in SF States Department of Physics and Astronomy will also host Astronomy on Tap, a series of short talks about their own research.

As we face the crisis of climate change in our own little corner of the sky, creating a community of shared wonder may be more important than ever, Cool explains. I think thats my hope for this conference, she said. That it will make us all realize that we have lots in common, lots to talk about and lots we can help each other with.

The conference will be held from 1 to 10 p.m. Friday, Oct. 18, across SF States main campus. For details, see the Astronomical Society of the Pacifics webpage.

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Astronomy ed event turns the telescope on Earth - SF State News

L Ilsedore Cleevess fascination with the origins of the universe began with an elementary school field trip to Sapelo Island, Georgia, where she and her classmates studied the night sky from the beaches of the barrier island. She went on to earn international headlines as a Ph.D. student, when she was the lead author of a 2014 Science journal article that concluded that as much as half of the water present in the solar system is older than the sun itself.

Five years later, the University of Virginia assistant professor of astronomy is considered one of the worlds leading experts in theoretical astrochemistry and its applications to newly forming and formed planets. Her work on the dusty disks around young stars where planet formation takes place has earned her a prestigious Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering.

Announced this morning by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the program for early-career scientists and engineers offers $875,000 over five years for each of this years 22 fellows to pursue their research.

For Cleeves, who came to the University in 2018 from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where she was a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow, that means advancing our understanding of the molecular and physical origins of planetary systems, including our own. Using clues from interstellar molecular emission, Cleeves and her research group study young planetary systems in formation around low-mass stars. These protoplanetary disks represent the very materials from which planets, comets and other solar system bodies eventually form.

The announcement of Cleevess fellowship comes a week after the announcement of this years Nobel Prize in Physics, which went to James Peebles, an astrophysicist who helped to explain how matter in the young universe swirled into galaxies, and Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, the first astronomers to discover a planet circling around a distant sun-like star, showing that other stars similar to the sun also possess planets.

Given the recent advances in exoplanet [planets beyond our solar system] and planet formation science, its an awesome time to be doing origins research, said Cleeves, who also holds a joint faculty appointment within the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, in the Department of Chemistry.

The Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering are among the nations largest nongovernmental fellowships, designed to allow maximum flexibility in how the funding is used. Since 1988, this program has supported opportunities for young investigators to conduct unencumbered research under the belief that their research over time will lead to new discoveries that improve peoples lives and enhance our understanding of the universe.

Cleeves joins two of her department colleagues as a Packard Fellow and is one of seven at UVA, which joins an elite group of universities with an astronomy department featuring three or more Packard Fellows.

Packard Fellows have gone on to receive a range of accolades, including Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics, the Fields Medal, the Alan T. Waterman Award, MacArthur Fellowships, and elections to national academies. Packard Fellows also gather at annual meetings to discuss their research, where conversations have led to unexpected collaborations across disciplines.

Cleeves joins two of her department colleagues as a Packard Fellow and is one of seven at UVA, which joins an elite group of universities with an astronomy department featuring three or more Packard Fellows.

Craig Sarazin, W.H. Vanderbilt Professor of Astronomy and chair of the Department of Astronomy, said Cleeves has already established herself as a brilliant and productive scientist who is making important contributions to our understanding of astrochemistry and the origin of planets.

Ilses work can help to answer the question: How much is the evolution toward life on planets aided by organic materials delivered to planets as they form, or shortly thereafter? Sarazin said. In just one year at UVA, Ilse has built a very strong group of post-docs, grad students and undergraduates,whom she is mentoring.

Cleeves uses both computer models and observations in her study of the dusty disks around young stars where planet formation happens. Her groups research aims to figure out how the properties of these disks lead to robust planet formation, especially with respect to potentially habitable planets.

While she focuses on the theoretical modeling of these systems, her work is guided by observational results from the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array in Chile the largest radio astronomy observatory in the world as well as data from other observatories.

Were really fortunate to be next door to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which maintains a close partnership with the University of Virginia, Cleeves said. Having this expertise nearby has been an incredibly productive relationship. In terms of the molecules we can detect in space, we use radio telescopes to observe and even map them.

But thats just half of the challenge. Even with ALMA, we cant see everything thats going with the discs that are forming planets. So that requires interpreting what we see with ALMA when we measure a certain molecule, and that depends heavily on chemical modeling. We continually need to improve our models, since they are only as good as the information they are based on.

Cleeves also serves on the management committee for the Virginia Initiative on Cosmic Origins, a UVA research initiative hosted by the departments of Astronomy, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Sciences, and Materials Science & Engineering, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Established in 2017 with a grant from the UVA Strategic Investment Fund, VICO is exploring fundamental questions about the formation of galaxies, stars, planets and life in the universe.

Cleeves said our knowledge of exoplanets planets that orbit around other stars beyond the solar system has expanded to the point where they may seem ubiquitous. The challenge remains, however, to understand the diversity in their composition and how they formed.

Were seeing exoplanets with a wide variety of compositions, with water, and carbon, and so where I come into this is wanting to understand how all of this material got there, Cleeves said. Where did all of this diversity in the architectures of these exoplanets come from? Where did their water come from? Is water a common ingredient of forming planets? What is the role of organic material? We want to understand what fundamentally drives the chemistry of planet formation, and eventually, planets.

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Astronomer L. Ilsedore Cleeves Joins the Ranks of UVA's Packard Fellows - University of Virginia

For the second time ever, astronomers have detected an interstellar object plunging through our solar system. But this time, researchers think they know where it came from.

Gennady Borisov, an amateur astronomer working with his own telescope in Crimea, first spotted the interstellar comet on Aug. 30. His find made the object the first interstellar visitor discovered since oblong 'Oumuamua flashed through our solar neighborhood back in 2017. Now, in a new paper, a team of Polish researchers has calculated the path this new comet known as Comet 2I/Borisov or (in early descriptions) as C/2019 Q4 took to arrive in our sun's gravity well. And that path leads back to a binary red dwarf star system 13.15 light-years away, known as Kruger 60.

When you rewind Comet Borisov's path through space, you'll find that 1 million years ago, the object passed just 5.7 light-years from the center of Kruger 60, moving just 2.13 miles per second (3.43 kilometers per second), the researchers wrote.

Related: 11 Fascinating Facts About Our Milky Way Galaxy

That's fast in human terms about the top speed of an X-43A Scramjet, one of the fastest aircraft ever built. But an X-43A Scramjet can't overcome the sun's gravity to escape our solar system. And the researchers found that if the comet were really moving that slowly at a distance of no more than 6 light-years from Kruger 60, it probably wasn't just passing by. That's probably the star system it came from, they said. At some point in the distant past, Comet Borisov lively orbited those stars the way comets in our system orbit ours.

Ye Quanzhi, an astronomer and comet expert at the University of Maryland who wasn't involved in this paper, told Live Science that the evidence pinning Comet 2I/Borisov to Kruger 60 is pretty convincing based on the data available so far.

"If you have an interstellar comet and you want to know where it came from, then you want to check two things," he said. "First, has this comet had a small pass distance from a planetary system? Because if it's coming from there, then its trajectory must intersect with the location of that system."

Though the 5.7 light-years between the new comet and Kruger may seem bigger than a "small gap" nearly 357,000 times Earth's distance from the sun it's close enough to count as "small" for these sorts of calculations, he said.

"Second," Ye added, "usually comets are ejected from a planetary system due to gravitational interactions with major planets in that system."

In our solar system, that might look like Jupiter snagging a comet that's falling toward the sun, slingshotting it around in a brief, partial orbit and then flinging it away toward interstellar space.

"This ejection speed has a limit," Ye said. "It can't be infinite because planets have a certain mass," and the mass of a planet determines how hard it can throw a comet into the void. "Jupiter is pretty massive," he added, "but you can't have a planet that's 100 times more massive than Jupiter because then it would be a star."

Related: 15 Amazing Images of Stars

That mass threshold sets an upper limit on the speeds of comets escaping star systems, Ye said. And the authors of this paper showed that Comet 2I/Borisov fell within the minimum speed and distance from Kruger 60 to suggest it originated there assuming their calculations of its trajectory are correct.

Studying interstellar comets is exciting, Ye said, because it offers a rare opportunity to study distant solar systems using the precise tools scientists employ when examining our own. Astronomers can look at Comet 2I/Borisov using telescopes that might reveal details of the comet's surface. They can figure out whether it behaves like comets in our own system (so far, it has) or does anything unusual, like 'Oumuamua famously did. That's a whole category of research that usually isn't possible with distant solar systems, where small objects only ever appear if they're visible at all as faint, discolored shadows on their suns.

This research, Ye said, means that anything we learn about Comet Borisov could be a lesson about Kruger 60, a nearby star system where no exoplanets have been discovered. 'Oumuamua, by contrast, seems to have come from the general direction of the bright star Vega, but according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, researchers don't believe that's where the object originally came from, instead suggesting it likely came from a newly-forming star system (though researchers aren't sure which one).. That would make Comet Borisov the first interstellar object ever traced to its home system, if these results are confirmed.

However, the paper's authors were careful to point out that these results shouldn't yet be considered conclusive. Astronomers are still collecting more data about Comet 2I/Borisov's path through space, and additional data may reveal that the original trajectory was wrong and that the comet came from somewhere else.

The paper tracing the comet's origin has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but it's available on the preprint server arXiv.

Originally published on Live Science.

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A Second Interstellar Visitor Has Arrived in Our Solar System. This Time, Astronomers Think They Know Where It Came From - Space.com

Some clues suggest that a flare of energetic radiation burst from our galaxys center within the last few million years. Now, in a new study, a team of researchers describes another piece of evidence that the Milky Way burped out such a flare. The research also points to the supermassive black hole in our galaxys center, called Sagittarius A* or Sgr A*, as the responsible party.

The team also estimated when this event occurred. Their data put the outburst at 3.5 million years ago, give or take a million years. That would mean that the Milky Ways center transitioned from an active to a quiet phase pretty recently in Earths history, possibly when early human ancestors were roaming the planet.

The flare would have been visible to the naked eye, shining about 10 times fainter than the Full Moon across a broad spectrum of light wavelengths.

It would look like the cone of light from a movie projector as it passes through a smoky theater, University of Sydney astrophysicist and lead study author Jonathan Bland-Hawthorn said in an email.

The researchers describe their findings in an upcoming paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

This new piece of evidence comes from examining a stream of gas that arcs around the Milky Way. This stream of gas is like a trail that two dwarf galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, leave as they orbit the Milky Way. The research team studied ultraviolet (UV) light coming from this gas trail, called the Magellanic Stream.

The characteristics of the UV light indicate that gases in some sections of the stream are in an excited state. Only a very energetic event, like a beam of radiation from an active galactic nucleus, could have done this, according to Bland-Hawthorn. This means that our own home galaxy had an active galactic nucleus phase in the past.

I think AGN flickering is what goes on for all of cosmic time, Bland-Hawthorn said. All galaxies are doing this, he said, like volcanoes that can lie quietly for long stretches of time but suddenly erupt.

Learning more about the central black hole of our galaxy is an exciting area of research, he added.

I think Sgr A* is the future of astrophysics, like searching for life signatures around planets, Bland-Hawthorn said. I am excited by what we will learn over the next 50 years.

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The Milky Way's supermassive black hole erupted with a violent flare - Astronomy Magazine

Image of black hole MAXI J1820+070

John Paice, a student from Pune-based Inter-University Centre for Astronomy & Astrophysics (IUCAA) as well as the University of Southampton, has created a movie of a growing black hole system with details that were never seen before.

The black hole studied by Paice and his fellow astronomers is named MAXI J1820+070. Discovered in the year 2018, it resides in our own Milky Way galaxy, merely 10,000 light-years away from Earth, and has a mass of seven Suns.

While far from being the biggest black hole around, the interesting thing about MAXI J1820+070 is that it produces flickering electromagnetic radiation.

Southampton University released the artist's impression of the event on the popular video-sharing platform YouTube last Friday. The video has already garnered over one lakh views on the site.

The black hole in the movie is in the process of eating up a star from its binary system, with the debris material forming a spinning accretion disc around it. Frictional, magnetic and gravitational forces are constantly compressing the black hole, thereby producing an incredible amount of heat and giving rise to flickering electromagnetic radiationa phenomenon that has been captured by the astronomers in splendid detail.

The astronomers used data from HiPERCAM instrument on the Gran Telescopio Canarias at La Palma and the X-ray-sensitive NICER instrument aboard the International Space Station for the movie. A high frame-rate visualisation (more than 300 frames per second) was created based on the observed visible and X-ray light emitted by the black hole system.

The astronomers confirmed that the movie is made using real data, but slowed down to 1/10th of its original speed, so as to allow the human eye to discern the rapid flares.

The debris material surrounding the black hole is so bright, it even outshines the star that is being consuming. Moreover, the fastest flickers only last for a few milliseconds, with an intensity equivalent to more than a hundred Suns emitting light in the blink of an eye.

Through this research, the team of astronomers has uncovered new clues that can help understand the immediate surroundings of black holes, including violent flaring at the heart of a black hole system. The observations also shed light on the operation of plasma flows around black holes.

The research paper was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The Weather Companys primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.

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Student from Pune-based Astronomy Institution Captures Unprecedented Details of Black Hole in a Movie - The Weather Channel

Astronomers have long searched the universe for planets, and in his new book The Lost Planets, North Platte native John Wenz discusses the account of Peter van de Kamp, who was one of the first to claim discovery of exoplanets.

Wenz is digital producer at Knowable Magazine, a science magazine based in Palo Alto, California. His writings have appeared in publications including Scientific American, Discover, New Scientist, Daily Beast, Vice Magazine, Wired and the Atlantic.

Wenz said he has always been interested in science, especially with both the planets of our solar system and those beyond it.

I can distinctly remember poring over the various science magazines at the North Platte Public Library and St. Patrick High Schools library just for any morsel of news coming out of space, Wenz said. Its always just been something thats captivated my interest going way, way back, even into childhood.

After graduating from St. Patrick in 2002, Wenz went to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he received a degree in English in 2007.

I lived in Philadelphia for a bit, Washington, D.C., back to Philly and then to Madison, Wisconsin, for a couple of years, Wenz said. Ive kind of been all over the board.

He had been writing freelance articles for websites and other publications, but his focus shifted when he started freelancing for Popular Mechanics.

In 2013, it was when I started writing for Popular Mechanics that I connected that this is a way to channel my obsession with keeping up with space and science news into something that I could actually make a career out of, Wenz said. That both led to me working as a full-time contributor to Popular Mechanics for their online team, as well as branching out into other publications.

His work has appeared in most of the big science magazines, he said.

It kind of really opened the door from there, Wenz said. I started working on the book proposal while I was an editor at Astronomy Magazine.

The discovery of planets outside Earths solar system has long fascinated Wenz.

In 1995, we confirmed the first planet outside our solar system that orbited a star like the sun, Wenz said. That, obviously, had a lot of history leading up to it, but a lot of books Id read didnt really talk about the missteps along the way.

He said they would briefly mention it, but mostly in passing.

It was as if it didnt have its own history and its own importance, even if the people trying to discover these planets werent correct, Wenz said. They were certainly on to something, and thats something I certainly hope shows through in the book. These early efforts werent nothing they were helping point things in the right direction.

The problem, Wenz said, was that the technology to do the research well didnt come into maturity until the 1980s.

The astronomer Wenz features in his book announced in 1963 that he had identified a planet around Barnards Star, the second closest star system to the sun.

Van de Kamp was an astronomer at the Sproul Observatory at Swarthmore College, Wenz said. He had devoted his career to studying double stars and binary stars, oftentimes looking for a dimmer star that you cant quite make out because of the light of another star, but you can kind of tell that its wobbling in place in the sky.

From there, van de Kamp tried to move toward finding planets, especially around smaller stars where a planet would make a more profound effect on a star.

A planet doesnt just do a clean orbit around a star, they kind of tug on each other, Wenz said. Theres a little bit of a tug of war where the star is actually pulled slightly off its center position by the presence of a planet.

Thus, the wobble van de Kamp saw was something he used to claim his discovery. However, the planet that van de Kamp thought he had discovered does not actually exist as verified by subsequent research by other astronomers.

Still, Wenz, wanted to tell van de Kamps story, and tell people about his work in the development of astronomy. Since van de Kamps time, technology has improved and scientists have discovered about 4,000 planets.

The book is published by MIT Press and can be found on most online book stores, as well as in some brick and mortar stores, Wenz said.

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North Platte native documents the work of a pioneering astronomer - North Platte Telegraph

(Credit: MIT/Image courtesy of the researchers)

When even the most powerful telescopes cant capture the views you want, it helps to have natural magnifying glasses to rely on.In a paper published Monday in Nature Astronomy, researchers describe how they zoomed in to capture a young, star-forming galaxy roughly 9 billion light-years away in X-ray light.

To study such a distant galaxy, the researchers took advantage of the fact that massive objects can warp space-time around them and magnify light from background objects.Astronomers have used this effect, called gravitational lensing, to study distant galaxies in various wavelengths of light before. But this is one of the first times researchers using this technique have been able to capture a distant star-forming galaxy in X-rays.

The teams work demonstrates that this technique is possible with existing telescopes, and shows that it can be a powerful new tool for studying star formation in faraway galaxies.

To use gravitational lensing, astronomers need to find massive objects that are aligned just right with distant galaxies in the background. They call the intervening massive object, often a galaxy or galaxy cluster, a gravitational lens. This massive lens warps the space-time around it; light from the distant galaxy in the background, which would otherwise be blocked by the intervening object, follows the warping and appears to us like an arc of light stretched around the lens.

The team, led by astronomer Matthew Bayliss, then at MIT, pointed NASAs Chandra X-ray Observatory at the so-called Phoenix Cluster. This group of galaxies sits 5.7 billion light-years away and is one of the largest galaxy clusters known. Researchers already knew that this monster lenses some background galaxies, but Bayliss team was excited to find that they picked up magnified X-ray light from a background galaxy, too.

They discovered that this distant dwarf galaxy, roughly 9 billion light-years away, has two distinct clumps of newly forming stars.

Seeing star formation happening in galaxies with X-rays is difficult because galaxies where stars and star formation make up most of the light are relatively faint. Galaxies whose light mostly comes from the activity of their central black holes, or active galactic nuclei, are generally much brighter and easier to observe.

Observing a faraway star-forming galaxy in X-rays is exciting because those X-rays come from the most massive stars. Specifically, they come from binary systems of massive stars in which one has collapsed into a black hole or neutron star and is consuming matter from the other.

Studying these distant galaxies in X-ray light may help scientists answer outstanding questions about massive stars. Astronomers know massive stars are often in binary systems, but do they always form in pairs or not? Massive stars shed a lot of gases throughout their lives, but in what ways does that affect their environments and how other stars form?

Its really a new window into studying the properties of the most massive stars that form in the distant universe, Bayliss said.

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Astronomers Zoom in on a Galaxy 9 Billion Light-years Away Thanks to Gravitational Lensing - D-brief - Discover Magazine

CLEVELAND Northeast Ohio astronomers believe more funding is needed to keep track of a growing number of near-earth asteroids that are being discovered and tracked on a daily basis.

Astronomers started talking about funding concerns after an asteroid, about the size of a football field, did a fly-by five times closer to earth than our moon in July, at speeds of over 55,000 miles-an-hour.

Scientists said it was the largest space rock to come so close to earth in 100 years and NASA admitted it didnt see it until it was just 24 hours away.

Cleveland State University Astronomer Jay Reynolds told News 5 it's basically a million-to-one probability that an asteroid could hit the Earth and cause a catastrophic event, but said additional funding is needed to track near-earth asteroids and collect critical data.

The item that were talking about is roughly less than 200 feet across, Reynolds said.

A 200-footer, thats it, thats all you need to destroy a city."

Reynolds said new photographic technology, coupled with high powered telescopes, is helping astronomers discover more and more near-earth asteroids, and it has NASA and the European Space Agency working on ways to create a planetary defense system.

He said NASA has been sending spacecrafts to asteroids to collect samples and determine how to create a planetary defense system, utilizing concepts like a gravity tractor or other ideas to change the trajectory of asteroids that could potentially threaten the earth.

"You have to come up with a plan to deflect an asteroid that it threatening the Earth when it's 20 to 50 years away, not just six months away, like you see in science fiction movies," Reynolds said.

"The earlier you catch the asteroid the easier it is to change its trajectory."

Do you blow it up, no. Maybe paint one side of it black, so that the sunlight will actually push it into a different orbit. Or do we put charges on it, basically engines and thrust this in a way.

Mark Peter with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Ohio Geological Survey told News 5 space rocks fall to the ground as meteorites and can cause bright flashes of light and sonic booms as bolides streaking across the sky.

Peter said there have been 13 confirmed meteorites that have hit land here in Ohio, including the Serpent Mound Crater site in southern Ohio.

That event took place about 300 million years ago, right at the junction of Highland, Adams and Pike County, and left deformed rock over an area of seven-and-a-half miles," Peter said.

Peter also outlined the New Concord meteorite strike of 1860, an event he said produced a sonic boom and shock waves that stunned area farmers.

This explosion that took place high in the atmosphere above them spread out, the boom was heard as far away as Wheeling, West Virginia, Peter said.

Peter and members of the Richland Astronomical Society, at Warren Rupp Observatory near Mansfield, also stressed the need for additional funding in tracking near-earth asteroids.

Observatory President Dan Everly said the society works hard at introducing young people to astronomy, at Friendly House Hidden Hollow Camp.

They really need to get onboard with this and learn how to get out there in space and push them out of the way, Everly said.

Richland Astronomical Society Outreach Coordinator Delores Maly told News 5 teaching astronomy to our youth is important, they could play a role in the future of asteroid tracking.

The people in our group, they are willing share, theyre willing to teach, theyre willing to help," Maly said.

Asteroid tracking is important, because one of these times were going to face it, so we need to be prepared.

If you think you may have found a meteorite, you can have your rock identified by the ODNR Ohio Geological Survey through this web page .

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Northeast Ohio astronomers report more funding needed to track asteroids - News 5 Cleveland

MICHELLE THALLER: There are a lot of people that are fascinated by astronomy, and they think, hey, you can actually get a job where it's your life to make new discoveries, to actually work with larger NASA missions. So how do you get this gig? How do you become an astronomer?

For some strange reason, I always wanted to be an astronomer, ever since I was a very small child. I think for a while I wanted to be an astronaut, and then I actually realized I was afraid of flying and I did not want to be an astronaut. But I loved space, and I could just never get the questions out of my head. I was told many times I didn't have the right personality to be a scientist. That really didn't matter at all. That turned out not to be true.

But here are some of the things that kind of need to happen. So if you want to become a professional research astronomer, one of the things you will have to have is a doctorate in astronomy.

Now, there are a lot of other ways to be involved in astronomy. I work with a lot of people who are engineers who help us build the telescopes or the instruments that we use. They, for the most part, do not have PhDs. They may have an undergraduate degree in engineering. Some of them have master's degrees. But usually, they actually start working in a more practical way, building the instruments, doing some testing. They start that fairly early in their careers.

But to be an astronomer, you do have to get a doctorate. So there is a fairly well-defined path for that. So you go through high school, and after high school, you can apply to any number of colleges that have degree programs in either physics, or mathematics, or computer science. Or, in some cases, they'll actually have full degree programs in astronomy or astrophysics. And these days, those two words, astronomy and astrophysics, are used fairly interchangeably in a professional setting. So if you're majoring in astronomy, you're basically a physicist majoring in things that are in the sky. So astrophysicist, astronomer, pretty much the same thing.

So what I did is, I actually did go to a universityI went to Harvard Universitythat had a major in astrophysics as an undergrad. And so we took pretty much all of the physics requirements for a physics degree, all the math that's involved in that, too, but then there were specialized classes in topics in astronomy. We'd read papers about the Big Bang. We'd get together and we'D go to observatories to learn how telescopes work. And there were classes in things like how does a star work, how does a supernova explosion work, what is a galaxy like?

And these really are physics classes. They involve a lot of math, usually calculusfiguring out how a galaxy evolves over time, how all the different stars work, how gravity affects everything. So there certainly is a good deal of math and physics involved.

But then, as you become a professional astronomer, while you certainly know the basics of that and you use that in your career, there's a lot more emphasis on being able to, interestingly enough, write. And so I think one of the things people don't realize is, don't just get all the physics and math that you can, also become very good at writing. And if you can, I think the most useful thing I did as a younger studentlike high school and undergradis I joined the debate club. Because one of the things you're going to have to do is write proposals. Astronomers need funding and time on telescopes.

So let's say you want to use the Hubble Space Telescope, you want to observe something in the sky. The way that happens is that youand not just you, a team of people togetherwill actually write a proposal to the Hubble Space Telescope and say, this is the object we'd like to observe, and here's why we think that's interesting, and these are the instruments we want to use, and we've done the calculations, this is how much time we need. And so you present this paper, basically. You send it in.

And once a year, astronomers from all over the world send their papers in to the Hubble Space Telescope, or maybe to the Peak Observatory in Arizona, or maybe the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. And those telescopes assemble a panel of experts, and these people, they may get many, many thousands of applications, so the panels may be hugedozens or up to 100 different scientists go through, and they read all the proposals, and they rank them in terms of what they think are the best ideas. Who has the most dramatic idea, but theyyou have to prove you can do it. You understand what's going on. You understand the telescope, what it can do. Maybe you've published other papers before, and you actually can reference that and say, look, I used this before, and I made some good discoveries.

So you have to be good at writing an argument. And now that I'm sort of on the other side of that, where I've been on panels that decide who gets time on telescopes, I can tell you I have read so many bad proposals, so learning how to write, learning how to make a case for what you want to do and having a really good narrative is a huge advantage in being an astronomer.

Some people have the idea of an astronomer being kind of a lone person, at night, at a telescope, just doing their own thing. And that's very intimidating. I mean, how do you know what to observe? How do you know what questions to ask?

When you are an undergraduate in college, you will probably start working with some of your professors as an assistant. They will actually have you help set up their experiments. They'll explain to you why they want to look at a certain type of star, or what sort of question that they want to answer. Maybe, as they write papers, they'll ask you to contribute something to the paperwrite a section of it, write a description of an instrument that you're building, whatever.

And you start working with a group of people. And then, as you become a more senior student, going on past your undergrad, getting your doctorate, you meet people all over the world, at conferences that the university will send you toand they'll pay for it. Don't worry, you don't have to have the money to traveland you will meet people working on similar things that you are, and you'll start working together.

You'll understand what you want to observe because all these people have had more experience than you, and they'll take you along with them as sort of an apprentice. So it's never just you trying to think, off the top of your head, what should I discover? It doesn't work that way. There are always people there with you, and you're always working in groups, trying to get money and time on the telescopes, funding to support your time to analyze that data. And you'll work together on those proposals.

So eventually, what happens is, after you get your doctorate, usually you will take a-couple-year temporary appointments where you basically help with research. You do your own research. These are called post-doctoral research fellowships. And they can be a lot of fun, but they're temporarythey usually last about three yearsand they don't pay very well, just enough to live on.

And then, if you're fairly successful as a postdoc, the next step is to get a permanent job, either at a university as a young professor, or at a large government laboratory, like where I work. I work at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which has about 10,000 people. And, of those, there are a couple hundred people that are professional astronomers. So some of these big government labs do hire many hundreds of astronomers at once.

Then you have a job. And you still have to bring in your funding to actually have time to do your work to actually make observations on different telescopes. So I get a government salary. And that's actually defined just by my seniority in the government. There is a very, very strict regulation as to how much government workers are paid, and that's what I get paid. But you still need to win proposals to support your time and actually sort of buy your time back from NASA to have time to work on your research. So in a way, you never stop asking for money, writing proposals.

I think one of the things that a lot of young people don't realize is that being a scientist is much more about that social aspectwriting, finances, budgets, plans, being able to work in a large group. Honestly, the thing I spend the single most amount of time on is attending meetings.

So yes, I do go out to telescopes, and that's wonderful. And you spend time working at computers. Of course computer skills are paramount, being able to analyze that data and discover things from it. But the most amount of time is looking for funds, trying to figure out how to work with everybody that's in your team, and getting organized, and then writing reports back to the people that are paying you to make sure that they know you're doing good work.

That doesn't have to be a bad thing. I've had many proposals rejected, and I've had many proposals accepted. That's part of life. You will learn to deal with that. And I love working with the people. People that are passionate about what they do and really enjoy it are just a joy.

So I hope that gives you some idea. You can major in physics, you can major in astrophysics, you can come at it from more of a computer science specialist. But once you get your doctorate and then you become part of a research group, you're sort of on the path to becoming a professional astronomer. And this is something I have enjoyedI'm now looking back on a career of more than 20 yearssomething that I enjoy to this day.

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Student of the stars: How do you become an astronomer? - Big Think

A cosmologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics Tuesday has said he is convinced extraterrestrial life exists and that we will likely find evidence of it within 30 years.

Speaking at an event in London earlier this week, Swiss researcher Didier Queloz, 52, suggested that the odds of finding life beyond our planet were strongly in our favor, The Telegraph reported.

"I can't believe we are the only living entity in the universe," Queloz said. "There are just way too many planets, way too many stars, and the chemistry is universal. The chemistry that led to life has to happen elsewhere."

He added that within the next 30 years, we will have built more advanced technology that can better detect signs of biological activity on distant worlds.

Quelozwho currently works at the University of Cambridge in the U.K.was awarded the Nobel Prize this year for discovering the first planet outside our solar system nearly a quarter of a century ago.

In 1995, Queloz and his Ph.D. supervisor at Princeton, Michel Mayorwho he shared this year's Nobel Prize withdiscovered the Jupiter-like exoplanet 51 Pegasi b orbiting a star around 50 light-years away. They identified the planet using a now-tried-and-tested method, known as Doppler spectroscopy, which looks for the tiny wobbles that a star makes as a planet orbits around it.

Since the discovery of 51 Pegasi b, more than 4,000 confirmed exoplanets have been found, revolutionizing our understanding of the universe and boosting hopes for finding life beyond our solar system. As evidence of his influence on the field, Queloz currently has more than 100 astronomical objects named after him.

"We opened a new window in astrophysicswe demonstrated that there are other planets like the ones we have orbiting our solar system," he said. "It was expanding our horizons, and once you start doing that there are a lot of questions you can start asking... why are we like we are?"

Lisa Kaltenegger, director of Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute and one of the world's leading exoplanet experts, said that the discovery of these distant worlds has paved the way for new methods of finding if alien life exists.

"The discovery opened our exploration of these brand-new worlds, and now 24 years later we are at the verge of finding out if we are alone in the universe," she said in a statement. "We have discovered that every fifth star has a planet that could be just like our own. With 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone, I really like our chances of finding life in the universe."

"The next step is to collect enough light from these small planets in the habitable zone to figure out if there are signs of life in their atmosphere," she said. "We are already building the telescopes that can collect enough light to answer the fundamental question of whether we are alone in the universeor not."

These telescopes include the next-generation James Webb Telescopescheduled for launch in 2021which will have the power to reveal intricate details about the properties of planets.

Just recently, scientists searching for life in the universe welcomed the announcement that water vapor had been detected for the first time in the atmosphere of an exoplanetthe "super-Earth" K2-18b, located around 110 light-years away from us.

We don't know whether life does or does not exist there. But the traces of water in the atmosphere and the fact that the planet lies in the habitable zonethe region around a host star within which liquid water, a key component for life as we know it, could exist on the surfacecertainly makes it a promising candidate.

Alongside Michel Mayor, Queloz also shared this year's physics prize with Canadian scientist James Peeble at Princeton for his work in the field of physical cosmology, which casts new light on the very beginnings of the universe.

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Nobel Prize-Winning Astronomer Says We Will Likely Find Aliens in 30 Years - Newsweek

In 1995, after years of effort, astronomers made an announcement: Theyd found the first planet circling a sun-like star outside our solar system. But that planet, 51 Pegasi b, was in a quite unexpected place it appeared to be just around 4.8 million miles away from its home star and able to dash around the star in just over four Earth-days. Our innermost planet, Mercury, by comparison, is 28.6 million miles away from the sun at its closest approach and orbits it every 88 days.

Whats more, 51 Pegasi b was big half the mass of Jupiter, which, like its fellow gas giant Saturn, orbits far out in our solar system. For their efforts in discovering the planet, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz were awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics alongside James Peebles, a cosmologist. The Nobel committee cited their contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earths place in the cosmos.

The phrase hot Jupiter came into parlance to describe planets like 51 Pegasi b as more and more were discovered in the 1990s. Now, more than two decades later, we know a total of 4,000-plus exoplanets, with many more to come, from a trove of planet-seeking telescopes in space and on the ground: the now-defunct Kepler; and current ones such as TESS, Gaia, WASP, KELT and more. Only a few more than 400 meet the rough definition of a hot Jupiter a planet with a 10-day-or-less orbit and a mass 25 percent or greater than that of our own Jupiter. While these close-in, hefty worlds represent about 10 percent of the exoplanets thus far detected, its thought they account for just 1 percent of all planets.

Still, hot Jupiters stand to tell us a lot about how planetary systems form and what kinds of conditions cause extreme outcomes. In a 2018 paper in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, astronomers Rebekah Dawson of the Pennsylvania State University and John Asher Johnson of Harvard University took a look at hot Jupiters and how they might have formed and what that means for the rest of the planets in the galaxy. Knowable Magazine spoke with Dawson about the past, present and future of planet-hunting, and why these enigmatic hot Jupiters remain important. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What is a hot Jupiter?

A hot Jupiter is a planet thats around the mass and size of Jupiter. But instead of being far away from the sun like our own Jupiter, its very close to its star. The exact definitions vary, but for the purpose of the Annual Review article we say its a Jupiter within about 0.1 astronomical units of its star. An astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and the sun, so its about 10 times closer to its star or less than Earth is to the sun.

What does being so close to their star do to these planets?

Thats an interesting and debated question. A lot of these hot Jupiters are much larger than our own Jupiter, which is often attributed to radiation from the star heating and expanding their gas layers.

It can have some effects on what we see in the atmosphere as well. These planets are tidally locked, so that the same side always faces the star, and depending on how much the heat gets redistributed, the dayside can be much hotter than the nightside.

Some hot Jupiters have evidence of hydrogen gas escaping from their atmospheres, and some particularly hot-hot Jupiters show a thermal inversion in their atmosphere where the temperature increases with altitude. At such high temperatures, molecules like water vapor and titanium oxide and metals like sodium and potassium in the gas phase can be present in the atmosphere.

Between 2009 and 2018, NASA's Kepler space telescope discovered thousands of planets. But exoplanetsplanets outside the solar systemappeared in science fiction before they appeared in telescopes. Astronomers in the early decades of the twentieth century spent entire careers searching for planets in other stellar systems. In The Lost Planets, John Wenz offers an account of the pioneering astronomer Peter van de Kamp, who was one of the first to claim discovery of exoplanets.

What might explain how a planet ends up so close to its star?

There are three categories of models that people have come up with. One is that maybe these planets form close to their stars to begin with. Originally, people sort of dismissed this. But more recently, astronomers have been taking this theory a bit more seriously as more studies and simulations have shown the conditions under which this could happen.

Another explanation is that during the stage when the planetary system was forming out of a disk of gas and dust, the Jupiter was pulled in closer to its star.

The last explanation is that the Jupiter could have started far away from the star and then gotten onto a very elliptical orbit probably through gravitational interactions with other bodies in the system so that it passed very close to the host star. It got so close that the star could raise strong tides on the Jupiter, just like the moon raises tides on the Earth. That could shrink and circularize its orbit so that it ended up close to the star, in the position we observe.

Are there things we see in the planetary systems that have hot Jupiters that other systems dont have?

There are some trends. One is that most hot Jupiters dont have other small planets nearby, in contrast to other types of planetary systems we see. If we see a small hot planet, or if we see a gas giant thats a bit farther away from its star, it often has other planets nearby. So hot Jupiters are special in being so lonely.

The loneliness trend ties in to how hot Jupiters formed so close to their stars. In the scenario where the planet gets onto an elliptical orbit that shrinks and circularizes, that would probably wipe out any small planets in the way. That said, there are a few systems where a hot Jupiter does have a small planet nearby. With those, its not a good explanation.

Planetary systems with hot Jupiters often have other giant planets in the system farther away out beyond where the Earth is, typically. Perhaps, if hot Jupiters originated from highly eccentric orbits, those faraway planets are responsible for exciting their eccentricities to begin with. Or there could have been responsible planets that got ejected from the system in the process, so we dont necessarily have to still see them in the system.

Another big trend is that hot Jupiters tend to be around stars that are more metal-rich. Astronomers refer to metals as any element heavier than hydrogen or helium. Theres more iron and other elements in the star, and we think that this may affect the disk of gas and dust that the planets formed out of. There are more solids available, and that could facilitate forming giant planets by providing material for their cores, which would then accrete gas and become gas giants.

Having more metals in the system could enable the creation of multiple giant planets. That could cause the type of gravitational interaction that would put the hot Jupiter onto a high eccentricity orbit.

Hot Jupiters like 51 Pegasi b were the first type of planet discovered around sun-like stars. What led to their discovery?

It occurred after astronomers started using a technique called the radial velocity method to look for extrasolar planets. They expected to find analogs to our own Jupiter, because giant planets like this would produce the biggest signal. It was a very happy surprise to find hot Jupiters, which produce an even larger signal, on a shorter timescale. It was a surprising but fortuitous discovery.

Can you explain the radial velocity method?

It detects the motion of the host star due to the planet. We often think of stars sitting still and theres a planet orbiting around it. But the star is actually doing its own little orbit around the center of mass between the two objects, and thats what the radial velocity method detects. More specifically, it detects the doppler shift of the stars light as it goes in its orbit and moves towards or away from us.

One of the other common ways to find planets is the transit method, which looks for the dimming of a stars light due to a planet passing in front of it. Its easier to find hot Jupiters than smaller planets this way because they block more of the stars light. And if they are close to the star they transit more frequently in a given period of time, so were more likely to detect them.

In the 1990s, many of the exoplanets astronomers discovered were hot Jupiters. Since then, weve found more and different kinds of planets hot Jupiters are relatively rare compared with Neptune-sized worlds and super-Earths. Why is it still important to find and study them?

One big motivation is the fact that theyre out there and that they werent predicted from our theories of how planetary systems form and evolve, so there must be some major pieces missing in those theories.

Those missing ingredients probably affect many planetary systems even if the outcome isnt a hot Jupiter a hot Jupiter, we think, is probably an extreme outcome. If we dont have a theory that can make hot Jupiters at all, then were probably missing out on those important processes.

A helpful thing about hot Jupiters is that they are a lot easier to detect and characterize using transits and radial velocity, and we can look at the transit at different wavelengths to try to study the atmosphere. They are really helpful windows into planet characterization.

Hot Jupiters are still going to always be the planets we can probe in the most detail. So even though people dont necessarily get excited about the discovery of a new hot Jupiter anymore, increasing the sample lets us gather more details about their orbits, compositions, sizes or what the rest of their planetary system looks like, to try to test theories of their origins. In turn, theyre teaching us about processes that affect all sorts of planetary systems.

What questions are we going to be able to answer about hot Jupiters as the next-generation observatories come up, such as the James Webb Space Telescope and larger ground-based telescopes?

With James Webb, the hope is to be able to characterize a huge number of hot Jupiters atmospheric properties, and these might be able to help us test where they formed and what their formation conditions were like. And my understanding is that James Webb can study hot Jupiters super quickly, so it could get a really big sample of them and help statistically test some of these questions.

The Gaia mission will be really helpful for characterizing the outer part of their planetary systems and in particular can help us measure whether massive and distant planets are in the same plane as a transiting hot Jupiter; different theories predict differently on whether that should be the case. Gaia is very special in being able to give us three-dimensional information, when usually we have only a two-dimensional view of the planetary system.

TESS [the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite space telescope] is going on right now and its discoveries are around really bright stars, so it becomes possible to study the whole system that has a hot Jupiter using the radial velocity method to better characterize the overall architecture of the planetary system. Knowing whats farther out will help us test some of the ideas about hot Jupiter origins.

TESS and other surveys also have more young stars in the sample. We can see what the occurrence rate and properties are of hot Jupiters closer to when they formed. That, too, will help us distinguish between different formation scenarios.

Theyre alien worlds to us, but what can hot Jupiters tell us about the origins of our own solar system? These days, many missions are concentrating on Earth-sized planets.

What were all still struggling to see is: Where does our solar system fit into a bigger picture of how planetary systems form and evolve, and what produces the diversity of planetary systems we see? We want to build a very complete blueprint that can explain everything from our solar system, to a system with hot Jupiters, to a system more typical of what [the retired space telescope] Kepler found, which are compact, flat systems of a bunch of super-Earths.

We still dont have a great explanation for why our solar system doesnt have a hot Jupiter and other solar systems do. Wed like some broad theory that can explain all types of planetary systems that weve observed. By identifying missing processes or physics in our models of planet formation that allow us to account for hot Jupiters, were developing that bigger picture.

Do you have any other thoughts?

The one thing I might add is that, as we put together all the evidence for our review, we found that none of the theories can explain everything. And that motivates us to believe that theres probably multiple ways to make a hot Jupiter so its all the more important to study them.

Knowable Magazine is an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

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What Astronomers Can Learn From Hot Jupiters, the Scorching Giant Planets of the Galaxy - Smithsonian

A PRINCIPLES-BASED BASIC INCOME

starts with you

Basic Income Calgary is an action group of the Basic Income Canada Network and an Enough for All stakeholder. Basic Income Calgary's goals align with Enough for All, Calgary's poverty reduction strategy, and the growing national movement for a basic income guarantee.

We believe in and support the creation of a basic income guarantee program that would create a regular, predictable income, universally and unconditionally available to all who need it, and sufficient to provide for a decent life style and enable full participation in the community.

The United Nations Human Rights Declaration and Sustainable Development Goals establish a framework of critical importance for global action of which the primary objective is "to ensure that all human beings can fulfill their potential in dignity and equality and a healthy environment."

This means that every Canadian has a right to live in dignity, with adequate means to achieve physical, mental and social well-being.

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Basic Income Calgary

What should I know about the upcoming Solar Eclipse (2017)? (Beginner)

Many people are excited about the upcoming Solar Eclipse that is passing through the US from Portland, OR to Charleston, SC. What is a solar eclipse? How do you stay safe while viewing one? How should you plan your day to have a good experience? Grab some eclipse glasses and Ask an Astronomer!

An eclipse is an example of syzygy. A syzygy occurs when three gravitationally bound objects form a straight line. The dominant syzygies for we Earthlings involve the three celestial objects that have the largest impact in our lives: The Sun, The Earth, and The Moon. When the Earth ends up between the Sun and Moon, it blocks sunlight from hitting the Moon, causing a Lunar eclipse. When the Moon ends up between the Sun and Earth, it blocks some sunlight from hitting the Earth, causing a Solar Eclipse.

Why isn't there a solar eclipse every new moon, and a lunar eclipse every full moon?

The orbits of the Earth around the Sun and the Moon around the Earth aren't perfectly coplanar (aligned). The orbit of the Moon around the Earth has a small tilt relative to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. For half of each month (or "moonth", one lunar orbit) the moon is above the plane of the Earth's orbit, and for the other half it is below that plane. Eclipses occur only when the Moon is new or full while it passes through the plane of the Earth's orbit.

Why doesn't the Moon block out the Sun everywhere on Earth?

The Earth is a big place, and only some parts of the Earth will line up perfectly for any given eclipse. This means that there are three types of solar eclipses: Total, Partial, and Annular. To understand their differences, we must first understand shadows.

Umbra vs Penumbra:

The Earth, Sun, and Moon are three-dimensional objects, and therefore cast light and shadow in three dimensions. In physics, shadows are broken down into two categories: an Umbra and a Penumbra. The Umbra is the part of an object's shadow where it blocks all light from a given source. The Penumbra is the part of an objects shadow where only some of the light is blocked from a given source. This is drawn out in more detail in the following images.

Because the Moon orbits around the Earth in an ellipse, sometimes it is close enough that parts of the surface of the Earth lie within its Umbra. Places within the Moon's Umbra experience a Total Solar Eclipse. Sometimes the moon is too far away, and its Umbra does not reach the Earth. Places on the Earth's surface that pass directly behind the Moon's Umbra experience an Annular Solar Eclipse. Places that pass through any other part of the Moon's Penumbra experience a Partial Solar Eclipse.

Wherever you are, the time when you first enter the Moons Penumbra is called "C1", short for "Contact 1". The time when you first enter the Moon's Umbra is called "C2", the time when you exit the Umbra is called "C3", and the time when you exit the Penumbra is called "C4". This terminology is used in many eclipse timing apps and tools. Although it is straightforward once you understand it, it can be confusing if you don't.

Just before C2 and just after C3, only a tiny sliver of the Sun is peeking out from around the Moon. This can lead to some interesting diffraction effects, so be sure to keep an eye on your surroundings. Between C2 and C3 is the time period known as "Totality". During this time you can see the Sun's corona, and even stars! The temperature drops by a few degrees, and it feels like night has fallen. This is the truly spectacular part of the show, and it is only viewable in the narrow band between Portland, OR and Charleston, SC.

How should I view the Solar Eclipse?

The Sun is very bright, and emits a lot of light. Some of that light is very high energy UV light that can damage your eyes. Even the best sunglasses don't block enough UV light to make it safe to look directly at the sun. To look at the sun safely, you have to look through a special filter. Welding hoods with a #14 (or darker) filter are sufficient, as are the Solar Filters used in telescopes. Many places also have "eclipse glasses" for sale, which are made of cardboard and have lenses made of Solar Filters. Protect your eyes and use the proper eyewear!

If you cannot find a proper filter to safely view the eclipse directly, you can also view it indirectly using a pinhole camera. Pinhole cameras are very easy to make: poke a small hole in a paper plate or piece of cardboard, line it up with the sun, and an image of the sun will be projected behind the pinhole. DO NOT LOOK THROUGH THE PINHOLE WITH YOUR NAKED EYE! Instead, have the image of the sun project onto something like a white bedsheet, piece of paper, or sidewalk. You can look up more detailed instructions for fancier pinhole cameras (sometimes called pinhole projectors) online.

What else should I do to prepare for the eclipse?

If you want the best possible view of the eclipse, try and get as close to the center of the track (the so called 'zone of totality') as possible. The closer to the center you are, the longer the eclipse will last and the darker your surroundings will become.

If you are near the zone of totality, there will probably be a lot of people wherever you go, and local businesses may be overwhelmed by all of the tourism. If you are traveling, we advise that everyone bring your own food and water, and maybe some extra to share with people who came less prepared.

Wherever you may be, be sure to check weather reports and avoid clouds. Also, if you're in a more rural area, stay away from wild animals. Animals don't usually understand what's going on. They see everything get dark, and sometimes get scared. Be careful and stay safe.

Try to make sure that everyone has a good time, and enjoy the darkness!

Additional Links:

General Information on Eclipses

Why can we have solar eclipses?

Why do we not have an eclipse every month?

How long does a solar eclipse last?

What is the best time of year to view an eclipse?

External Links:

General Eclipse Information from NASA

Video tutorial for making a pinhole viewer

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Home - Curious About Astronomy? Ask an Astronomer

Astronomy (ISSN0091-6358) is a monthly American magazine about astronomy. Targeting amateur astronomers for its readers, it contains columns on sky viewing, reader-submitted astrophotographs, and articles on astronomy and astrophysics that are readable by nonscientists.

Astronomy is a magazine about the science and hobby of astronomy. Based near Milwaukee in Waukesha, Wisconsin, it is produced by Kalmbach Publishing. Astronomys readers include those interested in astronomy, and those who want to know about sky events, observing techniques, astrophotography, and amateur astronomy in general.

Astronomy was founded in 1973 by Stephen A. Walther, a graduate of the University of WisconsinStevens Point and amateur astronomer. The first issue, August 1973, consisted of 48 pages with five feature articles and information about what to see in the sky that month. Issues contained astrophotos and illustrations created by astronomical artists. Walther had worked part time as a planetarium lecturer at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee and developed an interest in photographing constellations at an early age. Although even in childhood he was interested to obsession in Astronomy, he did so poorly in mathematics that his mother despaired that he would ever be able to earn a living. However he graduated in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, and as a senior class project he created a business plan for a magazine for amateur astronomers. With the help of his brother David, he was able to bring the magazine to fruition.[citation needed]. He died in 1977.

AstroMedia Corp., the company Walther had founded to publish Astronomy, brought in Richard Berry as editor. Berry also created the offshoot Odyssey, aimed at young readers, and the specialized Telescope Making. In 1985, Milwaukee hobby publisher Kalmbach bought Astronomy.

In 1992, Richard Berry left the magazine and Robert Burnham took over as chief editor. Kalmbach discontinued Deep Sky and Telescope Making magazines and sold Odyssey. In 1996 Bonnie Gordon, now a professor at Central Arizona College, assumed the editorship. David J. Eicher, the creator of "Deep Sky," became chief editor in 2002.

The Astronomy staff also produces other publications. These have included Explore the Universe; Beginners Guide to Astronomy; Origin and Fate of the Universe; Mars: Explore the Red Planet's Past, Present, and Future; Atlas of the Stars; Cosmos; and 50 Greatest Mysteries of the Universe. There also was, for a time in the mid-2000s, a Brazilian edition published by Duetto Editora called Astronomy Brasil. However, due mainly to low circulation numbers, Duetto ceased its publication in September 2007.

Astronomy publishes articles about the hobby and science of astronomy. Generally, the front half of the magazine reports on professional science, while the back half of the magazine presents items of interest to hobbyists. Science articles cover such topics as cosmology, space exploration, exobiology, research conducted by professional-class observatories, and individual professional astronomers. Each issue of Astronomy contains a foldout star map showing the evening sky for the current month and the positions of planets, and some comets.

The magazine has regular columnists. They include science writer Bob Berman, who writes a column called Bob Bermans Strange Universe. Stephen James OMeara writes Stephen James OMearas Secret Sky, which covers observing tips and stories relating to deep-sky objects, planets, and comets. Glenn Chaple writes "Glenn Chaples Observing Basics", a beginners column. Phil Harrington writes "Phil Harringtons Binocular Universe", about observing with binoculars. "Telescope Insider" interviews people who are a part of the telescope-manufacturing industry.

In each issue of Astronomy Magazine, readers will find star and planet charts, telescope observing tips and techniques, and advice on taking photography of the night sky.[2] The magazine also publishes reader-submitted photos in a gallery, lists astronomy-related events, letters from readers, news, and announcements of new products.

Astronomy may include special sections bound into the magazine, such as booklets or posters. Recent examples have included a Messier Catalog booklet, poster showing comet C/2006 P1 (McNaught) and historical comets, a Skyguide listing upcoming sky events, a Telescope Buyer's Guide; a poster titled "Atlas of Extrasolar Planets"; and a poster showing the life cycles of stars.

Astronomy is the largest circulation astronomy magazine, with monthly circulation of 114,080.[3] The majority of its readers are in the United States, but it is also circulated in Canada and internationally.[4]

Its major competitor is Sky & Telescope magazine with a circulation of 80,023.[3]

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Astronomy (magazine) - Wikipedia

Astronomy is a complex field that has slowly evolved to encompass several disciplines. An astronomer can not solely be a science person, they have to be techno-savvy, well written, and able to communicate well verbally. An astronomer has to be able to compel with empirical data and convincing verbage.

Here are a few facts about astronomy followed by a long list of links to as much information as you can handle on the topic.

Ancient astronomy was more of a branch of philosophy than real science. Astronomers had no way to directly observe any celestial bodies in detail, so had to make best guesses and then convince everyone else that they were right.

Before Copernicus came on the scene, astronomers believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe, the Sun and the four planets orbited around it in a series of complex movements.

Did you know that despite the advent of space telescopes and launching many space probes, we have only observed a minor fraction of the known Universe? That doesnt even take into account the Universe that we have no knowledge of at this time.

In the links below you will find a great deal of information about astronomy: some of the terminology used, images, and different discoveries made in the field. Hopefully, what you read will inspire you to delve even more deeply into the vastness of space.

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Astronomy - Universe Today

Astronomy is the scientific study of matter in outer space with the goal of determining or measuring properties of distant objects, such as distances, positions, dimensions, distribution, magnitudes, motion, composition, physical condition, energy, evolution, and the causes of their various phenomena. Astronomers research the contents of the Universe from the level of elementary particles (with masses of 1030 kg) to the largest superclusters of galaxies (with masses of 1050 kg).[1] Creation Astronomy differs only in that it attempts to explain stellar phenomena from the presupposition that celestial bodies were created by God. Most creationists also draw from religious texts like the Bible for insight.

At present, though astronomy continues to make important discoveries, is still in its infancy as regards gaining depth of understanding. Some would argue that it has many errant notions. (See astronomy quotes)

Important branches in this discipline include astrophysics and cosmology.

Astrophysical measurements and analysis are used to understand the cosmological history, structure, and constituent dynamics of our universe.

The Bible explicitly dates the universe as being the same age as the Earth and just over 6000 years old. In fact, according to the Bible, all other celestial bodies are slightly younger than the Earth. At the moment the Earth was created there were no other planets, stars, comets, or other such bodies in the universe. None of these came into existence until the fourth day of the Creation Week (See: Genesis Chapter 1). There is indeed much evidence to support the contention that our solar system, galaxies and even that the entirety of the universe is very young.

In contrast, secular scientists date the universe as being approximately 13.7 billion years using standard cosmologies.[2] The universe is believed to have begun with a cosmic inflation known as the Big Bang, which is then followed by the formation of stars, planets, and galaxies. Based on this chronology the Earth is believed to have formed after our Sun and is dated to be near 4.6 billion years old.

A galaxy is a large group of stars and interstellar gas and dust moving around a common center of gravity. The term galaxy comes from the Greek root galakt, which means "milk" (a reference to our own Milky Way). There are probably more than one hundred billion (1011) galaxies in the observable universe, which average near one hundred billion stars each. Galaxies range in size from dwarfs with as few as ten million (107) stars up to giants with one trillion (1012) stars.[3]

A star is a body in space of great size that produces prominent amounts of heat and light. Stars are composed of incredibly hot plasma and are classified by size and intensity. The sun is conventionally considered a star, although the creation account of Genesis mentions the stars secondarily after recording the creation of the sun on day four. Evolutionists assert that star formation or change must take millions of years to take place, however star alteration has been observed in just a few years.[4] These still widely held views of modern science and are actually founded in theories of stellar evolution that are primarily based on clues obtained from studies of the stellar spectra related to luminosity.

The word planet comes from the Greek word (planetes) which is derived from the word (planes)meaning "wanderer." [5] Originally the term was applied to any object that moved in the sky including stars. However, as a more complete picture of our universe emerged from the work of astronomers, the classification of a planet became more specific. In our solar system there are eight definite planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. In 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) demoted Pluto from its classification as a planet to dwarf planet because it did not conform to recently established criteria.

A dwarf planet is any celestial body that meets all the criteria for being a planet, except one: it does not "clear the neighborhood" of its orbit of all foreign-object debris. Currently, Eris, Pluto, and the former asteroid Ceres fall into this category. The IAU invented the category of "dwarf planet" following the discovery of Eris, a body larger even than Pluto but which, like Pluto, had not cleared its orbit of debris.

A moon is a natural satellite that orbits a planet or dwarf planet. The body known as The Moon is the particular object in orbit around the Earth, but nearly 200 other moons are known to exist in our solar system, in orbit around six of the eight planets and two of the dwarf planets (Pluto and Eris). For example, Jupiter has more than sixty satellites, including its four largest, the Galilean moons. The Earth's moon is the brightest object in the night sky, reflecting the light from the sun. The moon is the only astronomical body other than Earth ever visited by human beings.

One of the most powerful creations of Greek science was the mathematical astronomy created by Hipparchus in the second century B.C. and given final form by Ptolemy in the second century A.D. Ptolemy's work was known in the Middle Ages through imperfect Latin versions. In fifteenth-century Italy, however, it was brought back to life. George Trebizond, a Cretan emigre in the curia, produced a new translation and commentary. These proved imperfect and aroused much heated criticism. But a German astronomer, Johannes Regiomontanus, a protege of the brilliant Greek churchman Cardinal Bessarion, came to Italy with his patron, learned Greek, and produced a full-scale "Epitome" of Ptolemy's work from which most astronomers learned their art for the next century and more. Copernicus was only one of the celebrities of the Scientific Revolution whose work rested in large part on the study of ancient science carried out in fifteenth-century Italy.[6]

The Bible speaks of three heavens: the first heaven is the atmosphere, the third heaven is the place of the direct presence of God and is possibly non-physical or at least outside the bounds of the physical universe, and the second heaven is the physical universe beyond the earth's atmosphere, the realm of astronomy.

The heavens are the only portion of the creation credited with proclaiming God's righteousness.

The heavens declare his righteousness, for God himself is judge! [Selah] Psalm 50:6 (NASB)

The heavens proclaim his righteousness; and all the peoples behold his glory. Psalm 97:6 (NASB)

By the Word and Hand of God

By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth. Psalm 33:6 (NASB)

Of old thou didst lay the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of thy hands. Psalm 102:25 (NASB)

And again: Thou, Lord, didst found the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of thy hands; Hebrews 1:10 (NASB)

They deliberately ignore this fact, that by the word of God heavens existed long ago, and an earth formed out of water and by means of water, II_Peter 3:5 (NASB)

God Stretched-out the Heavens

It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in; Isaiah 40:22 (NASB)

Thus says God, the LORD, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread forth the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it: Isaiah 42:5 (NASB)

Thus says the LORD, your Redeemer, who formed you from the womb: "I am the LORD, who made all things, who stretched out the heavens alone, who spread out the earth--Who was with me? Isaiah 44:24 (NASB)

and have forgotten the LORD, your Maker, who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth, and fear continually all the day because of the fury of the oppressor, when he sets himself to destroy? Isaiah 51:13 (NASB)

An Oracle The word of the LORD concerning Israel: Thus says the LORD, who stretched out the heavens and founded the earth and formed the spirit of man within him: Zechariah 12:1 (NASB)

Do not be Dismayed by the Heavens

Thus says the LORD: "Learn not the way of the nations, nor be dismayed at the signs of the heavens because the nations are dismayed at them, Jeremiah 10:2 (NASB)

Not made of things which are visible

By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible. Hebrews 11:3 (NASB)

Creationist

Secular

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Astronomy - CreationWiki, the encyclopedia of creation science

The Milky Way's two largest companion galaxies may have once been a threesome but new data from the Gaia satellite leaves the satellites' history an open question.

TESS finds its first exoplanet a super-Earth around bright nearby star Pi Mensae and astronomers watched an asteroid hide a galaxy to get the details on the asteroid's size, shape, and orbit.

An unexpected pattern in the Milky Way's disk of stars points to a recent whack from another galaxy.

After a 10-day lockdown to cooperate with a criminal investigation, Sunspot Solar Observatory is back to looking at the Sun.

A recent analysis of data from NASA's Dawn spacecraft reveals the role of cryovolcanism past and likely present on the giant asteroid Ceres.

Thirty years ago, Gene Roddenberry, of Star Trek fame, and three astronomers made the case that the orange-hued star 40 Eridani A ought to host Vulcan, Mr. Spock's home. Now, a robotic survey has discovered a planet around that very star.

Starbirth and stardeath light up a nearby galaxy while faraway galaxies twist and bend in these new images from NASA's Hubble and Chandra space observatories.

Last weekend the 10th edition of what has become a major stargazing event drew thousands of visitors to Mount Desert Island in Maine.

A new finding suggests that LIGOs neutron-star merger was a typical gamma-ray burst after all.

A new technique gives astronomers a closer look at what makes some stellar carnage so incredibly luminous.

Revised data changed expectations for a star pair that was supposed to merge in 2022.

Cassini's legacy sheds more light on the strange mystery of Saturn's northern polar hexagon.

Juno observations reveal that Jupiters magnetic field has a wacky plume.

How did supermassive black holes form? Two studies discovered dozens of middling-mass black holes in dwarf galaxies to fuel an ongoing debate.

Scientists predicted the shape of the solar corona as it would be seen during the August 21, 2017, total solar eclipse. Observations confirmed that they got the broad strokes right.

As told in this month's astronomy podcast, Venus is disappearing in the west after sunset. So September offers you a final chance to see four bright planets at once.

Astronomers have a precise new mass measurement for Beta Pictoris b, a young gas giant still in the throes of formation 63 light-years from Earth.

NASA's Osiris-REX asteroid sample return mission spies target Bennu for the first time. Now the spacecraft is setting up for its close approach in December.

The famed Arecibo Observatory has faced down several funding challenges in recent years, and a hurricane to boot, but now a new project is making the radio dish more relevant to astronomy than ever.

After more than a decade of tantalizing but inconclusive hints, new research shows convincingly that patches of water ice lie exposed on the floors of many permanently shadowed lunar craters.

The Opportunity rover fell silent in June after nearly 15 years of work on the Red Planet. Now the dust storm that prevented its batteries from charging is clearing.

In astronomy news this week: A stunning just-released photo of last year's eclipse, 15,000 galaxies revealed in Hubble's new ultraviolet view of the deep sky, and watching star formation in action in the spiral galaxy M74.

New observations provide solid evidence of heavy metals in a gas giant exoplanets atmosphere.

A team of scientists has captured evidence that PDS 70b, the first directly imaged instance of early planet formation, is actively accreting material, and theyve measured the rate at which its growing.

Astronomers have discovered auroras around a set of brown dwarfs including one that wanders the galaxy by itself indicating surprisingly strong magnetic fields in these failed stars.

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Astronomy News & Current Events | Sky & Telescope

This is my last post for the Bad Astronomy Blog on Discover Magazine. As of today Monday, November 12, 2012 the blog has a new home at Slate magazine.

It has been my pleasure and honor to be a Discover blogger for more than four years. Still, I remember my science teacher in third grade quoting Heraclitus to us: "Nothing is permanent except change". Thats true today, of course, and just as obviously in the Age of the Internet the velocity of that change is accelerating.

But in this case I hope the change isnt too shocking for you, dear BABloggees. All you have to do is switch a URL in your bookmarks or update your RSS feed (to do that, just copy that link address into your feed reader). Ill still be writing the same sort of material, Ill still make dumb puns, and Ill still be Tweeting, Facebooking, and GooglePlussing like mad.

To be clear: all the archives of my blog will be copied to Slate magazine, but will still have a home here at Discover. Id be obliged if you updated links to the new archive, but old links shouldnt break.

And so, I bid a fond adieu to Discover. What I said in my post announcing the move still holds true: I encourage everyone to read the fantastic collection of science blogs that live here, among the best such blogs in the world; fantastic company in which to be. And I hope you follow me to Slate.

Its a big Universe out there, roomy enough for all of us. And theres still a vast amount left to explore and understand.

Thanks.

Folks, its time. And an appropriate time: for my penultimate post here at Discover Magazine, Ive decided to show you my tattoo.

Ive been meaning to post this for a while, but there were a lot of behind-the-scenes issues getting permissions I wont bore you with. But by the time I was able to post this it was so long after I got inked it seemed a little silly. Still, Discover Magazine was the reason I got it, so it seems fair and fitting to post this now. And Ive dyeing to let yall know anyway.

As a brief recap, a few years ago I made a bet with then-Discover Magazine CEO, Henry Donahue: if I got 2 million page views in one month, and the magazine got 5 million total, wed both get tattoos. In March 2009 we did it! So Henry and I went about getting inked.

He got a pretty nifty Celtic fish on his shoulder. For mine, I decided to turn to you, my readers, for suggestions. And they poured in. I narrowed it down to a handful I liked, then made my decision. Henry and I thought it would be fun for me to try to get my tattoo on the TV show "L.A. Ink", so I applied. They accepted! Discover Magazine generously offered to cover my expenses, and so a little while later I was on my way to Hollywood to get myself some ink.

Thats the basic story. So, without further ado, here it is: my tattoo!

Cool, huh? Its perfect, and just what I wanted! And how appropriate is it to get an asteroid burning up over the Earth? I know, the scales a bit off, but its a tattoo, not a scientific graphic in the Astronomical Journal. And I love the flames and the colors.

The actual clip never wound up getting aired on TLC, but they did create a fully-produced version and put it up on YouTube they have a higher res version on the TLC site. For those of you too lazy to click, here is the YouTube video version:

The first thing to note in the video is that while I seem upbeat I was actually screaming in pain inside my head. The whole thing took just under four hours, and the last quarter of that was where Dan was going over the flames again and again, shading in all the reds and oranges. The pain was, um, astonishing.

Still, I love the end result! If youre looking to get a full-color tattoo, you could do a lot worse than Dan Smith. Hes an excellent artist, and a friendly guy. If I were to get another tattoo which will never ever happen Id want him to do it.

Thank you Henry, thank you Dan, and thank you Discover Magazine for supporting this bit of fun. It was quite a ride, and I have a nice piece of art to show for it thatll last the rest of my life.

Related posts:

Big news: Bad Astronomy is moving to Slate magazine My secret nefarious inky plan revealed We who are about to dye Tat two

The Cascade range of volcanoes is pretty impressive to see from the ground. Stretching from California up to Washington, it includes famous mountains like Saint Helens, Hood, and Rainier. Ive seen many of these while driving in the area, and theyre even cooler from an airplane.

But I have to say, the view from the International Space Station might be best.

[Click to cascadienate.]

This shot was taken from the ISS on September 20, 2012, and shows the region around Mount Shasta, a 4300 meter peak in northern California. Its technically dormant it erupted last in 1786. In geologically recent history its erupted every 600 years or so, but thats not a precise schedule, so geologists keep an eye on it, as they do many of the peaks in the Cascades. As well they should.

To the west of the mountain (to the right in the picture, near the edge) is the much smaller Black Butte. I only point that out because you can see a highway winding around it to the right. Thats I5, a major north-south highway, and a few years back when my family lived in Northern California, I drove it on our way to and back from Oregon. Black Butte was a pretty impressive lava dome, looking exactly what you expect a volcano to look like. And looming in the distance was Shasta, but more standard mountainy looking. That appearance is, of course, quite deceiving.

I love volcanoes, and Im fascinated by them. Im hoping to visit some more very soon.. and Ill have some news about that, I think, in the near future.

Image credit: NASA

Do you like volcano pictures from space too? Heres a bunch of em!

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Speaking of Neil Tyson, if youre a fan of his youll be pleased to know that his show, Star Talk Radio, is now going to be part of the Nerdist Channel network! Thats actually a pretty big deal; Chris Hardwick has created this juggernaut of Nerdist and it reaches a lot of folks.

The new show is essentially a video version of the radio show. Chris interviewed Neil about it for The Nerdist website. If youre curious what itll be like, heres a video of a live Star Talk interview he did with several comedians (Hodgman! Schaal!) and Mike Massamino, a NASA astronaut:

Cool, eh? And maybe Ill have more news about this soon, too. Superman isnt the only guy who walks around in his underwear Neil has talked to.

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I love it when kids get excited enough about science to go out and do something about it. Thats why Im digging Jeffrey Tang whos 10 because he created the Astronomy For Kids podcast, where he talks about different astronomical things. The first podcast went up in February 2012 ("The Solar System") and hes done others on Stars, the Moon, Saturn, and gravity. Theyre only a few minutes long, perfect for a kid to listen to, and the ones I listened to were accurate and covered the ground pretty well. Theyre also interesting and fun!

If you have a kid who likes science, I bet theyll like this podcast. And I can see these being played in schools, too. Who better to connect with kids than another kid?

[Today is Carl Sagans birthday, celebrated by lovers of science and rationality around the planet. I wrote the following post last year, but I think its still appropriate (and I updated his age). Happy birthday, Carl. Its a darker cosmos without you, but we still walk with the candle you lit for us.]

If Carl Sagan were still alive, hed be 78 years old today. Perhaps he wouldnt have been overly concerned with arbitrary time measurements, especially when based on the fickle way we define a "year", but its human nature to look back at such integrally-divisible dates and Carl was very much a student of human nature.

Ive written about him so much in the past theres not much I can add right now, so I thought I would simply embed a video for you to watch but which one? Where James Randi eloquently and emotionally talks about his friendship with Carl? Or the wonderful first installment of Symphony of Science using my favorite quote by Carl? Or this amazing speech about how life seeks life?

But in the end, the choice is obvious. Carl Sagans essay, "Pale Blue Dot", will, I think, stand the test of time, and will deservedly be considered one of the greatest passages ever written in the English language.

Happy birthday to Doctor Carl Sagan, Professor of Astronomy, scientist, skeptic, muse, and though he may not have thought of himself this way poet.

Ill leave you with this, something I wrote abut Carl a while back, when asked about what his greatest legacy is:

Sagans insight, his gift to us, is the knowledge that we all have the ability to examine the Universe with all the power of human curiosity, and we need not retreat from the answers we find.

Of all the amazing pictures returned from the moon by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and I may include the Apollo landing sites among them I think my favorites are the ones showing boulders that rolled down slopes.

Did I say rolled? I mean bounced!

[Click to enselenate.]

This shot from LRO shows the floor of crater Shuckburgh E, an impact crater about 9 km (~6 miles) across. The image shows a region about 655 meters (0.4 miles) across. The crater floor here is not level; its tilted up from left to right, and also has contours. Boulders dislodged for some reason (a seismic event, or a nearby impact) on the right have rolled down to the left and some actually skipped along, bouncing and bounding as they did.

The two biggest trails are dashed, indicating the boulders had a bit of a rollicking time before coming to rest. You can see both boulders at the left of the trails, where they came to a stop. Note that the sunlight is coming from the bottom of this picture, which can play tricks on perspective. I see the boulders looking almost like craters and the skidding trails they left like little mounds. If you flip the picture over it may look better to you.

As always, pictures like this are a strong reminder that even on the Moon, where time stretches long and processes are slow, changes do occur. Maybe not often, and maybe not recently, but given enough time you have to think of the Moon as a dynamic place.

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

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Astronomers are discovering a lot of planets these days. The official count is 800+, with thousands of more candidates (unconfirmed but suspiciously planet-like).

Right now we give them alphabet soup names. Alpha Centauri Bb. HR 8799b (through HR8799 e). And of course, everyones favorite, 2MASS J04414489+2301513b.

These catalog names are useful, but less than public friendly. In science fiction we get Vulcan, Psychon, Arrakis, and other cool names. So why not in real life?

The folks at Uwingu asked themselves this very thing. Uwingu (pronounced oo-WIN-goo) is an astronomy and space startup company thats looking to fund scientific research and exploration. I wrote an intro to Uwingu back when it was soliciting funds to get initially rolling (happily, that goal was met). The idea is to sell goods and services to space enthusiasts, and use the proceeds toward doing real science. The folks in charge are professional astronomers and space scientists at the tops of their fields, people like Alan Stern and Pamela Gay. Full disclosure: I am on the Board of Advisors for Uwingu, an unpaid position, but Id write about it and support it anyway. These are top-notch scientists behind the project.

What does this have to do with the letter and number salad that is the current state of exoplanet names? As their first foray, the folks at Uwingu decided to let people create a suggested names list for these planets. For $0.99 a pop, you can submit a name you like to the database, and for another $0.99 you can vote for your favorite in the current list. Ill note these names are not official they are not assigned to specific planets, and only the International Astronomical Union can make these official (and mind you, theyre the ones who so elegantly handled the Pluto not being a planet issue (yes, thats sarcasm)). But, these names will be seen by planetary astronomers, and eventually those planets are going to need names. Why not yours?

I think this is a fun idea. There are currently nearly a hundred names in the database as I write this, but its expected to grow rapidly. If you think there should be a QonoS, Abydos, or even Alderaan in memoriam, of course then head over to Uwingu.

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Well now, this is an interesting discovery: astronomers have found what looks like a "super-Earth" a planet more massive than Earth but still smaller than a gas giant orbiting a nearby star at the right distance to have liquid water on it! Given that, it might might be Earthlike.

This is pretty cool news. Weve found planets like this before, but not very many! And it gets niftier: the planet has at least five siblings, all of which orbit its star closer than it does.

Now let me be clear: this is a planet candidate; it has not yet been confirmed. Reading the journal paper (PDF), though, the data look pretty good. It may yet turn out not to be real, but for the purpose of this blog post Ill just put this caveat here, call it a planet from here on out, and fairly warned be ye, says I.

The star is called HD 40307, and its a bit over 40 light years away (pretty close in galactic standards, but I wouldnt want to walk there). Its a K2.5 dwarf, which means its cooler, dimmer, and smaller than the Sun, but not by much. In other words, its reasonably Sun-like. By coincidence, it appears ot be about the age as the Sun, too: 4.5 billion years. It was observed using HARPS, the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (I know, it should be HARVPS, but thats harvd to pronounce). This is an extremely sensitive instrument that looks for changes in the starlight as a planet (or planets) orbits a star. The gravity of the star causes the planet to orbit it, but the planet has gravity too. As it circles the star, the star makes a littler circle too (I like to think of it as two kids, one bigger than the other, clasping hands and swinging each other around; the lighter kid makes a big circle and the bigger kid makes a smaller circle). As the star makes its circle, half the time its approaching us and half the time its receding. This means its light is Doppler shifted, the same effect that makes a motorcycle engine drop in pitch as it passes you.

Massive planets tug on their star harder, so theyre easier to find this way. Also, a planet closer in has a shorter orbit, so you dont have to look as long to find it. But in the end, by measuring just how the star is Doppler shifted, you can get the mass and orbital period of the planet. Or planets.

In this case, HD 40307 was originally observed a little while back by HARPS, and three planets were found. But the data are public, so a team of astronomers grabbed it and used a more sensitive method to extract any planetary signatures from the data. They found the three previously-seen planets easily enough, but also found three more! One of them is from a planet that has (at least) seven times the mass of the Earth, and orbits with a 198 day period. Called HD 40307g (planets are named after their host star, with a lower case letter after starting with b), its in the "super-Earth" range: more massive than Earth, but less than, say Neptune (which is 17 times our mass).

We dont know how big the planet is, unfortunately. It might be dense and only a little bigger than Earth, or it could be big and puffy. But if its density and size are just so, it could easily have about the same surface gravity as Earth that is, if you stood on it, youd weight the same as you do now!

But the very interesting thing is that it orbits the star at a distance of about 90 million kilometers (55 million miles) closer to its star than is is to the Sun but thats good! The star is fainter and cooler than the Sun, remember. In fact, at this distance, the planet is right in the stars "habitable zone", where the temperature is about right for liquid water to exist!

Thats exciting because of the prospect for life. Now, whenever I mention this I hear from people who get all huffy and say that we dont know you need water for life. Thats true, but look around. Water is common on Earth, and here we are. We dont know that you need water for life, but we do know that water is abundant and we need it. We dont know for sure of any other ways for life to form, so it makes sense to look where we understand things best. And that means liquid water.

Heres a diagram of the system as compared to our own:

Note the scales are a bit different, so that the habitable zones of the Sun and of HD 40307 line up better (remember, HD 40307g is actually closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun an AU is the distance of the Earth to the Sun, so HD 40307 is about 0.6 AU from its star). What makes me smile is that the new planet is actually better situated in its "Goldilocks Zone" than Earth is! Thats good news, actually: the orbit may be elliptical (the shape cant be determined from the types of observations made) but still stay entirely in the stars habitable zone.

And take a look at the system: the other planets all orbit closer to the star! We only have two inside Earths orbit in our solar system but all five of HD 40307s planets would fit comfortably inside Mercurys orbit. Amazing.

So this planet if it checks out as being real is one of only a few weve found in the right location for life as we know it. And some of those weve found already are gas giants (though they could have big moons where life could arise). So what this shows us is that the Earth isnt as out of the ordinary as we may have once thought: nature has lots of ways of putting planets the right distances from their stars for life.

Were edging closer all the time to finding that big goal: an Earth-sized, Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star at the right distance for life. This planet is a actually a pretty good fit, but we just dont know enough about it (primarily its size). So Im still waiting. And given the numbers of stars weve observed, and the number of planets we found, as always I have to ask: has Earth II already been observed, and the data just waiting to be uncovered?

Image credits: ESO/M. Kornmesser; Tuomi et al.

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A few people including my pal Deric Hughes put together this non-partisan and nicely done video in honor of democracy:

If you like it, give it a thumbs-up on YouTube and Like it on FB.

And theyre right. As I wrote last night, there is much work to be done. I dont think we can or even should put our differences aside we need them to keep a check on runaway beliefs. But that doesnt mean we cant work together to move things forward.

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Bad Astronomy - : Bad Astronomy

May 3, 2018: University of Hawaii Astronomer John Tonry Elected to National Academy of Sciences

University of Hawaii at Mnoa astronomer John Tonry has been named as one of the National Academy of Sciences' 84 newly chosen members. Tonry, who has been with the UH Mnoa Institute for Astronomy since 1996, joins an elite group of fewer than 2,400 exceptional scientists worldwide. NAS members are recognized for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Press Release

Today, NASA launched the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), its newest telescope to search for planets beyond our Solar System, and astronomers from the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy and Maunakea telescopes will be a part of the adventure.

Press Release

Paul Coleman, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, passed away at his home on January 16th, 2018. Paul was the first Native Hawaiian with a doctorate in astrophysics. In his 15 years with the IfA, Paul played a key role in our education and public outreach efforts, and advocated tirelessly for astronomy in Hawaii.

Obituary

The University of Hawaii ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) telescope on Mauna Loa captured images on February 8, 2018 of the Tesla Roadster launched into space as part of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy test.

Press Release

Extremely distant galaxies are usually too faint to be seen, even by the largest telescopes. But nature has a solution - gravitational lensing, predicted by Albert Einstein and observed many times by astronomers. Now, an international team of astronomers led by Harald Ebeling from the University of Hawaii has discovered one of the most extreme instances of magnification by gravitational lensing.

Press Release

University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA) Director Gnther Hasinger will be leaving UH to be the next Director of Science at the European Space Agency (ESA), Europe's equivalent to NASA.

UH will name an interim Director for the IfA and begin a search for a new Director.

UH Press Release

A team of astronomers from Maryland, Hawaii, Israel, and France has produced the most detailed map ever of the orbits of galaxies in our extended local neighborhood, showing the past motions of almost 1400 galaxies within 100 million light years of the Milky Way.

Press Release

Since astronomers first measured the size of an extrasolar planet seventeen years ago, they have struggled to answer the question: how did the largest planets get to be so large? Thanks to the recent discovery of twin planets by a University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy team led by graduate student Samuel Grunblatt, we are getting closer to an answer.

Press Release

In October, astronomers at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy (IfA) made a stunning discovery with the Pan-STARRS1 telescope - the first interstellar object seen passing through our Solar System. Now, an international team lead by Karen Meech (ifA) has made detailed measurements of the visitor's properties. "This thing is very strange," said Karen Meech.

Press Release

A small, recently discovered asteroid - or perhaps a comet - appears to have originated from outside the solar system, coming from somewhere else in our galaxy. If so, it would be the first "interstellar object" to be observed and confirmed by astronomers. This unusual object - for now designated A/2017 U1 - was discovered Oct. 19 by the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala during the course of its nightly search for Near-Earth Objects for NASA.

Press Release

UH astronomers and their international collaborators announced the discovery and study of the first binary neutron star merger detected in gravitational waves in articles published today in Science, Nature, and the Astrophysical Journal. The study of this event shows that at least some of the elements heavier than iron were originally created in binary neutron star mergers like this one.

Press Release

The brightest members of the Pleiades cluster form a spectacular group of naked-eye stars that have played a central role in cultures around the world for millennia. Now, an international team of astronomers, including Daniel Huber from the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, used the Kepler Space Telescope to perform the most detailed study to date of their variability - with some interesting new discoveries.

Press Release

The cosmic web - the distribution of matter on the largest scales in the universe - has usually been defined through the distribution of galaxies. Now, a new study by a team of astronomers from France, Israel, and Hawaii demonstrates a novel approach. Instead of using galaxy positions, they mapped the motions of thousands of galaxies. Because galaxies are pulled toward gravitational attractors and move away from empty regions, these motions allowed the team to locate the denser matter in clusters and filaments and the absence of matter in regions called voids.

Press Release

The University of Hawaii's 2.2 meter (88-inch) telescope on Maunakea will soon be producing images nearly as sharp as those from the Hubble Space Telescope, thanks to a new instrument using the latest image sharpening technologies. Astronomer Christoph Baranec, at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy (IfA), has been awarded a nearly $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to build an autonomous adaptive optics system called Robo-AO-2 for the UH telescope.

Press Release

The UH Institute for Astronomy celebrates its 50th Anniversary with a special three-day meeting in Honolulu from June 28-30, 2017. Everyone with a history or relationship with the IfA is invited to attend, including former and present graduate students, postdocs, staff and faculty. See below for two free public events that are also part of the celebration.

Event Information

June 27th, 7:30PM, UH Manoa Orvis Auditorium: Perpetual Motion: Galileo and His RevolutionsSarah Pillow, soprano & Mary-Anne Ballard, viola da gamba, with guests Daniel Swenberg, lute and theorbo; author Dava Sobel & Marc Wagnon, video artistA moving and compelling account of a remarkable moment in the history of science, human thought and music, Perpetual Motion ties together the groundbreaking repertoire of Galileo's day, narration by acclaimed best-selling science writer Dava Sobel, and images of Earth and the cosmos. The UH Bookstore will have copies of Dava's books for sale, and she will be signing them!

Free Tickets (required) via Ticketbud

June 28th, 7:30PM, UH Manoa Orvis Auditorium: Dava Sobel talks on "The Glass Universe"The acclaimed author of Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (Walker, 1995), Dava Sobel will be speaking about her new book, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars (Viking, 2016), which tells the story of the women who worked at the Harvard College Observatory from the late 1800s through the mid-1900s. The UH Bookstore will have copies of Dava's books for sale, and she will be signing them!

Free Tickets (required) via Ticketbud

Since the mid-1990s, when the first planet around another sun-like star was discovered, astronomers have been amassing what is now a large collection of exoplanets - nearly 3,500 have been confirmed so far. In a new study, whose lead author is an IfA graduate student, researchers have classified these planets in much the same way that biologists identify new animal species and have learned that the majority of exoplanets found to date fall into two distinct size groups: rocky Earth-like planets and larger mini-Neptunes. The team used data from NASA's Kepler mission and the W. M. Keck Observatory.

Press Release

An international team of astronomers, including IfA graduate student Jason Chu and Astronomer David Sanders, has used the Herschel Space Observatory to take far-infrared images of the 200 most infrared-luminous galaxies in the Local Universe.

Press Release

A team of astronomers, lead by IfA graduate Trent Dupuy and IfA astronomy Michael Liu, have shown what separates real stars from the wannabes. Not in Hollywood, but out in the universe. They found that an object must weigh at least 70 Jupiters in order to start hydrogen fusion. If it weighs less, the star does not ignite and becomes a brown dwarf instead.

Press Release

Starting the week of May 1, the University of Hawaii 88-inch telescope (UH88) will undergo much needed repair and maintenance. The renovation will include fresh paint and repaired siding on the exterior, roof repair and weather sealing of the dome, improved lightning protection, as well as safety upgrades.

Press Release

A good showing today for the IfA at the UH Awards Ceremony. Faculty members Christoph Baranec and Jeff Kuhn received the Board of Regents' Medal for Excellence in Research awards for excellence in research, while graduate student Will Best received the award for Student Excellence in Research (Doctoral Level).

More Information

Join us at our Manoa Headquarters on April 23rd, from 11am-4pm, for a day of family-friendly activities and talks!

More Information

The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST), currently under construction on Haleakala, Maui, is expected to start observing the Sun in 2020. When it does, it will rely on two complex infrared instruments being built by the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA). Their goal is to measure the Sun's weak magnetic field.The first of these to be completed is called the Cryogenic Near-Infrared Spectropolarimeter (CryoNIRSP). In a major milestone, it took its first look at the Sun from the laboratories at the IfA's Advanced Technology Research Center on Maui.

Press Release

The IfA mourns the loss of our long-time faculty member and professor emeritus Toby Owen. Tobias (Toby) C. Owen, passed away on March 4, 2017, in Sacramento, California, where he had been living after retiring from the IfA in 2012.

Obituary, by Alan Tokunaga

In a groundbreaking study published in Nature Astronomy, a team of researchers, including Brent Tully from the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, reports the discovery of a previously unknown, nearly empty region in our extragalactic neighborhood. Largely devoid of galaxies, this void exerts a repelling force, pushing our Local Group of galaxies through space.

Press Release

IfA Astronomer Nick Kaiser has been awarded the Gold Medal in Astronomy by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS). The Medal's past recipients include Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, Arthur Eddington and Stephen Hawking. Dr. Kaiser is receiving the award for his extensive theoretical and observational work on cosmology, including how matter - both dark and visible - is distributed on the largest scales.

Press Release

The Pan-STARRS project at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy is publicly releasing the world's largest digital sky survey today, via the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland.

Press Release

At first glance, Ceres, the largest body in the main asteroid belt, may not look icy. Images from NASA's Dawn spacecraft have revealed a dark, heavily cratered world whose brightest area is made of highly reflective salts -- not ice. But newly published studies from Dawn scientists, including University of Hawaii astronomer Norbert Schrghofer, show two distinct lines of evidence for ice at or near the surface of the dwarf planet. These findings, which verify predictions made by scientists formerly at UH, are being presented at the 2016 American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, California.

Press Release

Astronomers from the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA), Brazil, and Stanford University may have solved a long-standing solar mystery.Two decades ago, scientists discovered that the outer five percent of the Sun spins more slowly than the rest of its interior. Now, in a new study to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters, IfA Maui scientists Ian Cunnyngham, Jeff Kuhn, and Isabelle Scholl, together with Marcelo Emilio (Brazil) and Rock Bush (Stanford), describe the physical mechanism responsible for slowing the Sun's outer layers.

Press Release

"A Magnificent Celestial Show in 2017: The August 21 Total Solar Eclipse in North America " with IfA astronomer Shadia Habbal, 7:30 p.m., UH Mnoa Art Building Auditorium (room 132). Free Admission (Campus Parking $6). Poster

One of nature's most spectacular celestial sights is the magnificent solar corona, visible only during a total solar eclipse. On August 21, 2017, the moon's shadow will sweep across the entire United States from Oregon to South Carolina over a span of approximately 90 minutes. Everyone in the 48 contiguous states and Alaska will witness at least a partial solar eclipse. Those directly under the moon's 60 mile-wide shadow will have 2 minutes of totality - one of life's most awesome experiences. Learn why people become eclipse chasers, traveling the world to enjoy their beauty - and do some science.

The annual IfA Maui Open House will be held Friday, Oct. 7, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Maikalani building in Pukalani, Maui. Free Admission. Flier

Comet 332P/Ikeya-Murakami survived for 4.5 billion years in the frigid Kuiper Belt, a vast reservoir of icy bodies on the outskirts of our solar system. But within the last few million years, the unlucky comet was gravitationally kicked to the inner solar system by the outer planets - and this new home, closer to the sun, has doomed the comet. The Hubble Space Telescope caught the latest cloud of debris ejected by Comet 332P. The images, taken over three days in January 2016, represent one of the sharpest, most detailed observations of a comet breaking apart. The doomed comet may disintegrate in only 150 years.

Press Release

A team of astronomers known as the Kepler Habitable Zone Working Group, including University of Hawai'i Institute for Astronomy astronomer Nader Haghighipour, has identified which of the more than 4,000 exoplanets discovered by the NASA Kepler mission are most likely to be similar to our rocky home.

Press Release

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Institute for Astronomy