Jupiter has two new moons | Astronomy.com – Astronomy Magazine

As if the gas giant wasnt impressive enough, Jupiters already long list of moons has just grown by two.

While on the hunt for Planet X, DTM staff scientist Scott Sheppard, along with David Tholen from the University of Hawaii and Chadwick Trujillo from Northern Arizona University, decided to point their telescopes toward Jupiter. From there, the team could study Jupiter in the foreground while continuing their search for Planet X in the background.

While making those observations, they discovered many lost moons in addition to two new, mile-wide moons theyre calling S/2016 J 1 and S/2017 J 1. The new moons lie about 13 million miles (21 million kilometers) and 15 million miles (24 million kilometers) from Jupiter.

Several of the moons Sheppards team found qualify as lost moons - despite their discovery back in 2003, there was not enough information to define their exact orbits, so astronomers lost track of them as they circled Jupiter. Some moons have been found since that time, but at the beginning of 2016, 14 were still considered lost.

While observing, Sheppard and his team added their data from 2016-2017 to data from 2003 and found five of those lost moons. They will continue observing for another year to see if they can identify the rest of the lost moons; they may find more new moons, too.

In the meantime, after checking their 2016-2017 data against images taken in 2003, the team confirmed that S/2016 J 1 and S/2017 J 1 are previously undiscovered moons, bringing the number of Jupiters moons up to 69.

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Total eclipse of a planet | Astronomy.com – Astronomy Magazine

August 21 is the Great American Eclipse the first total solar eclipse in American history exclusive to the US. Elsewhere on Earth, though, a total solar eclipse occurs roughly every 18 months. But what about other planets? Can they happen there?

Mercury No. In a total solar eclipse, a moon slides between a planet and its sun, blocking the suns light and casting a shadow on the world below. But Mercury doesnt have a moon, making eclipses there impossible.

Venus No. Venus doesnt have a moon either. But that doesnt mean there arent eclipses. Venus has planetary eclipses or transits caused by Mercury orbiting between Venus and the Sun. Earth experiences transits, too, every time Mercury or Venus pass between the Sun and Earth. But theyre rare. Mercury and Venus transit Earth 8 years apart, then it takes over a century for the cycle to start over. The next planetary eclipse here on Earth is December 11, 2117.

Mars No. Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, so solar eclipses are totally possible they just arent total. Theyre annular. Just like a total solar eclipse, the moon passes between its planet and the Sun, covering the Suns center. But when a moons too far from the planet to cover the Sun or as with Phobos and Deimos too small, the rest of the Sun sticks out around the sides. See one for yourself in this video Curiosity Rover took on Mars September 13, 2012:

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Total eclipse of a planet | Astronomy.com - Astronomy Magazine

Stars may all be born in pairs and lose their siblings later – Astronomy Magazine

A cloud of gas and young stars in the Perseus molecular cloud may be revealing a strange truth to the universe: most, if not all, stars are born in pairs. This means that somewhere out there, the Sun has a lost companion and it may be one of several known stars. Essentially, all stars form in molecular clouds. In the Perseus observations, nearly all of these stars were gravitationally bound. This may be a requirement of protostars the egg-like objects could require a common center of gravity with a companion to accumulate mass. The dense cores then use leftover material to form more stars, continuing the process. So why doesnt the Sun have a binary companion (well, depending on who you ask)? It seems that 60 percent of stars shed their binary sister over time, gaining a wider distance from their partner until they are gravitationally severed. They also may not all have the same symmetry with regard to mass, meaning that some former companions could be brown dwarfs cast out by larger stars. The authors of the paper, accepted in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, say more work is needed to confirm their hypothesis. But if its true, the hunt may be on for the companion the Sun once had.

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Stars may all be born in pairs and lose their siblings later - Astronomy Magazine

Using Astronomy to Prospect for Asteroids Could Help Us Mine the … – Seeker

NEW YORK Smithsonian astrophysicist Martin Elvis would like to see astronomers take on a crucial role for future asteroid mining: as astronomical prospectors scoping out the next big catch.

Elvis, a researcher with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, discussed his dream for applied astronomy June 4 here at the Dawn of Private Space Science Symposium. Efficientasteroidmining would jump-start a space economy and bring down costs for exploration and space science, guiding humans into a modern space age, he said.

"My basic goal is just to revolutionize our exploration of the solar system, of the universe," Elvis said at the conference. [How Asteroid Mining Could Work (Infographic)]

Right now, he said, spaceflight and space science is unsustainably expensive. But asteroid mining could play a critical role in making those endeavors doable on a smaller budget, as private companies likeSpaceXhave decreased the launch cost per pound of payload.

But asteroid mining will face a critical problem, Elvis said: How to choose which asteroids will be worth the trip. And astronomers can play a crucial role in that determination, he said.

"The problem with asteroids is not many of them are valuable. You've got to find the right ones," he said. "We want to throw away that gray, stony stuff and deal with the carbonaceous or metallic ones, depending on whether you're looking for water or precious metals like platinum and palladium. So, this is where we [astronomers] come in."

As an example, Elvis pointed to the twin Magellan 6.5-meter telescopes in Chile. Professional astronomers could use telescopes of that size to characterize a faint asteroid in about 1-2 minutes. Eighty-five percent of asteroids could be thrown out based just on their color, he said, and the remaining 15 percent would be good prospects for sending small, exploratory probes using the data gathered about the objects' orbits and sizes.

Even a few nights per year would allow for the characterization of about 300 such objects, he said. And as larger telescopes come online, like the European Extremely Large Telescope and theGiant Magellan Telescope, the midsize telescopes could become more accessible for even more space-mining projects, he said.

"This means astronomers can turn out to be useful again [like] what [they] used to be, back in the days of navigation," he said. Similar to modern-day mining on Earth, there could be a multistep process of prospecting remotely "you don't just go straight to start digging rocks" before making a trip, Elvis added.

Such a process could cut asteroid prospecting costs by a factor of 10, he said. That would allow asteroid mining to flourish, lowering the cost commercially to put people and science in space.

On Earth, most of the precious metals, like platinum and palladium, are located 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) down, but they can come much nearer to the surface on asteroids. Those metals have dissolved in iron and were drawn to the center of the Earth, Elvis said, and the same thing happened on asteroids but the asteroids were then smashed up enough that it made the precious metals much more accessible. (Cometsalso contain valuable resources, especially water, Elvis said, but the energy needed to reach those fast-moving bodies makes them less worth the cost to explore.)

So far, Elvis has talked to the asteroid-mining companiesPlanetary ResourcesandDeep Space Industries, but neither company initially believed that this kind of remote prospecting would be necessary, he said.

"Both of them are dominated by engineers who are very good at building small spacecraft, and I'm sure they will succeed at building interplanetary cubesat-scale spacecraft for prospecting at the asteroid, but they were initially unbelieving of what I just told you," Elvis said.

They might come around, though, he added. "One of the companies did eventually realize that this was a necessary precursor to their sending out satellites," he said. "The other still isn't interested."

Original article onSpace.com.

EDITOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS Asteroid Basics: A Space Rock Quiz Deep Space Industries Sets Sights On Asteroids | Video Planetary Resources Unveils Asteroid-Hunting Arkyd Telescope | Video

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Using Astronomy to Prospect for Asteroids Could Help Us Mine the ... - Seeker

Galaxies are locked in place by their surroundings – Astronomy Magazine

Galaxies can be used as tracers for numerous characteristics of the universe, including the cosmic web of hydrogen gas that connects galaxies and follows the distribution of dark matter filaments throughout the cosmos. Looking at where galaxies sit sheds light on these otherwise invisible structures, while also providing clues about the amount of mass in galaxies and how they influence their neighbors over time. Now, astronomers have traced the alignment of massive galaxies back 10 billion years, showing these objects have been in tune with their environment since the universe was just one-third its current age.

The work was led by Lowell Observatory astronomer Michael West, who together with his collaborators used Hubble Space Telescope images of 65 galaxy clusters located billions of light-years away to study the orientation of the massive elliptical galaxies in the centers of these clusters. What they found suggests that the biggest, brightest galaxies in galaxy clusters have been heavily influenced by their unique environment since very early times. The study appears in Nature Astronomy online today.

Galaxy clusters present a very different environment from the field, which is an astronomers term for the majority of the sky, which shows no preferential structure or clustering of galaxies. Inside galaxy clusters, individual galaxies are subjected to intense gravity, a hot intracluster medium of gas, and many more flybys between neighboring galaxies than could ever occur in the less dense field. And while galaxies in the field tend to be oriented any which way, galaxies in clusters are different. The massive galaxies at the centers of clusters show preferential alignment with their neighbors, and astronomers are still looking to find out why.

One reason for this alignment could be that over time, gravity simply tends to orient large galaxies in the same direction as their neighbors. Alternatively, because large galaxies grow by absorbing smaller galaxies, these smaller galaxies could impart orientation on the galaxies that eat them due to the progenitors preferred orientation along the cosmic web.

The results of Wests study dont rule out either scenario, but they do help constrain the alignment by showing that it occurs very early on in galaxy evolution. Its an important new piece of the puzzle, said West in a press release, because it says that whatever caused these alignments happened early.

Whats next? Wests group plans to push the envelope further by trying to observe even more distant galaxies. Despite the precision achievable with Hubble, however, this will be challenging, as even massive galaxies appear fainter and smaller as the distance between Earth and these clusters grows. But such observations at the earliest epochs may help astronomers finally determine the reason for this preferred orientation, helping to complete our picture of early galaxy evolution.

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Galaxies are locked in place by their surroundings - Astronomy Magazine

The Future Of Astronomy: Thousands Of Radio Telescopes That Can See Beyond The Stars – Forbes


Forbes
The Future Of Astronomy: Thousands Of Radio Telescopes That Can See Beyond The Stars
Forbes
By building bigger telescopes, going to space, and looking from ultraviolet to visible to infrared wavelengths, we can view stars and galaxies as far back as stars and galaxies go. But for millions of years in the Universe, there were no stars, no ...

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The Future Of Astronomy: Thousands Of Radio Telescopes That Can See Beyond The Stars - Forbes

Mining the Heavens: Astronomers Could Spot Asteroid Prospects – Space.com

Artist's illustration of Deep Space Industries' Harvestor-class spacecraft for asteroid mining.

NEW YORK Smithsonian astrophysicist Martin Elvis would like to see astronomers take on a crucial role for future asteroid mining: as astronomical prospectors scoping out the next big catch.

Elvis, a researcher with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, discussed his dream for applied astronomy June 4 here at the Dawn of Private Space Science Symposium. Efficient asteroid mining would jump-start a space economy and bring down costs for exploration and space science, guiding humans into a modern space age, he said.

"My basic goal is just to revolutionize our exploration of the solar system, of the universe," Elvis said at the conference. [How Asteroid Mining Could Work (Infographic)]

Right now, he said, spaceflight and space science is unsustainably expensive. But asteroid mining could play a critical role in making those endeavors doable on a smaller budget, as private companies like SpaceX have decreased the launch cost per pound of payload.

But asteroid mining will face a critical problem, Elvis said: How to choose which asteroids will be worth the trip. And astronomers can play a crucial role in that determination, he said.

"The problem with asteroids is not many of them are valuable. You've got to find the right ones," he said. "We want to throw away that gray, stony stuff and deal with the carbonaceous or metallic ones, depending on whether you're looking for water or precious metals like platinum and palladium. So, this is where we [astronomers] come in."

As an example, Elvis pointed to the twin Magellan 6.5-meter telescopes in Chile. Professional astronomers could use telescopes of that size to characterize a faint asteroid in about 1-2 minutes. Eighty-five percent of asteroids could be thrown out based just on their color, he said, and the remaining 15 percent would be good prospects for sending small, exploratory probes using the data gathered about the objects' orbits and sizes.

Even a few nights per year would allow for the characterization of about 300 such objects, he said. And as larger telescopes come online, like the European Extremely Large Telescope and the Giant Magellan Telescope, the midsize telescopes could become more accessible for even more space-mining projects, he said.

Asteroids are fascinating for lots of reasons. They contain a variety of valuable resources and slam into our planet on a regular basis, occasionally snuffing out most of Earth's lifeforms. How much do you know about space rocks?

0 of 10 questions complete

Asteroid Basics: A Space Rock Quiz

Asteroids are fascinating for lots of reasons. They contain a variety of valuable resources and slam into our planet on a regular basis, occasionally snuffing out most of Earth's lifeforms. How much do you know about space rocks?

"This means astronomers can turn out to be useful again [like] what [they] used to be, back in the days of navigation," he said. Similar to modern-day mining on Earth, there could be a multistep process of prospecting remotely "you don't just go straight to start digging rocks" before making a trip, Elvis added.

Such a process could cut asteroid prospecting costs by a factor of 10, he said. That would allow asteroid mining to flourish, lowering the cost commercially to put people and science in space.

On Earth, most of the precious metals, like platinum and palladium, are located 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) down, but they can come much nearer to the surface on asteroids. Those metals have dissolved in iron and were drawn to the center of the Earth, Elvis said, and the same thing happened on asteroids but the asteroids were then smashed up enough that it made the precious metals much more accessible. (Comets also contain valuable resources, especially water, Elvis said, but the energy needed to reach those fast-moving bodies makes them less worth the cost to explore.)

So far, Elvis has talked to the asteroid-mining companies Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, but neither company initially believed that this kind of remote prospecting would be necessary, he said.

"Both of them are dominated by engineers who are very good at building small spacecraft, and I'm sure they will succeed at building interplanetary cubesat-scale spacecraft for prospecting at the asteroid, but they were initially unbelieving of what I just told you," Elvis said.

They might come around, though, he added. "One of the companies did eventually realize that this was a necessary precursor to their sending out satellites," he said. "The other still isn't interested."

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Mining the Heavens: Astronomers Could Spot Asteroid Prospects - Space.com

Get a sneak peak of August’s total solar eclipse – Astronomy Magazine

This helpful new tool may give you a better idea of where to go to watch the total solar eclipse.

The University of California, Berkeley teamed up with Google to create the Eclipse Megamovie Project, a new simulator that can show what the eclipse will look like from any location, including along the path of totality, which stretches across 11 states and goes up to 72 miles wide.

All you have to do is go to the website, enter the zip code or city you want to see, and youll receive an animation of the Sun in the sky over a three-hour time span. Youll see whether you will stand in the path of totality on eclipse day, or alternatively how much of the Sun will disappear during the partial eclipse visible from other locations.

Dan Zevin, who is on the team leading the project at UC Berkeleys Space Sciences Laboratory, said that while there are other eclipse simulators out there, this one is unique.

There are lots of online animations of the 2017 eclipse, but you cant use them like ours to get a sense of the full experience, including your surroundings, Zevin said in a press release. Our simulation is closer to what one might experience in a planetarium show.

Get a better idea of what the eclipse will look like in your hometown or along the path of totality on August 21, 2017, at this link.

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Get a sneak peak of August's total solar eclipse - Astronomy Magazine

Hubble spies on nearby brown dwarfs – Astronomy Magazine

Sometimes, its our closest neighbors that are the most difficult to spy on. Case in point: The Luhman 16 AB system, which is the third-closest stellar system to our Sun, yet was not discovered until 2013. After three years of subsequent monitoring, a stack of 12 images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has confirmed that the system is composed of two brown dwarfs and no third companion, as was originally suspected.

A team of astronomers led by Luigi Bedin watched the two visible stars, Luhman 16 A and Luhman 16 B, over the course of three years between August 22, 2014, and October 4, 2016. During this time, HST has imaged the system 12 times (with a thirteenth proposed visit in August 2018). Using these images, they were able to determine several orbital parameters of the stars, as well as more accurately measure their distance and search for any potential exoplanets in the system. Their results have been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Bedin and his team used their sequence of Hubble images to watch the two brown dwarfs dance across the sky. In particular, they were looking for a third potential body in the system, such as a large exoplanet, which had been indicated by the stars motion in previous observations with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. However, according to Bedins group, the new Hubble measurements rule out the presence of a third body in the system, all the way down to planets of Neptunes mass with a period between one and two years. Thus, if the system does harbor exoplanets, they must be smaller than Neptune and take longer than one to two Earth years to circle their sun.

Brown dwarfs are often called failed stars because they are too small to sustain the fusion processes that create energy inside stars. While these bodies can sometimes fuse a hydrogen isotope known as deuterium, even this phase doesnt last very long, relatively speaking, leaving the star to essentially cool off over cosmic time and grow dark.

However, astronomers know that there are many more low-mass objects in the universe than high-mass ones. Thus, because of their increased number, these lower-mass objects are an extremely fertile place to look for exoplanets.

Luhman A and B circle each other once every two to four decades, with a distance between them of about 3 astronomical units (three times the distance between the Sun and Earth). The system itself is located within about 2 parsecs of the Sun, or 6.5 light-years. Only the Alpha Centauri system and Barnard's Star are closer.

Because the Luhman 16 AB system is so close to the Sun, its the perfect place to study brown dwarfs, which are hard to see because theyre both small and dim, up close. Bedins team plans to continue their study of the stars to both improve the precision of their measured orbital parameters and to search for ever-smaller, Earth-sized exoplanets in the system.

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Hubble spies on nearby brown dwarfs - Astronomy Magazine

Inquiring minds rewarded – Harvard Gazette

Investigating how languages emerge and evolve. Using climate-change data to predict dust storms and bacterial meningitis outbreaks in Northern Africa. Understanding whether age-related diseases may stem from a common driver. Determining whether the presence of oxygen can be used to predict life on distant exoplanets.

Harvard scientists are known for pushing boundaries, but the projects funded through the 2017 Star Family Challenge for Promising Scientific Research are poised to take that reputation to new heights.

Created through a gift from James A. Star 83, the annual challenge funds high-risk, high-reward research that might not receive funding through other programs.

I want to salute the winners of the 2017 Star Family Challenge, Star said. This is a wonderful set of projects, and I look forward to hearing about them. I also want to thank Professor Randy Buckner and his committee for taking over from [former chairman] Doug Melton and moving the challenge forward.

As part of the program, the faculty members selected for the awards Jesse Snedeker, Elsie Sunderland, Caroline Buckee, Amy Wagers, and Robin Wordsworth made short presentations on their work to a standing-room-only crowd in the Faculty Room of University Hall.

We live in a time in which the funding of science faces threats, said Buckner, a professor of psychology and of neuroscience. It is unlikely the funding of science is going to become more risk-taking, more imaginative, or more centered on the blue-sky projects which excite so many people here today.

The need for the type of funding the Star Family Foundation is providing is going to become ever more critical, he continued. Your support means a very great deal.

Jesse Snedeker

Language is ubiquitous, said Snedeker, a professor of psychology, describing her project. Everywhere in the world you will find people talking to one another. These languages have many properties in common they all use nouns and verbs, they all have grammatical rules, and all languages are acquired by young children over a very short period. But there is also remarkable diversity of language they can vary in their words, in the specific grammatical structures that they allow, and in their sounds.

The basic question Snedeker hopes to address is one that has long been at the center of psychological research: Where does language come from?

Its an extremely difficult problem, she noted, because while the first humans left Africa at least 60,000 years ago, written records of language begin only about 5,000 years ago. What researchers can examine are the languages created by deaf communities.

Working with the deaf community in Nicaragua, Snedeker and colleagues plan to collect data on shared words, grammatical rules, and social networks among students from the 1970s through the 1990s with the goal of understanding how language changed over time.

What other researchers have discovered is that the first cohort those students that came into the schools in the 70s had shared signs for certain words and ordered narratives, but they do not reliably mark which argument is the subject and which is the object with either word order, like English, or case marking, like Russian or Turkish, Snedeker said. But by the time the later cohorts come in, they use verbal inflection about 50 percent of the time, and subject, object, verb word order the rest of the time.

This rapid pattern of evolution of language raises some interesting questions, Snedeker added. The first were going to be asking is: Why havent these older signers picked up on what the younger people around them are doing? Theyre part of a larger community, yet they havent adopted the regularities that the 20- and 30-year-olds are using.

Working with Martin Nowak, a professor of biology and mathematics and director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and Annemarie Kocab, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology, Snedeker hopes to create computational models that can provide new insight into the social dynamics that drive language.

Amy Wagers

When you consider the greatest risk factor for many diseases, says Wagers, the Forst Family Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, it all comes down to one word: aging.

There is growing evidence that diseases such as cancer, cardiac disease, and cognitive decline today viewed as separate medical challenges could be treated by targeting their age-related roots, Wagers said.

The underlying goal of this project is to understand the fundamental physiological processes of the natural process of aging, and then understand how those impact health, Wagers said. [With] that understanding, can we develop therapies or other interventions that allow us to take aim at that root cause, or develop strategies that could be applied across different diseases of aging which have typically been thought of as independent.

The notion that many age-related diseases may share a common driver was inspired in part by the discovery of mutations in circulating blood cells that accumulate with age and lead to clonal hematopoiesis problems in the formation of blood. Wagers and colleagues hope to investigate a new hypothesis that those mutations, and the problems they cause, may be a common driver of age-associated dysfunction across organ systems.

What this project will allow us to do is clarify the relevance of these age-related [mutations], Wagers said. This will allow us to understand whether there is therapeutic value in targeting those clones.

Working with Lee Rubin, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology, and Richard T. Lee, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology and of medicine, Wagers plans to use CRISPR technology to introduce specific mutations associated with clonal hematopoiesis in humans into young and middle-aged mice, and monitor the rate of emergence of age-associated pathologies in three different organ systems: skeletal muscle, the brain, and the heart.

Elsie Sunderland

Seasonal change and illness often go hand in hand, but in West Africa, the combination can be deadly.

Every year, dust storms across the region are accompanied by devastating epidemics of bacterial meningitis, which has a mortality rate of 50 percent when left untreated, said Sunderland, the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and an associate professor of environmental science and engineering at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Though its thought that the dust irritates the throat, making people more susceptible to disease, Sunderland plans to test an alternative hypothesis that meningitis bacteria are carried on the winds that drive those dust storms.

Microbes can be transported on aerosols like dust, Sunderland said. And these dust storms are very much a function of global climate so the intensity of these storms has been changing quite a bit over the last number of years. This is a very dynamic phenomenon that we are trying to link to the spread of meningitis in the area.

Sunderlands partner on the project is Buckee, an infectious disease epidemiologist from the Harvard Chan School, who said that while there has long been evidence of correlation between the dust storms and the outbreaks, the mechanism behind the link has been unclear.

Along with Buckee, Sunderland has recruited help from Tovi Lehmann of the National Institutes of Health, who samples insect populations on wind currents in Mali using helium balloons, and Stephen Bentley, a bacterial genomics expert at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

The group plans to use helium balloons and microbial collection devices to sample aerosols transported by winds in Mali, sequence the bacterial genomes that are collected, and assess the risk of atmospheric spread of meningitis and other windborne pathogens.

The idea is to provide some metrics to use for modeling to better understand these outbreaks, and to potentially use for forecasting, Sunderland said. Thats a major benefit for the practice of public health and being able to identify where vulnerable populations are.

Robin Wordsworth

With every discovery of a new exoplanet, interest in the idea that one may hold extraterrestrial life gains momentum. But how will that life be detected if the technology doesnt exist to send probes into deep space?

One possible method, says Wordsworth, an assistant professor of environmental science and engineering at SEAS, may be in detecting oxygen in the atmosphere of other planets.

Whats really fascinating and exciting about this to me is that for the first time on a large scale this question of extraterrestrial life is no longer something which is purely in literature or science fiction, Wordsworth said. Its something we can start to address scientifically.

Though there is wide evidence that oxygen in Earths atmosphere is due to the presence of life, there is debate about whether the gas is a reliable biosignature, because recent research has shown that some planets can produce oxygen-rich atmospheres abiotically.

In an effort to resolve that debate, Wordsworth and collaborators David Charbonneau, a professor of astronomy, and Dimitar Sasselov, Phillips Professor of Astronomy and director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, plan to construct advanced planetary evolution models that incorporate atmospheric, surface, and interior processes to simulate the early years of a planets development the period that most affects a planets oxygen accumulation.

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Inquiring minds rewarded - Harvard Gazette

Astronomy: Bending light and dead stars – The Sydney Morning Herald

How much does a dead star weigh? That's a question now with at least one solid answer thanks to an experiment first suggested by Albert Einstein a century ago.

How much does a dead star weigh? That's a question now with at least one solid answer thanks to an experiment first suggested by Albert Einstein a century ago.

This month astronomers led by Howard Bond NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute announced they had successfully measured the mass of a type of shrunken dead star called a white dwarf.

They did so using the Hubble space telescope and a test first devised by Einstein as a test of his general theory of relativity.

Einstein theorised that light should be affected by the mass of huge objects, such that light beams should bend around them. The theory was essentially proven during a solar eclipse in 1919 catapulting the physicist to world fame.

Using the same principle, Bond and his colleagues aimed Hubble at a particular white dwarf known as Stein 2051B as it passed in front of another star, taking multiple images in the process.

Relativity predicts that the light emanating from the background star should bend as the dwarf moves in and out of its way. The difference in the bent and straight line light arrival times is the crucial variable that permits the dwarf to be measured.

That difference turned out to be about two milliarcseconds a unit of measurement used in astronomy, and equivalent to 0.0000005555555556 of one degree.

This equates to roughly 68 per cent of the mass of our own sun a measurement, the scientists reported, that accorded well with earlier theoretical estimates based on the dwarf's known radius and other values.

"The agreement of the theoretical prediction with the measurement we were able to make with Hubble was astonishingly good," Bond said.

The research was published in the journal Science.

The team's next project is to make good use of Einstein, Hubble and bending light to measure the mass of the sun's nearest neighbour, the star Proxima Centauri.

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ALMA Observes Massive Protostar in Kleinmann-Low Nebula – Sci-News.com

A team of astronomers has determined how the gas flow from a massive infant star is launched. The researchers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to observe the 10-solar-mass protostar Orion KL Source I in the Kleinmann-Low Nebula and obtained clear evidence of rotation in the outflow.

Artists impression of Orion KL Source I. The massive protostar is surrounded by a disk of gas and dust. The outflow is launched from the surface of the outer disk. Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO.

Stars form from gas and dust floating in interstellar space. But, astronomers do not yet fully understand how it is possible to form the massive stars seen in space.

One key issue is gas rotation. The parent cloud rotates slowly in the initial stage and the rotation becomes faster as the cloud shrinks due to self-gravity.

Stars formed in such a process should have very rapid rotation, but this is not the case. The stars observed in the Universe rotate more slowly.

How is the rotational momentum dissipated? One possible scenario involves that the gas emanating from protostars.

If the gas outflow rotates, it can carry rotational momentum away from the system.

Astronomers have tried to detect the rotation of the outflow to test this scenario and understand its launching mechanism.

In a few cases signatures of rotation have been found, but it has been difficult to resolve clearly, especially around massive protostars.

Orion KL Source I observed with ALMA. The massive protostar is located in the center and surrounded by a gas disk (red). A bipolar gas outflow is ejected from the protostar (blue). Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / Hirota et al.

Dr. Tomoya Hirota, an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and SOKENDAI, and colleagues observed a protostar called Orion KL Source I in the Kleinmann-Low Nebula, the most active part of the Orion Nebula complex.

Thanks to its close vicinity and ALMAs advanced capabilities, Dr. Hirota and co-authors were able to reveal the nature of the outflow from Orion KL Source I.

We have clearly imaged the rotation of the outflow. In addition, the result gives us important insight into the launching mechanism of the outflow, Dr. Hirota said.

The new ALMA observations beautifully illustrate the rotation of the outflow: it rotates in the same direction as the gas disk surrounding the star; this strongly supports the idea that the outflow plays an important role in dissipating the rotational energy.

Furthermore, ALMA clearly shows that the outflow is launched not from the vicinity of Orion KL Source I itself, but rather from the outer edge of the disk. This morphology agrees well with the magnetocentrifugal disk wind model.

The findings appear today in the journal Nature Astronomy.

_____

Hirota et al. Disk-Driven Rotating Bipolar Outflow in Orion Source I. Nature Astronomy, published online June 12, 2017

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Stalwart of astronomy and proud family man – Gisborne Herald

HE WAS a Gisborne Astronomical Society star but the late Huon Chandler preferred to stay out of the limelight, says society president John Drummond of his long-time friend.

Mr Chandler was the societys long-standing treasurer and public nights presenter.

Devoted to the society since the early 1970s, the Cook Observatory was like his second home, said Mr Drummond in his eulogy.

Few know he paid the monthly power bills out of his own pocket when the society was at its ebb.

He also regularly mowed the grass around the Cook Observatory for years and painted over graffiti as soon as it appeared on the observatory.

Mr Chandler ran public nights every Tuesday for about 25 years and his talks on cosmology and others aspects of astronomy were legendary.

Those public nights even made it into the New Zealand Lonely Planet section on Gisborne.

There are undoubtedly many other things that Huon did for the society and observatory that even I dont know, said Mr Drummond.

Born in Dunedin in 1947, Mr Chandler joined the Inland Revenue Department on leaving school. When his family moved to Gisborne a few years later, he moved here too.

He met his future wife, Carol, during a holiday in USA and in 1976. They married in Gisborne and raised two boys, Joseph and Matthew.

Mr Chandlers varied career usually included a computer.

A passionate reader, Mr Chandler had a particular penchant for science fiction and loved fantasy games.

When computer fantasy games became available, he was in his element.

He was equally in his element on starry nights.

Mr Drummond recalls those nights.

We discussed everything from astronomy, to politics, to God and, of course his family, which he always spoke of with pride and excitement.

I remember one night on the roof of the Cook Observatory when Huon and I were observing a meteor shower.

We got to talking about the movie Blazing Saddles and noticed more meteors.

Later we revisited that comedy-western and again saw an increase in meteors.

This happened a number of times during the night. It was a unique experience to us both and one that we joked about for many years after.

Mr Chandler died on May 26 after several months of illness.

Farewell my old meteor-observing buddy, said Mr Drummond.

May you shine like a star in your new abode forever.

HE WAS a Gisborne Astronomical Society star but the late Huon Chandler preferred to stay out of the limelight, says society president John Drummond of his long-time friend.

Mr Chandler was the societys long-standing treasurer and public nights presenter.

Devoted to the society since the early 1970s, the Cook Observatory was like his second home, said Mr Drummond in his eulogy.

Few know he paid the monthly power bills out of his own pocket when the society was at its ebb.

He also regularly mowed the grass around the Cook Observatory for years and painted over graffiti as soon as it appeared on the observatory.

Mr Chandler ran public nights every Tuesday for about 25 years and his talks on cosmology and others aspects of astronomy were legendary.

Those public nights even made it into the New Zealand Lonely Planet section on Gisborne.

There are undoubtedly many other things that Huon did for the society and observatory that even I dont know, said Mr Drummond.

Born in Dunedin in 1947, Mr Chandler joined the Inland Revenue Department on leaving school. When his family moved to Gisborne a few years later, he moved here too.

He met his future wife, Carol, during a holiday in USA and in 1976. They married in Gisborne and raised two boys, Joseph and Matthew.

Mr Chandlers varied career usually included a computer.

A passionate reader, Mr Chandler had a particular penchant for science fiction and loved fantasy games.

When computer fantasy games became available, he was in his element.

He was equally in his element on starry nights.

Mr Drummond recalls those nights.

We discussed everything from astronomy, to politics, to God and, of course his family, which he always spoke of with pride and excitement.

I remember one night on the roof of the Cook Observatory when Huon and I were observing a meteor shower.

We got to talking about the movie Blazing Saddles and noticed more meteors.

Later we revisited that comedy-western and again saw an increase in meteors.

This happened a number of times during the night. It was a unique experience to us both and one that we joked about for many years after.

Mr Chandler died on May 26 after several months of illness.

Farewell my old meteor-observing buddy, said Mr Drummond.

May you shine like a star in your new abode forever.

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Stalwart of astronomy and proud family man - Gisborne Herald

Stein 2051B Shows How Gravity Can Bend Starlight – Sci-News.com

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observed the nearby white dwarf star Stein 2051B as it passed in front of a background star. During the close alignment, Stein 2051B deflected the starlight, which appeared offset by about 2 milliarcseconds from its actual position. This deviation is so small that it is equivalent to observing an ant crawl across the surface of a quarter from 1,500 miles (2,300 km) away.

The white dwarf star Stein 2051B (center) is 17 light-years away and the background star is 5,000 light-years away. Image credit: NASA / ESA / K. Sahu, STScI.

A century ago, Albert Einstein published his famous theory of relativity. He proposed that all objects physically warp the fabric of space, with larger masses producing a more pronounced effect, and very massive objects causing light to travel along curved paths through space.

Such an effect was first observed during the 1919 solar eclipse by English astronomer Arthur Eddington.

Scientists had to wait a century, however, to get a telescope powerful enough to detect this gravitational microlensing caused by a star outside the Solar System.

Even around objects with very large masses, such as stars, this effect is very slight, making such detections extremely challenging for ground-based telescopes. It is, however, within the capabilities of Hubble.

This Hubble image shows the binary star system Stein 2051 on October 1, 2013, consisting of the brighter, redder Stein 2051A component at lower right and the fainter, bluer Stein 2051B component near the center. Because these stars are only 17 light-years away they appear to move in the sky relative to the much more distant background stars in several months of observations with Hubble. The wavy blue line traces this motion, due to their true motion relative to the Sun combined with the parallax due to the motion of Earth around the Sun. Stein 2051B appeared to pass close enough to one of these background stars, labeled source that the light from the background star was bent due to the mass of the white dwarf. This color image was made by combining images taken in two filters with Hubbles Wide Field Camera 3. Image credit: NASA / ESA / K. Sahu, STScI.

Stein 2051B resides 17 light-years from Earth and forms a binary system with the red dwarf star Stein 2051A.

The background star is approximately 5,000 light-years away.

Space Telescope Science Institute researcher Dr. Kailash Sahu and co-authors observed Stein 2051B eight times within two years while the white dwarf traveled in front of the background star.

During the close alignment, the white dwarfs gravity bent the light from the distant star, making it appear offset by about 2 milliarcseconds from its actual position.

From this measurement, the astronomers calculated that the white dwarfs mass is 68% of the Suns mass.

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Stein 2051B Shows How Gravity Can Bend Starlight - Sci-News.com

Hubble applauds waltzing dwarfs – Astronomy Now Online

The image is a stack of 12 images made over the course of three years with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Using high-precision astrometry, an Italian-led team of astronomers tracked the two components of the system as they moved both across the sky and around each other. Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Bedin et al.

This seemingly unspectacular series of dots with varying distances between them actually shows the slow waltz of two brown dwarfs. The image is a stack of 12 images made over the course of three years with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Using high-precision astrometry, an Italian-led team of astronomers tracked the two components of the system as they moved both across the sky and around each other.

The observed system, Luhman 16AB, is only about six light-years away and is the third closest stellar system to Earth after the triple star system Alpha Centauri and Barnards Star. Despite its proximity, Luhman 16AB was only discovered in 2013 by the astronomer Kevin Luhman.

The two brown dwarfs that make up the system, Luhman 16A and Luhman 16B, orbit each other at a distance of only three times the distance between the Earth and the sun, and so these observations are a showcase for Hubbles precision and high resolution.

The astronomers using Hubble to study Luhman 16AB were not only interested in the waltz of the two brown dwarfs, but were also searching for a third, invisible, dancing partner. Earlier observations with the European Southern Observatorys Very Large Telescope indicated the presence of an exoplanet in the system. The team wanted to verify this claim by analyzing the movement of the brown dwarfs in great detail over a long period of time, but the Hubble data showed that the two dwarfs are indeed dancing alone, unperturbed by a massive planetary companion.

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Hubble applauds waltzing dwarfs - Astronomy Now Online

Solar astronomy buffs warming up for August eclipse – Anniston Star

James Ambrister has trained his telescope since he was a seventh-grader on the night-sky, but lately learned to look up during the day at the skys brightest star the sun.

Ambrister and other local astronomy buffs are excited for one of the rarer wonders of the daytime sky: a total solar eclipse that will be visible to much of the U.S. in August.

Ambrister, a member of the Oxford Alabama Solar Astronomy Club, had solar telescopes set up Saturday at Art in the Park in Choccolocco Park in Oxford.

Ambrister said he moved from New Hampshire to Oxford in 2009. He had been a member of New Hampshire Astronomical Society, which visited schools to interest kids in astronomy. Ambrister said he missed that outreach.

When I moved down, I missed that, Ambrister said. I started taking my telescope to Oxford Lake and show people.

Laura Weinkauf, planetarium director at Jacksonville State University, said people can usually see sunspots and solar flares through telescopes.

Sunspots are regions that are cooler than the rest of the sun, Weinkauf said. Solar flares are when the sun sends heated plasma out in one direction or another.

According to Weinkauf, sunspots look like small blemishes on the surface of the sun, but she said its all relative.

The sun is about 6,000 degrees Kelvin, Weinkauf said. The sunspots are cooler at about 4,000 degrees Kelvin, but keep in mind Earth is only 300 degrees Kelvin. Sunspots also look small, but theyre about the size of the Earth.

Ambrister said he is amazed at how many people dont know how big the sun is.

You can fit 109 Earths across the diameter of the sun, Ambrister said. If you opened it up, 1.2 million Earths would fit inside the sun.

Weinkauf said solar telescopes have special lenses on them that filter out sunlight to make it safe.

Its usually a lens you can attach to your telescope that blocks ninety-nine point some large fraction of the sunlight, Weinkauf said. Its so you dont blind yourself like Galileo did.

Ambrister said he has a telescope that is made specifically for looking at the sun and the filtering lenses for another telescope. He said he brought both to the park.

Oxford resident and co-founder of Backyard Weather Kent Shaddix was also at the park. He said he connected with Ambrister through a mutual friend. Shaddix said he and Ambrister decided to do a joint solar astronomy and weather event at the park.

Shaddix said he is excited for the upcoming solar eclipse.

Its gonna be August 21, Shaddix said. Were gonna set up somewhere for that too.

Weinkauf said a solar eclipse happens when the moon passes between the sun and the Earth. She said seeing a solar eclipse is pretty rare. She said the last total solar eclipse that could be seen in North America was in 1972 in northern Alaska.

The place where you can see the eclipse, the pass width, usually ends up to be somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Weinkauf said. We wont get a total eclipse in Anniston, but well get about 95-percent coverage which is still pretty rare.

Ambrister said he wont be in town for the eclipse, but he plans to take his telescopes back to the park on June 18 from 8 a.m. to noon. He said he hopes people will come out to take a look.

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Solar astronomy buffs warming up for August eclipse - Anniston Star

Forest Service cancels astronomy programs at heliport – Union Democrat

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Planets, stars, constellations and galaxies in the night sky are one of the free benefits for people who spend nights high in the Central Sierra, and for people who work and live beyond the reach of urban lighting.

The Forest Service used to offer astronomy programs at Bald Mountain Heliport. Stargazers say its a high point with no trees that offers near-perfect 360-degree panoramas of the heavens after dark.

But staffing and budget constraints have prompted Stanislaus National Forest administrators to cancel the astronomy star parties they used to host at the heliport.

Among those who are disappointed is amateur astronomer Rich Combs, 66, a resident of Strawberry and Livermore. He began coming to the Pinecrest area when he was a youngster in the late 1950s and 1960s. He remembers being inspired by a satellite passing over him in the night sky.

His affinity for the stars and astronomy stayed with him. He eventually hosted astronomy star parties for the Forest Service for more than a decade. An invoice from last year shows he got paid $120 a night for star parties at the heliport.

Combs contacted The Union Democrat and said today he doesnt care about the money.

Over the years, theyve offered me as much as $400 per presentation, Combs said Thursday. Thats what they told me some of their presenters get, and they asked me what I wanted to charge.

He charged $100, and thats what the Forest Service paid him for about 10 years. A couple years ago he started charging $120 a night.

I would be happy to do it for free if that would make any difference, Combs said. I hope the public understands heres what your money is not getting spent on.

Space race

Combs was born in 1951, and he remembers when he was about 8 years old the first time he attended Camp Gold, also known as Lair of the Golden Bear, an alumni camp for the University of California system, near Pinecrest and the Summit District Ranger Station.

Camp Gold is a family camp for alumni and their families, Combs said. Families almost always went the same week each year. We made friends that way. Combs family went from about 1959 to 1963.

Camp Gold is still there, off of Dodge Ridge Road and within walking distance of the Summit Ranger Station.

The first time Combs went to Camp Gold was for a week in August 1959, with his family. His father attended UC Berkeley, and he was a qualified alumnus. Combs remembers stargazing at dark night skies from a baseball field at the camp.

I was interested in astronomy since grade school, Combs said. I remember at Camp Gold going up and looking at a satellite, easily visible to the eye. My dad took to the family to a dark area near Camp Gold and a satellite had been predicted to be visible. We saw it go overhead. I was maybe 10 years old.

Combs said the satellite was called Echo.

This was in the midst of the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the Russians were beating the Americans.

In late 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite placed in orbit, and Sputnik II, which carried a small dog named Laika into orbit.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, created in 1958, was in its infancy. According to NASA historians, the agency launched an Echo I metalized balloon satellite Aug. 12 1960.

Echo satellites generated a lot of public interest in the early 1960s because they could be seen with the naked eye from the ground as they passed overhead.

In April 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth once and became the first human in space. Less than a month later, Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space.

Bald Mountain Heliport

Bald Mountain Heliport opened in 1962, said Dave Phillips, helibase manager. Its a Forest Service facility on Forest Service land. Phillips said helicopter crews with Cal Fire and contractor PHI Air Medical also use the base when needed.

Shawn Estes, an information assistant at the Summit District Ranger Station, said summer interpretive astronomy programs at Bald Mountain probably began in the summer of 1975.

Combs says hes been an active amateur astronomer since 1980.

He said he remembers going to Bald Mountain Heliport for the first time about 15 years ago, when he saw an ad in the Stanislaus Traveler newsletter distributed by the Forest Service. Combs said they were looking for someone to help with astronomy programs at Bald Mountain Heliport, because the person who did it for several years was retiring.

Im an observer of stars, galaxies and other objects in the heavens, Combs said. I share my enthusiasm for astronomy with others through my club and through programs at schools, including Summerville High School in Tuolumne.

In addition to leading astronomy programs at Bald Mountain Heliport until this year, Combs says he hosts star parties at Summerville High in October each fall.

We usually try to schedule it around a crescent moon, Combs said. A crescent moon is easy to view but does not overwhelm the dark night sky, so people can see the moon as well as stars.

He said he met a Summerville High science teacher, Karen Wessel, at a star party at Bald Mountain Heliport. At Summerville High star parties, Combs said he organizes star parties on the tennis court at the school. Each year, 20 to 30 people attend, including students and family members.

Its convenient, and its usually dark enough we can see a reasonable number of objects in the night sky, Combs said. Its not as good as Bald Mountain, but its close.

Combs says he is also currently president of the club Tri-Valley Stargazers, based in Livermore.

Staffing and budget

Combs said he went to Summit District Ranger Station about two weeks ago because he had not received his annual invitation to host star parties at Bald Mountain Heliport.

Basically, I was told they were not going to be having the program this year due to a lack of staffing and a lack of funding, Combs said.

Estes confirmed that interpretive astronomy programs at Bald Mountain Heliport this summer have been canceled.

A night program like that, we have to have staff up there, Estes said. Its on a locked firefighting aviation facility. There needs to be supervision up there for public safety.

Like numerous other federal agencies, the Forest Service has faced a hiring freeze and budget cuts since President Donald J. Trumps inauguration in January.

In Tuolumne County, public affairs staff with the Stanislaus National Forest announced that, beginning this week, the front desk at the Mi-Wok Ranger District will be open just one day a week, 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. each Friday.

The decision to open the Mi-Wok Ranger District front desk only on Fridays stems in part from staffing challenges and budget constraints, said Diana Fredlund with Stanislaus National Forest public affairs.

Asked for more details, Fredlund responded, Regarding the staffing challenges, the hiring freeze limits our ability to fill behind departures, whether its retirements or relocations. Flat or declining budgets for the past many years eventually impact our ability to provide services and reducing Mi-Woks front desk operating hours is one of those impacts. We cant discuss anything about future budgets until they have been voted on and announced by Congress and the White House.

In 2016 the overall budget for Stanislaus National Forest was about $20 million, Fredlund said. The 2017 overall budget is about $19.5 million. These numbers do not take into account special funding sources, like recovery from the Rim Fire, which may only be spent on recovery or management efforts directly related to the Rim Fire, or other grants that are designated for a specific purpose.

Combs said, I understand, but I kind of feel our government priorities are not in order. Were losing the chance to educate the public with a free resource, the night skies.

Contact Guy McCarthy at gmccarthy@uniondemocrat.com or (209) 588-4585. Follow him on Twitter @GuyMcCarthy.

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Forest Service cancels astronomy programs at heliport - Union Democrat

When art and astronomy mix – Astronomy Magazine

It can be hard to visualize something you can't see, so when NASA announced the TRAPPIST-1 system, they knew they needed to get some great artists to visually represent the amazing new system.

Robert Hurt, a visualization scientist at Caltechs IPAC Center with a Ph.D. in astrophysics, and Tim Pyle, a multimedia producer with a background in Hollywood special effects, came together to create visualizations of the TRAPPIST-1 system.

The seven-planet system discovered by NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope has three Earth-size planets in its habitable zone. As no telescope is powerful enough to photograph our distant neighbors yet, the two were tasked with creating realistic renderings of what they might look like.

"For the public, the value of this is not just giving them a picture of something somebody made up," Douglas Hudgins, a program scientist for the Exoplanet Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters, said in a press release. "These are real, educated guesses of how something might look to human beings. An image is worth a thousand words."

Hurt and Pyle worked with data from telescopes and consulted the discovery team at NASA as they went along. TRAPPIST-1b was inspired by Jupiters moon, Io. Pyle based the design of TRAPPIST-1h, the most distant and mysterious planet in the system, off two more of Jupiters moons, Ganymede and Europa.

"When we're doing these artist's concepts, we're never saying, 'This is what these planets actually look like,'" Pyle said. "We're doing plausible illustrations of what they could look like, based on what we know so far. Having this wide range of seven planets actually let us illustrate almost the whole breadth of what would be plausible. This was going to be this incredible interstellar laboratory for what could happen on an Earth-sized planet."

Based on the possibly that the planets are tidally locked, Hurt put an ice cap on TRAPPIST-1cs dark side. Hurt also took a little creative liberty, putting water on the dayside of TRAPPIST-1d, one of the three habitable planets. Scientists originally wanted him to depict an eyeball world, where the side facing the host star would be hot and dry, the side on the back would be icy, and the middle would have water. But Hurt tried to convince them his design would be the best bet.

Then I kind of pushed back, and said, 'If it's on the dark side, no one can look at it and understand we're saying there's water there,' Hurt said.

After the disagreement, the team compromised, allowing water to be seen in the dayside.

Ultimately, the teams main goal was to get the public excited about science and give them more information about what these planets might look like.

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When art and astronomy mix - Astronomy Magazine

Ingredient of life found around infant Sun-like stars – Astronomy Now Online

ALMA has observed stars like the Sun at a very early stage in their formation and found traces of methyl isocyanate a chemical building block of life. This is the first ever detection of this prebiotic molecule towards a solar-type protostar, the sort from which our Solar System evolved. The discovery could help astronomers understand how life arose on Earth.This image shows the spectacular region of star formation where methyl isocyanate was found. The insert shows the molecular structure of this chemical. Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2/L. Calada

ALMA has observed stars like the Sun at a very early stage in their formation and found traces of methyl isocyanate a chemical building block of life. This is the first ever detection of this prebiotic molecule towards solar-type protostars, the sort from which our Solar System evolved. The discovery could help astronomers understand how life arose on Earth.

Two teams of astronomers have harnessed the power of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array(ALMA) in Chile to detect the prebiotic complex organic moleculemethyl isocyanatein the multiple star systemIRAS 16293-2422. One team was co-led by Rafael Martn-Domnech at theCentro de Astrobiologain Madrid, Spain, and Vctor M. Rivilla, at the INAF-Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetriin Florence, Italy; and the other by Niels Ligterink at theLeiden Observatoryin the Netherlands and Audrey Coutens at University College London, United Kingdom.

This star system seems to keep on giving! Following the discovery of sugars, weve now found methyl isocyanate. This family of organic molecules is involved in the synthesis ofpeptidesandamino acids, which, in the form of proteins, are the biological basis for life as we know it, explain Niels Ligterink and Audrey Coutens.

ALMAs capabilities allowed both teams to observe the molecule at several different and characteristic wavelengths across theradio spectrum. They found the unique chemical fingerprints located in the warm, dense inner regions of the cocoon of dust and gas surrounding young stars in their earliest stages of evolution. Each team identified and isolated the signatures of the complex organic molecule methyl isocyanate. They then followed this up with computer chemical modelling and laboratory experiments to refine our understanding of the molecules origin.

IRAS 16293-2422is a multiple system of very young stars, around 400 light-years away in a large star-forming region calledRho Ophiuchiin the constellation ofOphiuchus(The Serpent Bearer). The new results from ALMA show that methyl isocyanate gas surrounds each of these young stars.

Earth and the other planets in our Solar System formed from thematerialleft over after the formation of the Sun. Studying solar-type protostars can therefore open a window to the past for astronomers and allow them to observe conditions similar to those that led to the formation of our Solar System over 4.5 billion years ago.

Rafael Martn-Domnech and Vctor M. Rivilla, lead authors of one of the papers, comment: We are particularly excited about the result because these protostars are very similar to the Sun at the beginning of its lifetime, with the sort of conditions that are well suited for Earth-sized planets to form. By finding prebiotic molecules in this study, we may now have another piece of the puzzle in understanding how life came about on our planet.

Niels Ligterink is delighted with the supporting laboratory results: Besides detecting molecules we also want to understand how they are formed. Our laboratory experiments show that methyl isocyanate can indeed be produced on icy particles under very cold conditions that are similar to those in interstellar space This implies that this molecule and thus the basis for peptide bonds is indeed likely to be present near most new young solar-type stars.

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Ingredient of life found around infant Sun-like stars - Astronomy Now Online

The TRAPPIST-1 system may have formed pebble-by-pebble … – Astronomy Magazine

The TRAPPIST-1 system looks more like Jupiter and its moons than our own solar system. Seven planets orbit in an elaborate synchronous dance around a star only slightly larger than Jupiter. Those seven planets are constrained within a 3 million-mile space and all of them are between the size of Mars and a slightly-larger-than-Earth rocky planet. Oh, and at least three of the planets are habitable.

And now, a group of University of Amsterdam professors believe they know how it formed. And they think it happened rock-by-rock.

Solar systems typically form from nebula as gas accumulates and clumps, it forms a star, which then helps gravitationally shape planets. But in a small system like TRAPPIST-1, the planets have to stay close in order to keep gravitationally bound. In the TRAPPIST system, the first batch of planets formed from material leftovers clumps of dirt and ice then migrated outward. At a certain point they reach a place where water sublimes into vapor, and water accumulates onto that ice and rock. It becomes enough material to smoosh into a proto-planet and migrates closer to the star.

The end result? Seven icy, Earth-sized worlds. Chris Ornell, lead author of the paper recently accepted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, said in a press release, We have been working on pebble aggregation and sweep-up by planets for a long time and were also developing a new ice-line model. Thanks to the discovery of Trappist-1 we can compare our model with reality.

This method of accumulation also helps settle why the system seems to have no gas giants like Neptune or Uranus, at least that we know of. Its unknown yet if such a mechanism creates atmospheres on the planets or how this might affect habitability in the system.

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The TRAPPIST-1 system may have formed pebble-by-pebble ... - Astronomy Magazine