The possible discovery of a massive ringed planet in Orion needs confirmation and amateur astronomers can help.

Update (June 8, 2017): Finder charts are now available! Scroll down to the bottom for color and black-and-white versions.

Do you want to help observe a giant planet orbiting a young star in Orion?

Astronomers suspect a giant, ringed planet orbits a young star in Orion, as depicted in this artist's conception. University of Warick, UK

Professional astronomers are once again teaming up with amateur astronomers all over the world to capture the eclipse of PDS 110, a young star in Orion orbited by a large planet (or perhaps a brown dwarf) that is itself surrounded by a ring system and moons.

Perhaps you remember the case of J1407 that system featured a gigantic ring system full of gaps, presumably from exomoons. The PDS 110 system, detailed by Hugh Osborn (University of Warwick, UK) in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, shows some similarities to the J1407 companion.

PDS 110 is a star in the Orion OB1a association, northwest of Orions belt. The association, like many others in Orion, contains young, massive stars less than 20 million years old. PDS 110 itself is estimated to be 7 to 10 million years old and is still growing, accreting material from its natal cloud. The stars mass is 1.6 times that of the Sun, but unlike the Sun, it emits a lot of light at infrared wavelengths, probably emitted by the surrounding gas and dust heated by the infant stars radiation. Since its relatively bright, it has been the object of surveys for decades.

Osborn and his team began poring over data from a few automated surveys, including the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) and Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT), when they noticed some interesting events in brightness of the star over time. In November 2008 and January 2011, the light coming from PDS 110 dimmed dramatically for a couple weeks, to about 30% its usual value.

Osborn ruled out other explanations for these dips, including clumps of dust orbiting the star any such clumps wouldn't last, they'd quickly spread out along their orbits. Instead, he suggests that there is a companion with between 2 and 80 times the mass of Jupiter orbiting PDS 110 every 808 days. This period corresponds to an average distance from the star of 2 astronomical units (twice the average distance between Earth and the Sun).

What makes this system so fascinating is the nature of the eclipses, as seen by their shape in the light curve that traces the stars brightness over time. While lone planets cause a stars brightness to dip steadily and symmetrically, the two eclipses observed so far in the PDS 110 system are far deeper than your typical exoplanet transit, and theyre ragged too, indicating some kind of structure to the eclipsing object.

Whats exciting is that during both eclipses, we see the light from the star change rapidly, and that suggests that there are rings in the eclipsing object, but these rings are many times larger than the rings around Saturn, says coauthor Matthew Kenworthy (Leiden University).

Similar behavior was seen in the J1407, which Kenworthy discovered, but that system only has one observed eclipse. PDS 110 has exhibited this behavior twice, and if Osborns hypothesis is correct, the the companion object and its massive set of rings will once again eclipse the star in September 2017. The ring system appears to be full of gaps and variations in density, which could signal exomoons, as in the J1407 system.

The team will be producing finder charts and instructions for observers to be released prior to September, and we will link to that information here as it becomes available. If the period is confirmed, PDS 110 will stand alone as the only confirmed ringed companion to a star outside our solar system. It will likely be the target of follow-up spectroscopy, which will enable Osborn and colleagues to more precisely estimate the companions mass, as well as ALMA observations that may reveal material or companions in more distant orbits around the star.

Color finder chart for PDS 110. Right-click to save and print.

Black and white finder chart for PDS 110. Click (or right-click) image to see, download, and print PDF file.

Originally posted here:

Help Astronomers Track a Giant, Ringed Planet - Sky & Telescope

Einsteins theory of general relatively changed the way scientists look at the universe. The presence of mass bends spacetime like a bowling ball depressing a mattress, causing light to curve as it travels through these depressions on its way to Earth. In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington confirmed this effect by measuring the deflection of background stars caused by our Sun during a total solar eclipse. Nearly a century later, astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to measure this effect caused by a star outside our solar system for the first time.

This groundbreaking result was announced today at the 230th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society by Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute. Sahus team used HST to capture the deflection of light from a background star as a white dwarf, the remnant core of a star once like our Sun, passed in front of it as seen from Earth. Although this deflection was tiny about 1,000 times smaller than the deflection measured by Eddington in 1919 the precision achievable with Hubble allowed astronomers to see it clearly. From the deflection, they were able to measure the mass of the white dwarf, called Stein 2051B, in a new way that independently confirms the theoretical mass-radius relationship for white dwarfs. This is good news, because the mass-radius relationship is the foundation for astronomers use of these objects as standard distance indicators in cosmology. The work will appear this month in the journal Science.

To find a suitable pair of stars to accomplish this task, Sahus team first combed through a catalog of 10,000 stars with large proper motions, or movements on the sky as seen from Earth. Based on the motions of these stars, the team projected the stars positions forward in time to find a pair that would pass close enough to each other (when projected on the sky, not in physical space) to produce a bend in starlight measurable with HST.

Their choice: Stein 2051B, a white dwarf 17 light-years from Earth. According to the teams calculations, Stein 2051B would pass in front of a distant background star, about 5,000 light-years away, causing the background starlight to bend by 2 milliarcseconds. In more understandable terms, seeing that bend would be like trying to watch an insect crawl across the face of a quarter from a distance of about 1,500 miles (2,400km).

The team enlisted Hubble to observe the stars over eight epochs, or points in time, with observations taken in the time leading up to, during, and after the event, which occurred in March 2014. And, indeed, they did observe a deflection of the background light as the white dwarf passed in front of the distant source.

This work represents two firsts in astronomy. One, its the first time a deflection due to general relativity has been measured using a star other than our Sun. And two, as Sahu explained during the press conference, measuring the mass of Stein 2051B is the first clean test for [the] mass-radius relationship.

The mass-radius relationship for white dwarfs leads to a limit called the Chandrasekhar limit. If a white dwarf accumulates mass past this limit (by stealing it off a binary companion), it will explode as a supernova, which can be seen from vast distances and can be used by astronomers to measure very large distances accurately. But if this relationship is different than we currently understand it, it would affect distance measurements based on white dwarf supernovae.

Read more from the original source:

Astronomers weigh a white dwarf using gravitational lensing - Astronomy Magazine

June 8, 2017 Astronomers from the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) explain with a model how seven earth-sized planets could have been formed in the planetary system Trappist-1 (here an artistic impression). The crux is on the line where ice changes in water. Credit: NASA/R. Hurt/T. Pyle

Astronomers from the University of Amsterdam have offered an explanation for the formation of the Trappist-1 planetary system. The system has seven planets as big as the Earth that orbit close to their star. The crux, according to the researchers from the Netherlands, is the line where ice changes in water. Near that ice line, pebbles that drifted from outer regions to the star receive an additional portion of water and clot together to form proto-planets. The article with the model has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

In February 2017, an international team of astronomers announced the discovery of a system of seven exoplanets around a small star, Trappist-1 (see report on eso.org). It was against the prevailing theories of planet formation that so many relatively large planets orbited so close around a small star. Researchers from the University of Amsterdam now come up with a model that explains how the planetary system could have originated.

Until now, there were two prevailing theories for the formation of planets. The first theory assumes that planets are formed more or less on the spot where they are now. With Trappist-1, that is unlikely because the disk from which the planets had originated should have been very dense. The second theory assumes that a planet forms much further out in the disk and migrates inward afterwards. This theory also causes problems with Trappist-1 because it does not explain why the planets are all about the same size as the Earth.

Now, the Amsterdam researchers come up with a model where pebbles migrate instead of complete planets. The model begins with pebbles that are floating from outside regions to the star. Such pebbles consist largely of ice. When the pebbles arrive near the so-called ice line, the point where it is warm enough for liquid water, they get an additional portion of water vapor to process. As a result, they clot together into a proto-planet. Then the proto-planet moves a little closer to the star. On its way it sweeps up more pebbles like a vacuum cleaner, until it reaches the size of the Earth. The planet then moves in a little further and makes room for the formation of the next planet.

The crux, according to the researchers, is in the clotting of pebbles near the ice line. By crossing the ice line, pebbles lose their water ice. But that water is re-used by the following load of pebbles that is drifting from the outer regions of the dust disk. At Trappist-1, this process repeated until seven planets were formed.

Research leader Chris Ormel (University of Amsterdam): "For us, Trappist-1 with its seven planets, came as a welcome surprise. We have been working on pebble aggregation and sweepup 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."

In the near future, the Amsterdam researchers want to refine their model. They will run computer simulations to see how their model withstands different initial conditions.

The researchers still expect some discussion among fellow astronomers. The model is quite revolutionary because the pebbles travel from the outer part of the disk to the ice line without much activity in between. Ormel: "I hope that our model will help answer the question about how unique our own solar system is compared to other planetary systems."

Explore further: Temperate earth-sized worlds found in extraordinarily rich planetary system (Update)

More information: "Formation of TRAPPIST-1 and other compact systems." Chris W. Ormel, Beibei Liu & Djoeke Schoonenberg. Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics. doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201730826 . Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/1703.06924

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Astronomers explain the formation of seven exoplanets around Trappist-1 - Phys.Org

Astronomers with the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope(s) (KELT) survey have just announced an amazing find: the hottest gas giant ever discovered. In fact, the planet is so hot that its hotter than most stars, and its only a few thousand degrees cooler than our own Sun.

The planet, KELT-9b, is about three times the mass of Jupiter and twice its size. Its discovery was announced by B. Scott Gaudi of The Ohio State University and Karen Collins of Vanderbilt University at a press conference Monday afternoon at the 230th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas. We are very excited today to announce the discovery of KELT-9b a gas giant planet hotter than most stars. And I want to emphasize thats not a typo, Collins said during the press conference. She went on to explain that KELT-9b is so hot because of its sun, the brightest, hottest, most massive known transiting gas giant planet host star. Concurrent with the announcement, the work was also published online as a letter in Nature.

That host star is roughly 2.5 times the mass of our Sun, and is rotating so quickly (about once a day) that its more of a flattened egg shape than a sphere, like the planet Saturn. Every time KELT-9b transits across the face of its sun, the light coming from the star drops by only one half of one percent. The star, which is a hot, blue star, radiates not only in the optical, but also puts out huge amounts of ultraviolet (UV) light. Its massive output, coupled with KELT-9bs close proximity, boosts the temperature on the planets day side to about 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit (4,300 Celsius). Because the planet is tidally locked, the same side always faces its parent star; astronomers currently think that the night side is much cooler, due to the atmospheres poor ability to transfer heat from the broiling day side to the rest of the planet. But even still, that cool side is hot: The night side would probably look like a red dwarf to our eyes, Gaudi said at the press conference.

Furthermore, KELT-9b is orbiting its star perpendicular to the hosts axis of rotation. That means rather than circling in the same plane as the stars equator, as our planets circle the Sun, KELT-9b flies over its parent stars north and south poles with every 1.5-day orbit it completes. This odd orbit, Gaudi said, likely precesses as well, which means the planet may stop transiting its sun as seen from Earth within about 150 years, depending on the rate of this precession. Astronomers would then have to wait several thousand years before transits could be seen again.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

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We've just found the hottest planet ever - Astronomy Magazine

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Astronomy - Celestron

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Cool stars have really come into their own lately, especially as discoveries of their planetary systems increase (think TRAPPIST-1 and Proxima Centauri). But despite their relatively cool nature, these stars can put out intense flares that might affect the planets haplessly circling them. The role of such flares remains unknown but maybe not for long, now that a team of astronomers has begun building a database of dwarf star flares from high-precision data obtained by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission.

The database was introduced Tuesday morning at the 230th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society by Chase Million of Million Concepts. Million is the leader of a project called gPhoton, which has undertaken the effort to reprocess data taken by GALEX, which recorded the sky in ultraviolet (UV) light. Thus far, the team has examined more than 100 terabytes of data, looking for flares from red dwarf stars. Although these stars are normally unremarkable in the UV bands, the flares they emit cause them to brighten and become noticeable at these wavelengths, if only for a short time. The foundation of this work is the observation that the sky changes rapidly, said Million during the press conference in Austin, Texas.

While large flares are easier to record, smaller flares have also been seen and theyre predicted to occur more frequently. Its these smaller flares that Million and his colleagues are looking to identify, thanks to the remarkably high precision (5 thousandths of a second) of the data taken by GALEX. Finding these rapid flares is now possible with the help of gPhoton, which allows astronomers to unlock that very short time domain data and study very fast variables with archival data, he said.

The gPhoton database is now a trillion photons strong and 1.2 terabytes in size. Its currently comprised of 10,000 m-dwarf stars with known distances, and each star has its own light curve (a measurement of the amount of light it emits over time). From these light curves, the team has already identified 100 to 200 small flares, each about a minute in length, at energies that havent really been measured before, said Million.

And these flares could have serious implications for planets around these cool stars. Habitable planets are closer to cooler stars and cooler stars, we know, have a lot of these flares Even though small flares are small, because the planets are closer, they will have more of an impact on the habitability of those planets.

As Scott Fleming of the Space Telescope Science Institute explained in an accompanying press release, What if planets are constantly bathed by these smaller, but still significant, flares? There could be a cumulative effect.

Concluding his presentation, Million said, Im intentionally vague. This means something I really do not know. It may be that flares strip away the atmospheres and maybe that they irradiate the surfaces. Theres even a recent preprint where they say some amount of flare activity may be necessary for prebiotic chemistry. I dont know, but Im really excited to get this result out so that other people can tell me what it means.

Link:

Do stellar flares damage exoplanets? - Astronomy Magazine

The term gravitational lensing has become pretty commonplace. This effect, which occurs when light from a background object, such as a galaxy, is magnified and brightened when it encounters a massive gravitational field, say from a galaxy cluster, on its way to Earth. Gravitational lensing can make otherwise impossible-to-see objects visible, and offers a window into the very distant universe. It also turns out, gravitational lensing is responsible for many, if not all, of the brightest infrared galaxies we see in the sky.

James Lowenthal of Smith College made the announcement Tuesday afternoon at a press conference during the 230th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which is taking place in Austin, Texas. Lowenthal and his collaborators are interested in studying galaxies called ultra-luminous infrared galaxies, or ULIRGS, which are undergoing huge booms of star formation in the faraway universe. However, star formation produces dust as a natural result; because these galaxies are dusty, much of their optical light is hidden and reprocessed by the dust, which re-emits the light at longer wavelengths: the infrared. Understanding why these galaxies are undergoing such intense star formation is vital to creating a more complete picture of galaxy evolution over time.

Lowenthals group began with data taken by the Planck satellite, which was launched to map the cosmic microwave background left over from the Big Bang. But because the satellite observed the sky in infrared and submillimeter wavelengths, it was also able to spot bright infrared galaxies. From this data, Lowenthals team assembled a sample of 31 of the brightest sources some of the very brightest infrared galaxies in the universe, Lowenthal said during the press conference. These sources are star-forming galaxies that existed between 8 and 11.5 billion years ago, churning out stars at a rate 1,000 or more times that of the Milky Ways current star formation rate (about one solar mass per year). In fact, theyre so active that theyre not just ULIRGS, theyre 10 or 100 times the ULIRG threshold, said Lowenthal. They really are the most luminous objects that we know of.

They team followed up their sample by looking at data taken with the ESA's Herschel Space Observatory and the Very Large Array. Finally, they used the Large Millimeter Telescope to observe their galaxy sample to measure their distances.

But because observing in longer wavelengths reduces the resolution, or sharpness, of the data, the team was still missing information about the nature of these galaxies. In particular, it was still difficult to tell why they were forming stars at such high rates. So they next turned to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST); while ULIRG galaxies dont normally put out a lot of optical light because its obscured by dust, these galaxies are so extreme that they still emit enough for Hubble to pick it up.

Now, the first 11 of 31 have been imaged by HST, and the result is already astounding: These galaxies are all gravitationally lensed. They knocked our socks off, Lowenthal said. This has been a treasure box, a jewel box of cool new images. And one after another, you see gravitational lenses galore.

What does that mean? These galaxies are all made brighter and bigger by the presence of galaxy clusters containing huge amounts of mass between the ULIRG and Earth. At least eight of the images show Einstein rings, an artifact of lensing that can smear the distant galaxy into a circular shape as a result of the viewing geometry. Lowenthal likened it to looking at a candle through a wine glass held longwise. If the glass is tilted just right, the image of the candle will smear out into a circle.

We have added significantly to the total list of known gravitational lenses without even trying, Lowenthal said. We did not set out to find gravitational lenses. We set out to study distant, dusty starburst galaxies. But it turns out the brightest ones are all gravitationally lensed.

These lensed images also show dramatically more detail than images captured with other instruments. And despite the distorted images created by the lenses, Lowenthals team can use these new, clearer images to reconstruct the galaxies to, he said, unscramble the true shape and nature of the background galaxies. And we can do it with better precision than we could before.

This unprecedented detail will allow astronomers to peer deeper into the mechanisms responsible for these galaxies star formation on smaller scales within the galaxy itself, as small as 10 to 100 light-years across. Currently, there are two theories behind such huge bursts of star-forming activity in the distant universe: mergers between galaxies that excite material into forming stars, and cold gas flooding into galaxies from the intergalactic medium to feed star formation. In nearby galaxies, the former is responsible, but in these more distant galaxies, the question remains. The information needed to discern between the two ideas might be found inside these gravitationally lensed galaxies.

Lowenthal concluded the press conference by showing the attendees a sneak peek of the newest image, which hed received while at the conference. And, just as the others in his sample: Its another one, he said, as the image appeared on the screen to confirm it. Its another spectacular gravitational lens.

Originally posted here:

Gravitational lenses reveal the universe's brightest galaxies - Astronomy Magazine

Its a freezing January night, at 3200-meter above sea level, in southwest China. The wind sweeps across the mountaintop from east to west, reddening bare fingers in seconds. But looking at the stars above, youll easily forget where you are.

About 26 miles away from Lijiang, Yunnan, the Lijiang observatory is within a village called Gao Mei Gu. Gao Mei Gu means a place higher than the sky in the language of Naxi people, the only ethnic group in China that has maintained traditions of a matrilineal clan. While Lijiang is famous for its ancient city and tourism, Gao Mei Gu is famous for its starry sky.

Its the same starry sky that has attracted some businessman to drive across half of the country about 1200 miles just for an overnight camping every winter, tent and telescope in his BMW trunk. And its the same starry sky that stopped a female officer during a tour, laying herself down on the ground and staring at the heaven-like view despite the coldness. Many amateur astronomers and enthusiasts were also moved to tears by the starry sky.

The Lijiang Observatory hosts the most productive research optical telescope in China, the observatorys director, Jinming Bai, wrote in the preface of its 2016 annual report. The optical telescope hes referring to is the 2.4m telescope. About 30 percent of active galactic nuclei identified in the world were viewed at this telescope, as well as 10 percent of the supernovae, according to Liang Chang, the chief optical engineer at the Observatory. The 2.4m telescope was also used to look for high-redshift quasars, important celestial bodies for studying universes early days and the evolution of black holes. In a 2016 Astrophysical Journal article surveying 75 high redshift quasars, researchers were able to find 36 of them with the 2.4m telescope.

Some special features of the 2.4m telescope make such discoveries possible. For example, the telescope is capable of creating both spectrographs and visual images. Its 2.3-ton primary mirror is made from materials with near-zero thermal expansion, and the mirrors position can be auto-adjusted by air pressure for precise observation. On its Cassegrain focus, a fast instrument change system switches different instruments in less than 30 seconds, thus maximizing the telescopes observation time.

When I visit the control room during a winter night researchers on shift are observing astronomical bodies that might be supernovae. These supernovae candidates are not confirmed yet, explains a PhD student as he zooms in to show the redshift of star of interest. Because they are too close to the galaxies around them, its impossible to tell the supernovae and the galaxies apart not by direct imaging. The good news is that supernovae and galaxies have vastly different spectrograph presentations. So spectrographs collected by the 2.4m telescope will be used to disentangle these two groups of celestial bodies and to see if there are supernovae hiding insides their surrounding galaxies.

The perspectives of those young astronomers at the Lijiang Observatory are somewhat unique too. They conquer technical and financial difficulties with innovations, sacrificing family time and health by devoting themselves to this high altitude observatory in their 30s. Not only driven by an academic passion, they also have a sense of mission. They aspire to make Chinas astronomy research abreast with the worlds best.

Recently, a 12-meter Optical/Infrared Telescope has been listed as a key project of Chinas Thirteenth Five-Year Plan. The chief optical engineer, Chang, says while its ok for China to aim at building the next biggest telescopes, China needs more medium optical telescopes in the diameter range of 3-5 meters. It would mean lower investment and more scientific output. An 8-meter optical telescope in design, the Chinese Giant Solar Telescope, is expected to cost $90 million.

Yufeng Fan, engineer in chief of the Lijiang Observatory, agrees on the usefulness of optical telescopes with medium size. And Fan adds that the Lijiang observatory always looks forward to having more fresh blood to help with the teams research.

As we step out of the dome, clouds from the east have covered almost all stars, and the nights observation has to end. Its past 11pm and our guide Yuxin Xin is still energetic. Staying up late is an old habit of astronomers observing the sky at night, Xin says. On the drive back to downtown, we talk about his work, future of astronomy and unsolved mysteries. To him, he says, its really amazing that the extreme big and the extreme small of the universe are actually in the same form: Planets orbiting the sun is somewhat like electrons orbiting the nucleus.

I think of the image I saw on one of the monitors in the telescopes control room: two swirling distant galaxies in a long and slow process of merging together. Isnt that image somewhat similar to the image of two single-celled organisms merging into a multicellular one under the microscope? Not usually familiar to us lay people, those two images are both beauties at another scale, wonders in different corners of the world.

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An observatory higher than the sky | Astronomy.com - Astronomy Magazine

Universe Today

Summer Astronomy, Minimoon & Saturn Opposition 2017 Universe Today Summertime astronomy leaves observers with the perennial question: when to observe? Here in Florida, for example, true astronomical darkness does not occur until 10 PM; folks further north face an even more dire situation. In Alaska, the game in late ...

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Summer Astronomy, Minimoon & Saturn Opposition 2017 - Universe Today

This artists concept shows planet KELT-9b orbiting its host star, KELT-9. It is the hottest gas giant planet discovered so far. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A newly discovered Jupiter-like world is so hot, its being vaporized by its own star.

With a dayside temperature of more than 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit (4,600 Kelvin), KELT-9b is a planet that is hotter than most stars. But its blue A-type star, called KELT-9, is even hotter in fact, it is probably unraveling the planet through evaporation.

This is the hottest gas giant planet that has ever been discovered, said Scott Gaudi, astronomy professor at The Ohio State University in Columbus, who led a study on the topic. He worked on this study while on sabbatical at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. The unusual planet is described in the journal Nature and at a presentation at the American Astronomical Society summer meeting this week in Austin, Texas.

KELT-9b is 2.8 times more massive than Jupiter, but only half as dense. Scientists would expect the planet to have a smaller radius, but the extreme radiation from its host star has caused the planets atmosphere to puff up like a balloon.

Because the planet is tidally locked to its star as the moon is to Earth one side of the planet is always facing toward the star, and one side is in perpetual darkness. Molecules such as water, carbon dioxide and methane cant form on the dayside because it is bombarded by too much ultraviolet radiation. The properties of the nightside are still mysterious molecules may be able to form there, but probably only temporarily.

Its a planet by any of the typical definitions of mass, but its atmosphere is almost certainly unlike any other planet weve ever seen just because of the temperature of its dayside, Gaudi said.

The KELT-9 star is only 300 million years old, which is young in star time. It is more than twice as large, and nearly twice as hot, as our Sun. Given that the planets atmosphere is constantly blasted with high levels of ultraviolet radiation, the planet may even be shedding a tail of evaporated planetary material like a comet.

KELT-9 radiates so much ultraviolet radiation that it may completely evaporate the planet, said Keivan StasSun, a professor of physics and astronomy at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, who directed the study with Gaudi.

But this scenario assumes the star doesnt grow to engulf the planet first.

KELT-9 will swell to become a red giant star in a few hundred million years, said Stassun. The long-term prospects for life, or real estate for that matter, on KELT-9b are not looking good.

The planet is also unusual in that it orbits perpendicular to the spin axis of the star. That would be analogous to the planet orbiting perpendicular to the plane of our solar system. One year on this planet is less than two days.

KELT-9b is nowhere close to habitable, but Gaudi said theres a good reason to study worlds that are unlivable in the extreme.

As has been highlighted by the recent discoveries from the MEarth collaboration, the planet around Proxima Centauri, and the astonishing system discovered around TRAPPIST-1, the astronomical community is clearly focused on finding Earth-like planets around small, cooler stars like our Sun. They are easy targets and theres a lot that can be learned about potentially habitable planets orbiting very low-mass stars in general. On the other hand, because KELT-9bs host star is bigger and hotter than the Sun, it complements those efforts and provides a kind of touchstone for understanding how planetary systems form around hot, massive stars, Gaudi said.

The KELT-9b planet was found using one of the two telescopes called KELT, or Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope. In late May and early June 2016, astronomers using the KELT-North telescope at Winer Observatory in Arizona noticed a tiny drop in the stars brightness only about half of one percent which indicated that a planet may have passed in front of the star. The brightness dipped once every 1.5 days, which means the planet completes a yearly circuit around its star every 1.5 days.

Subsequent observations confirmed the signal to be due to a planet, and revealed it to be what astronomers call a hot Jupiter the kind of planet the KELT telescopes are designed to spot.

Astronomers at Ohio State, Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Vanderbilt jointly operate two KELTs (one each in the northern and southern hemispheres) to fill a large gap in the available technologies for finding exoplanets. Other telescopes are designed to look at very faint stars in much smaller sections of the sky, and at very high resolution. The KELTs, in contrast, look at millions of very bright stars at once, over broad sections of sky, and at low resolution.

This discovery is a testament to the discovery power of small telescopes, and the ability of citizen scientists to directly contribute to cutting-edge scientific research, said Joshua Pepper, astronomer and assistant professor of physics at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who built the two KELT telescopes.

The astronomers hope to take a closer look at KELT-9b with other telescopes including NASAs Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, and eventually the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in 2018. Observations with Hubble would enable them to see if the planet really does have a cometary tail, and allow them to determine how much longer that planet will survive its current hellish condition.

Thanks to this planets star-like heat, it is an exceptional target to observe at all wavelengths, from ultraviolet to infrared, in both transit and eclipse. Such observations will allow us to get as complete a view of its atmosphere as is possible for a planet outside our solar system, said Knicole Colon, paper co-author who was based at NASA Ames Research Center in Californias Silicon Valley during the time of this study.

Go here to read the rest:

Astronomers find planet hotter than most stars - Astronomy Now Online

06/07/2017

Blair Hearth, KD2EPA, of Oceanport, New Jersey, has joined the select group of individuals who have received Gold certification in the Radio Astronomy Observation program of the International Astronomical League for making at least 10 galactic observations. Hearth, who already had qualified for Silver certification, used the InfoAge Science History Museums TLM-18 dish for a few of his observations but most were accomplished by using Amateur Radio equipment to scan the void. A member of the Garden State Amateur Radio Association and the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers, Hearth in 2015 was the recipient of the ARRL Hudson Division Technical Achievement Award for his work in radio astronomy and RFI. As Hearth explains on his QRZ.com profile:

I use a low frequency receiver to collect data that indicates sudden ionospheric disturbances. My venerable Kenwood R-600 receiver is dedicated to receiving Jovian radiation at 20.1 MHz. I also monitor and count meteors via radio reflection using a NooElec 2 dongle, SDR# and HDRFFT software. I attempt observations of extra-solar radio objects in the 408 MHz band using GNU Radio, an excellent LNA and a DB8 bow-tie antenna.

Hearth said he uses the TLM-18 60-foot dish for research into the velocity of the sun with respect to the Local Standard of Rest. He also will take part in data-gathering during the August solar eclipse. Hearth will deliver a presentation, How to Use Ham radio Gear to Do Radio Astronomy, at the International Astronomical Leagues 2018 international meeting. He enjoys QRP operating and has a WSPR beacon on 20 meters.

Read more:

New Jersey Radio Amateur Receives International Astronomical League's Gold Certification - ARRL

Asteroid Apophis is going to have a close encounter with Earth in 2029 and astronomers arent the only ones preparing for the event.

20 students at MIT are designing a space mission to get close to the asteroid as it comes within about 21,770 miles (35,040km) from Earth. The mission will get more information on the asteroid, as well as measure the effects of Earth and other planetary bodies on it.

MIT faculty members Richard Binzel, professor of planetary sciences, and David Miller, the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, are advising the students as they design their missions.

The approaching asteroid is about 1,066 feet (325m) across and weighs 20 million metric tons. An asteroid passing this close to Earth is a rarity, so the students are working hard to get their calculations just right.

Binzel said in a press release that this project is the kick-starter that he hopes will encourage space agencies to study the asteroid.

There have been plenty of missions to comets and asteroids, so why is this unique? Binzel said. Apophis is coming so close that Earths gravity is going to tug and redirect its path. The Earth is going to give it a big thunk.

The proposed spacecraft would carry instruments to study Apophis shape, size, density, surface topography, rotation rate, and spin rate. The craft will have to launch by August 2026 to cross paths with the asteroid in March 2028, and then follow it until the missions end in 2033.

The students presented their work to NASA scientists and engineers, who asked direct questions that will help shape a future proposal for the mission. NASA Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson said the students made a really good effort and stated that the project is almost ready for a NASA proposal.

While China and the European Space Agency are both considering missions to Apophis, should this proposal remain in budget and successfully beat out other competition, theres a real chance it could be approved for an official NASA mission.

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MIT students propose Apophis asteroid mission | Astronomy.com - Astronomy Magazine

June 5, 2017 Artist's illustration of star KELT-9 and its super-heated planet KELT-9b. Credit: Robert Hurt / NASA/JPL-Caltech

Imagine a planet like Jupiter zipping around its host star every day and a half, superheated to temperatures hotter than most stars and sporting a giant, glowing gas tail like a comet.

That is what an international research team led by astronomers at Ohio State and Vanderbilt universities think they have found orbiting a massive star they have labeled KELT-9, located 650 light years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.

The discovery is described this week in a paper titled "A giant planet undergoing extreme-ultraviolet irradiation by its hot massive-star host" published by the journal Nature and in a presentation at the spring meeting of American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.

With a day-side temperature peaking at 4,600 Kelvin (more than 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit), the newly discovered exoplanet, designated KELT-9b, is hotter than most stars and only 1,200 Kelvin (about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than our own sun. In fact, the ultraviolet radiation from the star it orbits is so brutal that the planet may be literally evaporating away under the intense glare, producing a glowing gas tail.

The super-heated planet has other unusual features as well. For instance, it's a gas giant 2.8 times more massive than Jupiter but only half as dense, because the extreme radiation from its host star has caused its atmosphere to puff up like a balloon.

Because it is tidally locked to its staras the moon is to Earththe day side of the planet is perpetually bombarded by stellar radiation and, as a result, it is so hot that molecules such as water, carbon dioxide and methane can't form there.

"It's a planet by any of the typical definitions based on mass, but its atmosphere is almost certainly unlike any other planet we've ever seen just because of the temperature of its day side," said Scott Gaudi, professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University and one of the lead authors of the study.

The reason the exoplanet is so hot is because the star it orbits is more than twice as large and nearly twice as hot as our sun. "KELT-9 radiates so much ultraviolet radiation that it may completely evaporate the planet. Or, if gas giant planets like KELT-9b possess solid rocky cores as some theories suggest, the planet may be boiled down to a barren rock, like Mercury," said Keivan Stassun, Stevenson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt, who directed the study with Gaudi.

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On the other hand, the planet's orbit is extremely close to the star so if the star begins to expand it will engulf it. "KELT-9 will swell to become a red giant star in about a billion years," said Stassun. "The long-term prospects for life, or real estate for that matter, on KELT-9b are not looking good."

While Stassun and Gaudi spend a lot of time developing missions, such as the NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, designed to find habitable planets in other solar systems, the scientists said there's a good reason to study worlds that are unlivable in the extreme.

"The astronomical community is clearly focused on finding Earthlike planets around small, cooler stars like our sun. They are easy targets and there's a lot that can be learned about potentially habitable planets orbiting very low-mass stars in general. On the other hand, because KELT-9b's host star is bigger and hotter than the sun, it complements those efforts and provides a kind of touchstone for understanding how planetary systems form around hot, massive stars," Gaudi said.

Stassun added, "As we seek to develop a complete picture of the variety of other worlds out there, it's important to know not only how planets form and evolve, but also when and under what conditions they are destroyed."

How was the new planet found?

"We were pretty lucky to catch the planet while its orbit transits the face of the star," said co-author Karen Collins, a post-doctoral fellow at Vanderbilt. "Because of its extremely short period, near-polar orbit and the fact that its host star is oblate, rather than spherical, we calculate that orbital precession will carry the planet out of view in about 150 years, and it won't reappear for roughly three and a half millennia."

In 2014 astronomers spotted the exoplanet using one of two telescopes specially designed to detect planets orbiting bright starsone in the northern and one in the southern hemispherejointly operated by Ohio State, Vanderbilt and Lehigh universities. The instruments, "Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescopes" or KELTs, fill a large gap in the available technologies for finding extrasolar planets. They use mostly off-the-shelf technology to provide a low-cost means of planet hunting. Whereas a traditional astronomical telescope costs millions of dollars to build, the hardware for a KELT telescope runs less than $75,000. Where other telescopes are designed to look at very faint stars in small sections of the sky at very high resolution, KELTs look at millions of very bright stars at once, over broad sections of sky, at relatively low resolution.

"This result demonstrates that even 'extremely little' telescopes can play an important role in discovery," commented James Neff, astronomical sciences program director at the National Science Foundation, which partially funded the research.

Using the KELT-North telescope at Winer Observatory in Arizona, the astronomers noticed a tiny drop in the star's brightnessonly about half of one percentwhich indicated that a planet may have passed in front of it. The brightness dipped once every 1.5 days, which means the planet completes a "yearly" circuit around its star every 1.5 days. Subsequent observations confirmed that the signal was caused by a transiting planet and revealed that it was what astronomers call a "hot Jupiter"an ideal kind of planet for the KELT telescopes to spot.

The astronomers hope to take a closer look at KELT-9b with other telescopesincluding Spitzer, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and eventually the James Webb Space Telescope after it launches in 2018. Observations with HST would enable them to see if the planet really does have a cometary tail and allow them to estimate how much longer the planet will survive its current hellish condition.

Explore further: New 'styrofoam' planet provides tools in search for habitable planets

More information: B. Scott Gaudi et al, A giant planet undergoing extreme-ultraviolet irradiation by its hot massive-star host, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature22392

Journal reference: Nature

Provided by: Vanderbilt University

Fifth-graders making styrofoam solar system models may have the right idea. Researchers at Lehigh University have discovered a new planet orbiting a star 320 light years from Earth that has the density of styrofoam. This ...

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The risk is growing that Earth will be hit by an asteroid from a meteor stream known as the Taurids, Czech astronomers said on Tuesday.

In biology, "symbiosis" refers to two organisms that live close to and interact with one another. Astronomers have long studied a class of starscalled symbiotic starsthat co-exist in a similar way. Using data from NASA's ...

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I notice that there is not the usual mention of how this planet formed - could it be that at least some notion of honesty is being entered into by acknowledging that hot jupiters are simply inexplicable challenges for the nebular paradigm? No amount of forming elsewhere and then drifting inwards is going to account for the huge number of these enigmas discovered so far.

The planet's temperament is not dependent on the star's star temperature. From: http://www.svemir...Universe Planet.. Mass of Jupiter ..Temperature K ....Distance AU GQ Lupi b ................ 1-36 ...... 2650 100 ........ 100 ROXs 42Bb .................. 9 ..... 1,950-2,000 ....... 157 HD 106906 b ............... 11 ...... 1.800 ............... ~ 650 DH Tauri b ................... 12 ...... 2.750 ................. 330 CT Chamaeleontis b.10.5-17...2.500 ............... 440 HD 44627 ................. 13-14 ...... 1.600-2.400 ..... 275 1RXS 1609 b .............. 14 ........ 1.800 ................ 330 USCENT 108 b ........ 14 ........ 2.600 ................ 670 Oph 11 B ..................... 21 ........ 2.478 ................ 243

TrES-2b / Kepler-1b, ...... ... G0V, ...... 0.03556 AU, ... albedo (Ag) 0.0136; OGLE-TR-111 (b) ............ G or K, ... 0.047 AU, ...... .940 K; HD 40307 (b) ~ 5,000 K ... ..K2,5V, ... 0,0468 AU, .... ..804,5 K; etc. http://www.svemir...ncorrect

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Extreme exoplanet: Astronomers discover alien world hotter than ... - Phys.Org

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) may have solved the mystery of the coldest known object in the cosmos the Boomerang Nebula, a pre-planetary nebula produced by a dying red giant. The research is published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Composite image of the Boomerang Nebula: ALMA observations (orange) showing the hourglass-shaped outflow, which is embedded inside a roughly round ultra-cold outflow; the hourglass outflow stretches more than 1.9 trillion miles from end to end, and is the result of a jet that is being fired by the central star, sweeping up the inner regions of the ultra-cold outflow like a snow-plow; the ultra-cold outflow is about 10 times bigger. The ALMA data are shown on top of an image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (blue). Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / NASA / ESA / Hubble / AUI / NSF.

An ancient red giant has produced the Boomerang Nebula, the coldest object found in the Universe so far. How this star was able to create an environment strikingly colder than the natural background temperature of deep space has been a mystery for more than two decades.

According to astronomers using ALMA, the answer may be that a small companion star has plunged into the heart of the red giant, ejecting most the matter of the larger star as an ultra-cold outflow of gas and dust.

This outflow is expanding so rapidly that its temperature has fallen to less than half a degree Kelvin (minus 458.5 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 272.5 degrees Celsius).

The ALMA observations enabled the astronomers to unravel this mystery by providing the first precise calculations of the Boomerang Nebulas extent, age, mass, and kinetic energy.

These new data show us that most of the stellar envelope from the massive red giant star has been blasted out into space at speeds far beyond the capabilities of a single, red giant star, said lead author Dr. Raghvendra Sahai, an astronomer at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The only way to eject so much mass and at such extreme speeds is from the gravitational energy of two interacting stars, which would explain the puzzling properties of the ultra-cold outflow.

Such close companions may be responsible for the early and violent demise of most stars in the Universe.

The extreme properties of the Boomerang Nebula challenge the conventional ideas about such interactions and provide us with one of the best opportunities to test the physics of binary systems that contain a giant star, said co-author Prof. Wouter Vlemmings, an astronomer at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.

Also known as the Bow Tie Nebula and the Centaurus Bipolar Nebula, the Boomerang Nebula is located about 5,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus.

When the nebula was first observed in 1995, astronomers noted that it was absorbing the light of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the fossil light resulting from a time when the Universe was hot and dense, only 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

This radiation provides the natural background temperature of space only 2.725 degrees above absolute zero.

For the Boomerang Nebula to absorb that radiation, it had to be even colder than this lingering, dim energy that has been continually cooling for more than 13 billion years.

The new ALMA observations also produced an evocative image of the nebula, showing an hourglass-shaped outflow inside a roughly round ultra-cold outflow.

The hourglass outflow stretches more than 1.9 trillion miles (3 trillion km, or about 21,000 times the distance from the Sun to the Earth) from end to end, and is the result of a jet that is being fired by the central star, sweeping up the inner regions of the ultra-cold outflow like a snowplow.

The ultra-cold outflow is more than 10 times bigger. Traveling more than 335,540 mph (150 km/s), it took material at its outer edges approximately 3,500 years to reach these extreme distances after it was first ejected from the dying star.

These conditions, however, will not last long. Even now, the Boomerang Nebula is slowly warming.

We see this remarkable object at a very special, very short-lived period of its life, said co-author Dr. Lars-ke Nyman, an astronomer at the Joint ALMA Observatory in Santiago, Chile.

Its possible these super cosmic freezers are quite common in the Universe, but they can only maintain such extreme temperatures for a relatively short time.

_____

R. Sahai et al. 2017. The Coldest Place in the Universe: Probing the Ultra-cold Outflow and Dusty Disk in the Boomerang Nebula. ApJ 841, 110; doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/aa6d86

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ALMA Probes Boomerang Nebula, Universe's Coldest Known Object - Sci-News.com

Coincidences happen. Even in space.

Or, at least, when we look into space from Earth. The sky is big, and you can only see a few thousand stars by eye, so honestly without optical aid you dont see many that are super close together.

But part of the main function of a telescope is to gather light, collecting it like rain in a bucket. This makes fainter objects look brighter, so when you use a telescope much dimmer stars become visible; even a small one allows you to see millions. When you use something like Hubble, that number can get substantially larger. That makes the sky more crowded.

And its not just stars. Only a handful of galaxies are visible to the eye, but with even a small scope you can see hundreds. Hubble? Billions. Billions.

So if you look long enough, youre bound to see some overlap.

And that brings us to HD 107146 ... but, before we get to the coincidence, let me explain some fun stuff.

The star is relatively nearby, about 90 light-years from us. Its a solar analog, a star much like the Sun in mass, size and temperature. But theres a big difference: Its very young, just 100 million years old or so (the Sun is 45 times older than that).

Stars that young are sometimes surrounded by debris disks, material left over from their formation. And yup, HD 107146 has one as well. It was discovered in 2004, but the best image of it was made using Hubble in 2011:

The star is very bright, a million or more times brighter than the disk of material around it, so the astronomers who took the data (including my old friend Glenn Schneider) were clever: First they placed the star behind a metal occulting bar, literally a bar of metal inside the camera (my old camera, STIS!) that blocks the light from the core of the star. They also took multiple images, rotating the observatory between each observation; that helps reduce noise in the image. Finally, they also did exactly the same thing with another star that happens to be very similar to HD 107146 (but lacks the disk), and they subtracted those images from the ones of HD 107146, further reducing the light from the star.

That leaves an odd-looking image of the star, with the center blacked out from the occulting bar and lots of radial spikes from light scattered and diffracted by Hubbles optics. But it blocks the vast majority of the starlight, allowing the far fainter disk to appear. Thats the wide band of light circling the star.

This all, by itself, is really interesting! Better yet, the material is not so much a disk as it is a ring; that annulus is real, with less light closer to the star. The ring is huge, starting about 7 billion kilometers from the star and stretching out to well over 20 billion km. Neptunes orbit around the Sun is only about 5 billion km, so this ring is like our own Kuiper Belt, the region past Neptune populated by smaller icy bodies. (Pluto is likely the biggest of these objects).

Observations using the fantastic radio telescope array ALMA indicate this material may be small grains of dust, which youd expect if Pluto-sized objects formed out there and started smashing into one another and any planets forming there. The ALMA data also indicate the presence of a gap in the ring, too narrow to show up in the Hubble images, about a billion km wide, which may have been carved out by the presence of a newly formed planet there. If so, it would have several times Earths mass.

But theres more! And now we get to the fun coincidence.

See that blob to the lower right of the ring? Thats not a part of the ring, or even the star. Thats a galaxy, far, far in the background, likely hundreds of millions of light-years away. It was first seen in 2004, when the disk itself was discovered in a different set of Hubble observations:

By coincidence, the star happens to lie very nearly along our line of sight to the galaxy, so they appear very close in the sky despite their mind-crushingly different distances. Now take another look at the two images ...here, Ill put them side by side to make it easier for you:

Notice anything? The galaxy is closer to the star in the 2011 image than it was in 2004! Or more accurately, the star is closer to the galaxy. Thats because the star is moving across the sky!

Sure, the stars rise and set, so theres a daily (what astronomers call diurnal) motion. But stars also orbit the center of our galaxy at different speeds, and over time we can see that motion with powerful telescopes. They move relative to one another across the sky, which is proper motion. Its small, but higher for nearby stars due to perspective (just as nearby trees seem to whiz by you as you drive past them, but distant buildings or mountains seem to crawl).

HD 107146 has a decent proper motion, and over the seven or so years between Hubble observations, it moved southwest (to the lower right), bringing it closer to the galaxys position.

Extrapolating, the galaxy is already behind the ring right now. In a few more years (around 2020) itll be fully behind the ring. The ring, itself, is optically thin, which means light can pass through it, so well see the galaxy right through it. Itll look like a really bright blob in the ring. Its actually a good thing the galaxy was seen a few years ago; if the first observations were made in 2020, it couldve been confused for something happening in the ring itself, like a planetary collision!

Given the stars motion, the ring will be superposed on the galaxy for about a decade before the galaxy slips into the gap between the star and ring.

How cool is that? Answer: Pretty damn cool.

And useful. This is a unique geometry, with a galaxy behind a ring like this. While the ring is optically thin, its not transparent. Itll block some of the galaxys light, and that can be measured. Because we have images of the galaxy when it was well outside the thickest part of the ring, measuring how much light is blocked will give some insight into the ring particles physical properties. In fact, Glenn and his team have follow-up Hubble observations planned for the next few years to take advantage of this serendipitous situation.

One final bit. What do we call this event? When the Sun is blocked by the Moon, we call that a solar eclipse. When the Moon is blocked by the Earth, we call that a lunar eclipse. So I suppose that this event could be called a galactic eclipse.

I love that! It has a Flash Gordon-esque feel to it ... but, unfortunately, it wont work. In an eclipse, an object has its light source blocked by an intruding object, and the ring is lit by the star. The galaxy is literally millions of times of times farther away, so it cant block the starlight!

Another type of astronomical event like this is an occultation, when an object passes in front of another (its a more general term for eclipse, I suppose). But again, the ring is mostly transparent and isnt blocking the light from the galaxy (at least not all of it), so this doesnt fit, either.

I talked to Glenn about it, and he suggested calling it a transit, which is fair enough. Thats when one body passes in front of another, regardless of whether its opaque or not. That works, but dangit. I liked galactic eclipse. Oh, well. The Universe is under no compulsion to obey our etymological astronomical desires.

Still, whatever we call it, this is a fantastic chance to get a wholly new type of observation. I worked on observations of these kinds of disks using STIS back in the day, and I can remember when this field was brand spanking new. Something like this is amazing to me. Its an actual event where the stars align!

Science! I love this stuff.

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When the stars align ... well, one star with a hundred billion stars. - Blastr

Astronomy Festival Set for Black Canyon Park Kiowa County Press Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, in partnership with the Black Canyon Astronomical Society, will be celebrating the starlit skies of Western Colorado with their 8th annual Astronomy Festival June 21-24. Black Canyon was designated as an ... and more »

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Astronomy Festival Set for Black Canyon Park - Kiowa County Press

With the right apps installed, your phone becomes a powerful pocket toolkit for your astronomy hobby. Its GPS, compass and gyro sensors help to level and align your telescope, apps such as Astronomy Tools Night Sky provide cloud cover maps and more, and the Observer Pro-Astronomy Planner app indicates the best times to see particular objects.

The phone in your pocket is a veritable Swiss Army knife of functionality for both casual stargazers and serious astronomers. In this edition of Mobile Astronomy, we'll look at the ways your phone, when loaded with the right apps, can enhance your astronomy hobby as you plan your observing sessions, set up your telescope, record your observations and much more.

Your phone's usefulness for astronomy starts well before you pack up your telescope or cameras and leave the house. It can help you find and navigate to an observing site. It also lets you check the location's weather forecast to decide whether to make the drive.

When seeking a new dark observing site, I like to consult light pollution maps. The Dark Site Finder website uses a Google Maps interface overlaid with color-coded light pollution data. White, red and orange tones indicate extremely light-polluted areas that are poor for skywatching. Yellow means moderate light pollution, and green through black indicate the darkest skies. You can pan and zoom in and out on the map to find darker skies within a reasonable driving distance (or check the skies at your upcoming vacation spot). [A Planet Skywatching Guide for 2017: When, Where & How to See The Planets]

The Dark Site Finder website overlays worldwide light pollution data onto Google Maps. Red and white zones indicate skies with bad light pollution in urban areas while blues and grays indicate nearly pristine dark skies. The map can be zoomed and searched to find dark sky areas close to your location.

State and national parks are usually good bets for pristine skies, but you should check their after-dark policies for visitors. For privately held property, you must get permission from the owner (preferably during the daytime). They'll often be happy to host you and a few friends if you are quiet, leave the area as you found it and offer to show them a few objects.

If you are traveling to a remote location, be sure to file a "flight plan" with loved ones, and use your phone to confirm that you've arrived safely. Your stock Maps app will navigate you to a new observing site. But consider downloading the area as an offline map while you're still home, in case the cell coverage is spotty or nonexistent on-site.

Your usual weather forecasting app will tell you whether it's cloudy or clear, as well as the temperature and the chance of rain. But for observing, other factors are important, too. How steady will the air be? Rough air makes stars twinkle and blurs the view. Will the air be heavy with moisture and hazy, or dry and transparent? Will your telescope or camera become coated with dew?

The free Clear Outside app for Android and iOS provides nearly everything a skywatcher will need to know about the observing conditions. In a graphical format, it shows predicted hourly cloud-cover values, visibility (i.e., sky transparency), and the likelihood of fog, rain, wind and frost. It indicates when the sky will be fully dark after sunset and before sunrise, the contribution of moonlight, and even when the International Space Station will fly overhead!

Other favorites the free Clear Sky Droid app for Android and iCSC: Clear Sky Chart Viewer app for iOS use the popular Clear Dark Sky website. Both let you select from a list of weather station sites throughout North America. They provide an hourly breakdown, in a graphical format, of the cloud cover, transparency, seeing, darkness, wind, humidity and temperature for the next 48 hours. Note that the information is based on future weather models that are updated only about twice per day, not in real time.

The Clear Dark Sky astronomy forecasting website, developed by Attilla Danko, provides at-a-glance indicators for sky quality (seeing, transparency, cloud cover and darkness) and observing conditions on the ground (wind, humidity and temperature) for the next 48 hours for hundreds of locations throughout North America. Mobile apps such as Clear Sky Droid and iCSC: Clear Sky Chart put the site's information in your pocket.

The free Astronomy Tools Night Sky app for Android does even more than weather. It details cloud cover, sends aurora and meteor shower alerts, includes built-in light pollution maps, describes moon position, and more. The paid Scope Nights: Astronomy Weather and Dark Sky Map for iOS analyzes the weather and rates the stargazing up to 10 nights in advance, issues alerts when conditions are great, and more. For real-time weather conditions, look at the NOAA Weather Radar app for Android and iOS. It provides animated satellite imagery of cloud cover and precipitation for most of the world.

Telescopes with equatorial mounts, and most motorized GoTo and tracking systems, need to be set up level and aligned with the Earth's polar axis. The better they are aligned, the more accurate the tracking and GoTos will be. Long-exposure astrophotographs will be sharper, too. Here's how your phone can help.

At night, the polestar (Polaris, or the North Star) can be used for alignment. But if you are setting up a tracking telescope to observe the sun or a nighttime scope before it's dark enough to see Polaris or if you are in the Southern Hemisphere, where there is no polestar to align on it helps to have a compass app handy. There are plenty of free ones. You need to set up based on true north, not magnetic north. The better compass apps will include what's called a declination correction for this.

To level the telescope tripod, install a bubble level app, and simply rest your phone on the eyepiece tray or another part of the mount. Find an app that levels in two directions simultaneously, such as a circular bubble level, and that buzzes when levelness is achieved so that you can adjust the tripod legs without needing to see the phone's display.

The polar (or right ascension) axis of equatorial mounts need to be tilted at the angle equal to your latitude on Earth. Pick a bubble level app such as Bubble for Android or Bubble Level for iPhone and iPad that has a digital readout of the tilt. Then, use it to check the angle of the telescope's tube, or the polar axis directly. (For mounts that have counterweight shafts, you can hold the phone against it. The shaft should be tilted at 90 degrees minus your latitude.)

Remember that your device's compass and gyroscope need to be calibrated properly. Bubble level apps have options to zero the reading when your phone is resting on a horizontal surface. Compass apps will have instructions to sweep your phone in a pattern that corrects the magnetic readings. Be sure to avoid standing near metal objects, such as your car, when doing this. Another good option is to check your phone's tilt and compass readings on a telescope that you know is already aligned, using the polestar.

Designed for hiking and other activities outdoors, the Polaris GPS Navigation App is also handy for astronomers for setting up and aligning a telescope. The app displays the position and time data from your device's GPS receiver, as well as the compass bearing.

Finally, computerized telescope mounts also need to know the correct time and observing location so that they can calculate where the stars are. Your phone's GPS sensor measures these, but there isn't always an easy way to access the values. I find that a good hiking or navigating app, such as DS Software's free Polaris GPS Navigation for Android, offers everything you'll need, including a compass. [June Full Moon 2017: How to See the Strawberry Minimoon]

In past editions of Mobile Astronomy, we've covered the many ways in which astronomy sky chart apps can help you identify things in the sky and locate particular objects. They also provide many details about these sights. Many astronomy enthusiasts like to keep a record, or observing log, of what they have seen over the years. Some chase down certain objects in order to earn observing certificates from astronomy clubs or societies, and some prefer to observe certain types of objects. (I like planetary nebulas!) There are also specific types of observations, such as variable star brightness estimates, that you can submit as a citizen scientist.

SkySafari 5, Night Sky Tools and other apps include additional functionality for creating observing lists. Set the app to the date and time you'll be observing, and use the search function to find the objects of interest. Alternatively, you might need to view a particular target in an observing certificate program. The app can show you the best time to see it.

To make an observing list in SkySafari 5, open the Search menu, scroll to the bottom and tap the Create New Observing List option. You'll be prompted for a name. Exit this menu, and select a celestial object by tapping it on the display. Tap the Info icon. (You can also do this by using the object's name in the search menu.) In the lower right of the information panel, tap the More icon. A dialog box will appear. Select Add to Observing List, and tap the list you created. Later, you can sort, edit and manage the objects in the list. You can also make multiple lists. There are also dozens of publicly available observing lists you can import from the Online Repository.

Traditionally, observations were recorded in a paper logbook. But your phone makes this far easier. You can log a description of an object using the voice recorder on your phone as you peer into the eyepiece. You can type into a note-taking app. Or, better yet, you can use an astronomy app with logging functionality.

For instance, you can log your observations of your observing-list objects in the SkySafari 5 app. In the object's information page, tap More and select Create New Observation. The app will launch a form where you can enter the date, time and location (some are autofilled), your notes, the equipment you used, and the seeing and transparency rating for the night. The Night Sky Tools app for Android provides similar functionalities, and even allows for filters or cameras.

The SkySafari 5 app includes functions to create observing lists and log observations, including the date, time, location, equipment used and sky conditions.

Finally, the Observer Pro Astronomy Planner for iOS app lets you plan your sessions, make observing lists and log observations. It even lets you map the horizon profile of your observing site to determine when objects will be visible for example, high enough to clear the neighbor's garage roof all for about $10.

Telescope owners find it helpful to know the magnifications and fields of view produced by their various eyepieces. A good tip is to calculate the values and save them in a document on the phone. Or, use an app designed just for that! The AstroAid app for iOS lets you select from preloaded commercial telescopes, eyepieces and accessories. Then, it can calculate all of the values, and even generate previews for many of the major deep-sky objects.

The AstroAid app for iOS allows you to select from a list of provided telescopes and eyepieces that match your own setup. It then generates observing previews of major deep sky targets to assist in planning your observing or astrophotography session. It can also help you decide what equipment to buy because you can experiment with different combinations of apertures, focal lengths and other parameters.

Everyone approaches astronomy their own way. When I'm not chatting with folks, I like to listen to music when I observe, and my smartphone is loaded with plenty of inspiring tracks for that. If you do the same, be sure you aren't bothering your fellow observers or disturbing sleepers in the middle of the night. For safety, avoid using earbuds when observing alone in an unfamiliar place.

You don't need to be an expert astrophotographer to capture a memento of your night under the stars. In How to Snap Awesome Photos of Night-Sky Objects with Your Smartphone, we covered how to capture images of astronomical targets using your phone. Astronomy outreach and education events are perfect opportunities to engage students and the public in astronomy by sharing their excitement and images on social media. And, hey, why not tweet or text an invitation to your next observing session? We'd love to join you!

If you have found other ways to use your phone for astronomy, feel free to send me a note or share them in the comments. In a future edition of Mobile Astronomy, we'll cover how to wirelessly control your telescope with your phone, highlight some early summer celestial treats, and more. Until then, keep looking up!

Editor's note: Chris Vaughan is an astronomy public outreach and education specialist, and operator of the historic 1.88-meter David Dunlap Observatory telescope. You can reach him via email, and follow him on Twitter @astrogeoguy, as well as on Facebook and Tumblr.

This article was provided by Simulation Curriculum, the leader in space science curriculum solutions and the makers of the SkySafari app for Android and iOS. Follow SkySafari on Twitter @SkySafariAstro. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Turn Your Smartphone into an Astronomy Toolbox with Mobile Apps - Space.com

Our sun was still dim. Waves crashed on martian beaches. Life was emerging on Earth.

Thats when the ghosts of two dead stars black holes dozens of times more massive than our sun merged in a far-off corner of the universe. In their final moments, these binary black holes were circling each other hundreds of times per second, as each one spun at 10 times that rate.

The rumbles of distant thunder from that collision reached Earth on Jan. 4 of this year, passing through the detector at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Hanford, Washington. Then, traveling at the speed of light, this wrinkle in space-time passed through LIGOs second detector in Livingston, Louisiana, just a fraction of a second later.

The results were published Thursday in the journalPhysical Review Letters.

Gravity is the weakest among natures four fundamental forces. So only extreme cosmic events like supernovas, neutron stars and merging black holes can make detectable gravitational waves. The waves are so weak that theyd warp the distance between Earth and sun by just the width of a hydrogen atom. But as these waves pass through LIGOs twin detectors, its enormous lasers can pick up on the truly tiny stretches and squeezes of space-time. You can think of it like a seismometer for measuring mini quakes in the cosmos gravitational fabric.

When LIGO gets a hit, the gravitational wave makes a characteristic signal that scientists call a chirp because of the sound it makes once translated into a format human ears can hear.

This was the third such detection since Albert Einstein first predicted gravitational waves a century ago as part of his general theory of relativity, or theory of gravity. Taken together, these observations form the first samples of a black hole census with far-reaching implications.

Before colliding, the binary black holes spotted earlier this year weighed in at 19 and 31 times our suns mass. After merging, the pair created a single black hole 49 times more massive than the sun. Einsteins equations tell us that energy and mass are interchangeable. And so the missing solar mass worth of energy was radiated out across the universe as gravitational waves.

And with this detection, scientists for the first time think the two black holes might have been spinning in opposite directions. That could reveal clues about the lives of the stars that formed them. Its possible that the two stars lived in a dense stellar cluster.

Before LIGO, astronomers didnt know that so-called solar mass black holes, which form when stars die, could reach such extreme sizes.

This census can also help explain an enduring mystery in astronomy. Scientists have seen supermassive black holes that dominate entire galaxies, as well as small black holes that form after stars die. We even now know about so-called intermediate mass black holes weighing as much as thousands of suns. But how do these all form? Do many small black holes combine intro larger and larger behemoths? LIGO is just starting to piece together this puzzle.

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3rd gravitational wave detection is about much more than black holes - Astronomy Magazine

STORY WRITTEN FORCBS NEWS& USED WITH PERMISSION

Three billion years ago, in a third of a second, two black holes crashed into each other and merged into a single entity, converting two solar masses into energy that shook the fabric of spacetime, sending gravitational ripples across the universe that were detected on Earth last January, researchers announced Thursday.

It was the third confirmed detection of coalescing black holes detected so far by the U.S.-led Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, a project made up of two observing stations, one near Hanford, Washington, and the other 1,800 miles away near Livingston, Louisiana.

As the gravitational waves passed by, they caused space to lengthen in one direction and compress in the other, squeezing and stretching the LIGO detectors ever so slightly and causing laser beams to cover slightly different distances as they bounced back and forth between massive mirrors.

Exhaustive tests and analyses confirmed the reality of the signal in another milestone for the growing field of gravitational wave astronomy.

We have observed, on the fourth of January, 2017, another massive black hole-to-black hole binary coalescence, the merging of black holes roughly 20 and 30 times the mass of our sun, David Shoemaker, the spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, told reporters.

The key thing to take away from this third event is were really moving from novelty to new observational science, a new astronomy of gravitational waves.

The discovery was detailed in a paper accepted by the journal Physical Review Letters.

The ripples detected by LIGO indicate the single black hole formed by the merger has a mass of about 49 times that of the sun, midway between the black holes detected by LIGO in September and December 2015. Two times the mass of Earths sun was converted directly into energy in a fraction of a second.

Black holes are among the most bizarre objects in the known universe. They are believed to form when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel at the end of their lives. Without the outward pressure generated by nuclear fusion to offset the inward pull of gravity, the core suddenly collapses as the star is blown apart.

For stars similar to the sun, core collapse stops due to quantum mechanical effects and a white dwarf remains, a compact remnant that slowly radiates its residual heat away into space. The cores of more massive stars can collapse even further, crushed to the point where protons merge with electrons. The result is a city-size ball of neutrons with the density of an atomic nucleus.

The cores of even more massive stars can collapse past the neutron star state, disappearing from the observable universe. Their gravity is so strong not even light can escape.

A major question mark is how binary black hole systems like those observed by LIGO form.

One school of thought holds the binary black holes form when two already paired stars explode and collapse to the ultimate state, spiraling into each other in a cataclysmic crash. The spins of each pre-merger black hole likely would be aligned with respect to their orbital motion.

A second theory holds that black holes form separately and later became gravitationally bound. In that case, the spins would be more randomly oriented.

LIGOs latest discovery likely favors the theory that these two black holes formed separately in a dense stellar cluster, sank to the core of the cluster and then paired up rather than being formed together from the collapse of two already paired stars, said Laura Cadonati, a LIGO researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

This is an important clue in understanding how black holes form, she said. We have found a new tile to put in the puzzle of understanding the formation mechanism.

Gravitational waves were predicted in 1916 by Einsteins general theory of relativity. The equations showed that massive bodies under acceleration, like binary black holes or the collapsing cores of huge stars in supernova explosions, would radiate gravitational energy in the form of waves distorting the fabric of space.

The waves would spread out in all directions, traveling at or near the speed of light. But detecting them is a major challenge. By the time a wave from an event many light years away reaches Earth, its effects are vastly reduced, becoming hard-to-detect ripples rather than powerful waves.

To detect those ripples, the LIGO observatories were designed to measure changes in distance that are vastly smaller than the width of an atomic nucleus.

Gravitational waves are distortions in the metric of space, in the medium that we live in, said Michael Landry, director of the LIGO observatory near Hanford. Normally, we dont think of the nothing of space as having any properties at all, so its quite counter intuitive that it could expand or contract or vibrate.

But thats what Einsteins relatively tells us. When a gravitational wave passes, the medium that we live in is distorted, and that causes what looks to us like length changes.

By way of analogy, Landry likened spacetime to the canvas of a painting.

If I stretch the medium of a painting, I can see the painting get distorted, he said. Its the medium thats vibrating, thats really what a gravitational wave is, and so we register the passage of those gravitational waves by comparing the length of the two long arms of our L-shaped detector.

Each LIGO observatory features a pair of 2.5-mile-long vacuum tubes arranged in an L shape in which precisely tuned laser beams flash back and forth between multiple mirrors that effectively increase the distance each beam travels to nearly 1,000 miles. The laser beams then are recombined and directed into a sensor.

If the laser beam in each vacuum tube travels exactly the same distance before it is recombined, the LIGO detectors do not see anything. But if gravitational waves pass through, that distance would change very slightly in a very predictable way, affecting the path of the laser beams.

The resulting interference patterns allow scientists to compute the masses involved and, in some cases, how the initial black holes were spinning with respect to their orbital motion.

The LIGO system features two widely separated observing stations to make sure a local vibration is not misinterpreted. A confirmed gravitational wave must be seen by both stations at roughly the same time.

And thats precisely what the LIGO researchers found in the three confirmed cases to date. The first two events happened 1.3 and 1.4 billion light years away respectively. The collision that generated the waves detected in January occurred some 3 billion light years away.

It is remarkable that humans can put together a story, and test it, for such strange and extreme events that took place billions of years ago and billions of light-years distant from us, Shoemaker said in a statement.

LIGOs current observing campaign runs through the summer. After that, upgrades are planned to increase the sensitivity of the detectors, possibly bringing less powerful events like neutron star mergers into view. And theres always a chance a nearby supernova or merger might occur, one that would give space a major shake.

If one of this size were to actually coalesce in the Milky Way, it would make a marvelous signal for us, it would be enormously strong, said Shoemaker. But the likelihood theres one in our Milky Way thats about to coalesce is very, very low, so thats not something that were betting on.

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[ 3 June 2017 ] Black holes crash together and make waves News - Astronomy Now Online