For those willing to stay up a bit late, I will be appearing on Coast to Coast tonight from midnight to 2 am (Pacific), talking about my book, The Universe in a Mirror, and history of the Hubble Space Telescope as it celebrates its 25th anniversary in orbit.
For the first time scientists have detected directly the reflected light coming from an exoplanet.
Astronomers using the HARPS planet-hunting machine at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile have made the first-ever direct detection of the spectrum of visible light reflected off an exoplanet. These observations also revealed new properties of this famous object, the first exoplanet ever discovered around a normal star: 51 Pegasi b. The result promises an exciting future for this technique, particularly with the advent of next generation instruments, such as ESPRESSO, on the VLT, and future telescopes, such as the E-ELT.
The uncertainty of science: The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted the explosion of a star that does not fit into any theory for stellar evolution.
The exploding star, which was seen in the constellation Eridanus, faded over two weeks — much too rapidly to qualify as a supernova. The outburst was also about ten times fainter than most supernovae, explosions that destroy some or all of a star. But it was about 100 times brighter than an ordinary nova, which is a type of surface explosion that leaves a star intact. “The combination of properties is puzzling,” says Mario Livio, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. “I thought about a number of possibilities, but each of them fails” to account for all characteristics of the outburst, he adds.
We can put this discovery on the bottom of a very long list of similar discoveries by Hubble, which this week is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its launch.
On that note, as part of that celebration Space.com today has published a long interview with me about Hubble and my book, The Universe in a Mirror, the saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the visionaries who built it. They have also published an excerpt from the book. Check both out.
The builders of the Thirty Meter Telescope have temporarily extended the suspension of construction originally demanded by Hawaii’s governor.
The tone of the article, especially the comments by the governor, suggests that the state is accepting the reality that they have no legal right to stop construction, and are making that fact very public. Instead, the govenor is now beginning the public relations campaign to make construction possible despite the protests, including negotiating some other givebacks to the protesters to shut them up. Sadly, those giveback appear to be the decommissioning of some other working telescopes as well as some increased restrictions on access to the mountain by the public.
A search for evidence of advanced civilizations in the WISE orbiting telescope database has come up mostly empty.
Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson proposed in the 1960s that advanced alien civilizations beyond Earth could be detected by the telltale evidence of their mid-infrared emissions. It was not until space-based telescopes like the WISE satellite that it became possible to make sensitive measurements of this radiation emitted by objects in space.
Roger Griffith, a postbaccalaureate researcher at Penn State and the lead author of the paper, scoured almost the entire catalog of the WISE satellite’s detections — nearly 100 million entries — for objects consistent with galaxies emitting too much mid-infrared radiation. He then individually examined and categorized around 100,000 of the most promising galaxy images. Wright reports, “We found about 50 galaxies that have unusually high levels of mid-infrared radiation. Our follow-up studies of those galaxies may reveal if the origin of their radiation results from natural astronomical processes, or if it could indicate the presence of a highly advanced civilization.”
Though the spin of the article is that no clear evidence of alien civilizations was found, I am most intrigued by those 50 candidate galaxies.
The official launch of construction of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) took place today in Chile.
Today, collaborators from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Chile’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Technológica (CONICYT) and several other international public-private partners will gather outside La Serena, Chile, for a traditional Chilean stone-laying ceremony to celebrate the construction launch of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).
They did the same kind of ceremony in Hawaii for the ground-breaking of the Thirty Meter Telescope, but things have gone very sour since. In Chile, however, I expect no problems. I wonder which local community has more sense.
The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have discovered that the type of supernovae they have used as a standard to measure the accelerating expansion of the universe, which also is evidence for the existence of dark energy, are actually made up of two different types.
The authors conclude that some of the reported acceleration of the universe can be explained by color differences between the two groups of supernovae, leaving less acceleration than initially reported. This would, in turn, require less dark energy than currently assumed. “We’re proposing that our data suggest there might be less dark energy than textbook knowledge, but we can’t put a number on it,” Milne said. “Until our paper, the two populations of supernovae were treated as the same population. To get that final answer, you need to do all that work again, separately for the red and for the blue population.”
The authors pointed out that more data have to be collected before scientists can understand the impact on current measures of dark energy.
It has always bothered me that the evidence for dark energy was based entirely on measurements of type 1a supernovae from extremely far away and billions of years ago. Not only was that a different time in the universe’s history when conditions could be different, our actual understanding of those supernovae themselves is very tenuous. We really do not have a full understanding of what causes them, or how they even happen. To then assume that these distant explosions are all so similar that their brightness can be used as a “standard” seems untrustworthy. From my perspective, the conclusions, though interesting, are being pushed based on extremely weak data.
The research at the link illustrates just how weak that data was.
Bowing to extortion: The governor of Hawaii has extended her stop order on the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope at Mauna Kea because of the protests of about 30 people.
I am sorry, but I remain very skeptical about the real motives of most of these protesters. In every previous example, the reasons for the protests always vanished as soon as the protesters got a deal and some cash for their trouble. I suspect this is what is going to happen this time as well.
They aren’t protecting their “sacred site” on Mauna Kea. They are using the sacredness of the site to extort cash and favors from the state and the telescope operation.
The uncertainty of science: Three new studies on the mystery of the origin of the Moon all appear to better confirm the theory that it was created when the Earth collided with a Mars-sized planet.
It is important to be aware of the uncertainties here. All these studies were done to try to address problems with the impact theory, and though they kind of answer the questions, they leave behind some important doubts.
Observations of the protoplanetary disk surrounding an infant star system have discovered the complex organic molecule methyl cyanide in what astronomers think will eventually be that system’s Oort cloud.
Want to help the Rosetta science team study Comet 67P/C-G? If you are an amateur astronomer, you can!
They are asking amateurs with larger telescopes to observe the comet as it makes its close approach to the Sun and report their observations. The science team will compare their observations with the amateurs. This will teach us how to interpret future comet events when seen from afar.
Bowing to the demands of about two dozen protesters, the governor of Hawaii has ordered a one week halt in the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea.
You can read statements from the governor, the protesters, and the telescope’s project manager here. Make sure especially you read the statement by the telescope manager, as it outlines in great detail the negotiations over the past seven years between the telescope and the local community. This project was not forced upon them. They discussed it and agreed to it. As the statement notes,
Following an appeal of the permit and further contested case proceedings, the TMT project has proceeded in full compliance with the law. The TMT site was selected with great care and respect. There are no archaeological shrines or burial sites within TMT’s project site. Comprehensive research by expert hydrologists confirm there is no threat to the aquifer.
This is the same story we’ve seen for the past half century with every telescope that has been built in territories where the local native population has some say in construction. Years of negotiation are ignored just as construction is about to begin by a small number of protesters demanding a halt. The protesters always claim a combination of religious and environmental concerns. In every case, these so-called passionate demands somehow vanish after they are promised some additional cash.
It would a terrible tragedy for Hawaii, and the human race, if this $1.4 billion telescope ends up getting canceled because of the complaints of a handful of people who to my mind are behaving like extortionists. It will also be unfortunate if the government bows to this extortion and rewards them for this behavior.
