Tag: astronomy

Astronomers confirm existence of Earthlike exoplanet 21 light years away

12:22 pm

Worlds without end: Astronomers have confirmed the existence of a rocky Earthlike exoplanet only 21 light years away.

HD 219134b is also the closest exoplanet to Earth to be detected transiting, or crossing in front of, its star and, therefore, perfect for extensive research. “Transiting exoplanets are worth their weight in gold because they can be extensively characterized,” said Michael Werner, the project scientist for the Spitzer mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “This exoplanet will be one of the most studied for decades to come.”

The planet has a mass 4.5 times that of Earth, and orbits its sun every three days, which means it is not likely to harbor life. Its sun also harbors three other small exoplanets, but little is known of them.

Expect a lot more news coming from HD 219134b, however. With transits every three days, astronomers are going to have a lot of opportunities to study its atmosphere and make-up.

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Hawaii government not enforcing Mauna Kea emergency rule

9:28 am

Surprise, surprise! The emergency rule imposed by the Democratic governor of Hawaii at Mauna Kea, restricting access and forbidding camping, is not being enforced.

A week after Governor David Ige signed the rule into effect on July 14, signs informing the public were posted on along the Mauna Kea summit access road. Days later on Thursday, July 23, DLNR Conservation and Resource Enforcement officers started distributing what officials are calling educational handouts.

Cell-phone video taken by protesters, who say they’re standing in protection of the mountain as a sacred Native Hawaiian place, captured the first exchange. “We’re here just to serve you these papers, okay? And basically what you need to do is just to read them and understand that this is the emergency proclamation that went through,” a DOCARE officer explained.


DLNR officers have been back five times since then, but no citations or arrests have been made.

This is typical behavior when faced with liberal illegal protesters for most modern political leaders, especially Democrats. Even when they talk a good game, when it comes time to actually enforce the law, they chicken out. And until Governor Ige enforces the law, I do not see how construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope can resume.

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Astronomers confirm Kepler discovery of near twin of Earth

10:08 am

Worlds without end! In the release today of another set of Kepler data, astronomers have announced the discovery in that dataset of a new twin of Earth.

The newly discovered Kepler-452b is the smallest planet to date discovered orbiting in the habitable zone — the area around a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet — of a G2-type star, like our sun. The confirmation of Kepler-452b brings the total number of confirmed planets to 1,030. …

Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. While its mass and composition are not yet determined, previous research suggests that planets the size of Kepler-452b have a good chance of being rocky. While Kepler-452b is larger than Earth, its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer. The planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star Kepler-452 than Earth is from the Sun. Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger.

While this exoplanet is certainly not identical to Earth, it is close enough that the possibility of alien life — really alien life — could very likely exist upon it.

The dataset also included 11 other Earth twin candidate exoplanets that still need to be confirmed.

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Internet tycoon commits $100 million to alien life search

9:16 am

Russian internet entrepreneur Yuri Milner has given SETI $100 million for a ten year project to accelerate their effort to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Understanding why SETI needs private funding is important:

SETI has been going on since 1960, when radio telescopes became sensitive enough to detect signals from another planet if it was broadcasting signals similar to those which our civilization does. Researchers developed devices that could monitor millions of frequencies at once for any signal that looked at all different from that produced by astronomical objects or the natural background. At first funded by universities and NASA, public funding for SETI was axed by Congress in the early 1990s. Since then, the nonprofit SETI League has received funding of a few million dollars a year from private donors.

Congress correctly cut the funds because it isn’t really the business of the federal government to search for alien life. Some taxpayers really don’t want their money used for that purpose, and they should have the right to say no. Instead, Congress essentially told SETI to do it right: Get private funding from people who want the research done. The work will be done more efficiently for less, and no one will be required to contribute who doesn’t want to.

Milner’s contribution now is the biggest donation yet, and suggests that interest in this research is building culturally.

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Astronomers find exoplanet twin of Jupiter

4:03 pm

Worlds without end: Astronomers have discovered an exoplanet with the same mass as Jupiter orbiting its star in a very similar orbit.

Not only that, but:

The planet’s host, the solar twin HIP 11915, is not only similar in mass to the Sun, but is also about the same age. To further strengthen the similarities, the composition of the star is similar to the Sun’s. The chemical signature of our Sun may be partly marked by the presence of rocky planets in the Solar System, hinting at the possibility of rocky planets also around HIP 11915.

I immediately wonder if this star also has rocky inner planets.

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Road to Mauna Kea opened, with restrictions

9:59 am

The University of Hawaii has reopened the road to the summit of Mauna Kea, subject to the emergency restrictions imposed by Hawaii’s Board of Land and Natural Resources.

The visitors center remains closed, and access by the public is much more limited. However, with the road open to employees it means astronomy can resume on the mountain as well as construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope.

I fully expect some of the protesters to defy these restrictions and get arrested. Based on their behavior these past four months, they don’t have much respect either for the law, or for the sacredness of the mountain.

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Hawaii officials vote to limit access to Mauna Kea

6:08 pm

Hawaii’s Board of Land and Natural Resources voted 5 to 2 on Friday to restrict access to Mauna Kea.

The rule restricts being within a mile (1.6 kilometres) of the mountain’s access road during certain nighttime hours, unless in a moving vehicle, and prohibits camping gear. It would allow construction to resume on the $1.4 billion Thirty Meter Telescope, the subject of months of protests. Many Native Hawaiians consider the mountain sacred. Camping was already prohibited on the mountain. “We need the tools to keep order on the mountain,” said board member Chris Yuen. “It’s sad that it has come to this point.”

Not surprisingly, the leader of the protesters said they would ignore the rule and continue their overnight protests.

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The incivility and hostility of the Mauna Kea protesters

11:07 am

The management of Mauna Kea has released event logs by both their rangers [pdf] and the visitor center [pdf], outlining the generally hostile and illegal behavior of the TMT protesters during the past four months, including threats of violence against visiters and workers to the mountain.

The news story above does not really give the full flavor of the protesters’ generally rude and hostile behavior. They repeatedly threatened workers and visitors, damaged both existing facilities as well as the natural environment on which they camped illegally, and interfered with others who had come to the mountain to star-gaze or work. The logs also include numerous examples of the protesters exhibiting incredible ignorance about the astronomy on the mountain as well as the Thirty Meter Telescope itself. If you get the chance, read these logs yourself. They clarify for everyone which side stands on the side of civilization and which does not.

Finally there is this important tidbit:

From March 24, 2015 through present, groups of protesters, some up to nearly 200 persons, have sporadically been onsite on the University of Hawaii management lands and DLNR lands on Maunakea. A group of about 10 protesters has maintained a continuous presence day and night. [emphasis mine]

As is usual for protests like this, the actual numbers are miniscule, and are magnified by a press that wants to promote the protesters’ agenda, even though a very large majority does not agree with that agenda.

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A bullseye in space

11:18 am

Cool image time! The science team of the Swift space telescope has released a movie compiled from X-ray images taken of the first outburst from black hole V404 Cygni in 26 years. [link fixed!]

Astronomers say the rings result from an “echo” of X-ray light. The black hole’s flares emit X-rays in all directions. Dust layers reflect some of these X-rays back to us, but the light travels a longer distance and reaches us slightly later than light traveling a more direct path. The time delay creates the light echo, forming rings that expand with time.

Detailed analysis of the expanding rings shows that they all originate from a large flare that occurred on June 26 at 1:40 p.m. EDT. There are multiple rings because there are multiple reflecting dust layers between 4,000 and 7,000 light-years away from us. Regular monitoring of the rings and how they change as the eruption continues will allow astronomers to better understand their nature.

V404 Cygni is located about 8,000 light-years away. Every couple of decades the black hole fires up in an outburst of high-energy light. Its previous eruption ended in 1989.

The animation below the fold is a smaller resolution version of the movie, showing the rings as they expand outward.
» Read more

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Dance of the stars

8:51 am

Astronomers have found a stellar system made up of five stars, two binary systems orbiting each other, with a fifth star orbiting one of the stars in one of the binaries.

Co-author Dr Markus Lohr, from the Open University, told BBC News that these contact binaries were stars that orbit so closely they share an outer atmosphere. The other star pair – a detached binary – has a separation distance of some three million km. The two binaries orbit in the same plane at a distance of 21 billion km.

Follow-up observations of different wavelengths of light coming from the star system uncovered a fifth star, which is linked to the detached binary star. “This is a truly exotic star system. In principle there’s no reason why it couldn’t have planets in orbit around each of the pairs of stars. Any inhabitants would have a sky that would put the makers of Star Wars to shame,” Dr. Lohr said. “There could sometimes be no fewer than five Suns of different brightnesses lighting up the landscape.”

Dr. Lohr is being a bit extravagant. Though planets are a possibility here, I suspect it very unlikely that they are habitable.

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Astronomers propose giant super Hubble replacement

9:52 am

A major university consortium that manages many ground- and space-based telescopes has proposed that a new giant optical space telescope be built to replace Hubble.

A report published today by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C., lays out the rationale for another orbiting observatory. It will have a mirror as big as 12 meters across, to both look for habitable planets around other stars and peer deep into the early aeons of the universe.

Hubble has a mirror 2.4 meters across, so this would be significantly larger. In fact, if built this new space telescope would make it bigger than any ground-based telescope that exists today.

As the article notes, the cost over-runs and delays of the infrared James Webb Space Telescope — which went from a $1 billion budget to $8 billion — will likely make Congress reluctant to fund a new giant project like this. Nonetheless, this report gives us a hint of where the astronomy community wants to head in future decades. For the past two decades they have poo-pooed the construction of a new and larger optical space telescope. It appears from this report that this culture is now changing.

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TMT protesters complain about road closure

9:59 am

The leader of the protest that is opposing the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is now complaining about the road closure imposed by Hawaii’s government that is preventing him and his followers from returning to the mountain.

“The telescope employees have been able to access the mountain every single day to go up and come back down and even we as protectors of the mountain have been given daily access to conduct pule and religious practices on the mountain,” said Kahookahi Kanuha, a member of Ku Kia’i Mauna, which hopes to keep the telescope from being built. “So, if they do deem it unsafe, it is quite irresponsible of them to allow other individuals up the mountain.”

So let me get this straight: He thinks it is wrong for the people who own or lease the mountain — who have legal right to control access — to block the protesters, but he sees nothing wrong with him going there — trespassing — and blocking access to others. What a hypocrite.

This article proves that my analysis from Tuesday is correct. The government has shut the road mainly to quietly get the protesters out of the way and let things cool down. When construction resumes, I guarantee that road access will restricted to prevent the protesters from returning and blocking the road. (Update: The quotes here from the state’s attorney general provide even further confirmation that the state will not allow protests to obstruct future access to construction crews.)

One other note: The author of the first article above uses the typical dishonest mainstream media technique of only quoting one protester, the activist leader, while claiming that “protesters” are objecting. The data in the article, however, does not document this spin. As far as I can tell, the only one complaining about the road closure is this one guy.

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