AstroFest 2011

For 2 days each year at the start of February, the UK astronomy magazine "Astronomy Now" organises a national festival celebrating recent news in astronomy and bringing amateurs together to hone their skills. This year I was lucky to visit the conference on both Friday and Saturday and there were some excellent talks on Phobos and Deimos (Emily Baldwin), epsilon Aurigae (Nathalie Thureau), Uranus & Neptune (Chris Arridge) and the Moon (Chuck Wood) amongst several others. Sadly I missed the principal galactic astronomy talk by Gerry Gilmore of Cambridge University because session 4 (Saturday afternoon) was already sold out.

I also enjoyed the trade stalls in particular those of the BAA and Ian King Imaging/Shelyak Instruments, the latter a French company specialising in spectroscopes for amateur astronomers. I would love to buy their LISA instrument but the Star Analyser is more realistic for my budget/telescope!

Ian Ridpath during the Friday afternoon session interval

Nathalie Thureau describes the CHARA infra-red interferometer

"It's not Rocket Science", a very amusing space-themed comedy show by Helen Keen (Radio 4 in March/April)

Links

• AstroFest 2011 blog
  
• epsilon Aurigae press release at the University of St Andrews
  
• Uranus Pathfinder
  
• Helen Keen, writer & comedian
  

Saturn and family from Cassini

A selection of images which featured in the wonderful talk by Professor Carl Murray (Queen Mary University, London) at the SPA Autumn 2010 meeting. Prof Murray's research interests are in solar system dynamics and currently the dynamics of Saturn's mysterious F-ring. Since 1990 he is working on the Imaging Science Subsystem on the Cassini spacecraft which is currently orbiting Saturn.

PIA 08329: Backlit Saturn and Earth

Looking back towards the inner solar system from Saturn (a distance of 1400 million kilometres), this image shows Saturn's disc and rings backlit by the Sun. It is a sobering thought that the tiny pale blue dot visible in this colour-enhanced image, is our planet Earth! (Look inside the G ring and above the brighter main rings to the left of Saturn.)

PIA 13424: The colourful equator of Rhea

These colour-enhanced images show recent bluish material which was presumably deposited on Rhea's surface since the formation of the impact craters. The image size is 130km across, about the size of the home counties of South-East England.

PIA 11688: Bursting at the Seams

A superb view of the plumes near the south pole of Enceladus, taken when Cassini flew through the jets on November 21st, 2009. The jets emerge from the tiger stripes which may contain liquid water, despite Enceladus receiving only 1 per-cent of the sunlight that Earth receives.

PIA 12481: Reflection of sunlight off Titan lake

As the Sun sets on Titan, sunlight glints off a hydrocarbon lake in this infra-red image taken on July 8th, 2009.

PIA 11690: Global view of Iapetus dichotomy

About 40 per-cent of the surface of Iapetus is coated in a dark material, deposited on the leading hemisphere. This material is thought to originate on Phoebe and causes the icy surface to melt further due to decreased reflectivity, relative to the uncoated trailing hemisphere. Over a long timescale this reinforces the contrast to its present-day level. The irregularly-shaped moon Hyperion is also coated but its chaotic rotation means the coating is uniform.

Shapiro delay weighs super-heavy neutron star

Radio astronomers in the U.S. and the Netherlands have announced the accurate weighing of a neutron star-white dwarf binary, revealing the neutron star to be almost 50 per-cent heavier than most other neutron stars. Their results appeared yesterday in the scientific journal Nature.

Neutron stars are found in a variety of binary stars, which provides a means to determine their masses using Kepler's Laws -- possibly modified to tske into account relativity.

A much more accurate technique using the Shapiro Delay (named after Harvard Professor Irwin Shapiro) is possible for the double neutron stars in which one star is a radio pulsar. If the path of the radio pulse passes close to the companion star it will be delayed by a tiny amount, which is measurable with very accurate clocks on Earth. The technique can also be applied to white dwarf-pulsar systems with reduced accuracy due to the weaker gravitational field of a white dwarf star.

As an example, the famous binary known as PSR B1913+16 is made up of neutron stars with 1.441 and 1.387 times the mass of our Sun. Surprisingly, these kinds of stars often turn out to have masses very close to 1.4 times the Sun's mass. The new observation of 1.97+/-0.04 times the Sun's mass for J1614-2230 is all the more remarkable, and provides new clues to physicists studying the interiors of neutron stars.

Double neutron star systems are also unique laboratories for testing General Relativity. The first one to be discovered, PSR1913+16 won Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 2004 an international team including scientists at Manchester University in the UK discovered an even rarer double pulsar.

Links

Astronomy Now article by Keith Cooper.
Ars Technica news story.

An Exoplanet Menagerie!

On 9th October Dr Peter Wheatley (Warwick University) gave a super and wide-ranging talk on the topic of Extrasolar Planets at the FAS convention in Cambridge. He mentioned the 10cm Schmidt camera STARE which inspired the SuperWASP camera on the Canary Islands, which now has 8 200mm f/1.8 lenses and has discovered 26 exoplanets to date. SuperWASP uses the transit method which allows astronomers to weigh the planets and sometimes to determine their radii too, which together constrain theories for their internal structure. One of the current unsolved mysteries is how some hot Jupiters are so enlarged for their mass, more than can be explained by the super-heating received as the planet hovers over its parent star.

Another remarkable discovery is the planet HAT-P-7b which is in a retrograde orbit according to observations of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect. Although some moons in our solar system (notably Triton) orbit in the "wrong" direction, it's difficult to imagine how a planet can move against the flow of a rotating protoplanetary disk.

Dr Wheatley showed a chart showing all known exoplanets, grouped according to their size and the distance from their host star. I produced my own version below using data from the Extrasolar Planet Encyclopedia. It's remarkable that we know almost 500 exoplanets now; in 1999 I read "Planet Quest" by the renowned science writer Ken Croswell, at which time only 9 were known! With Kepler and SuperWASP-2 in development, the thousandth exoplanet discovery is just around the corner!

Links

The SuperWASP homepage

Postscript

I plotted Gliese 581g, a very recent discovery currently generating much excitement due to its position within the zone of habitability around its parent star, where liquid water and therefore Earth-like life may exist. It's the 6th planet found orbiting Gliese 581, a rather cool red dwarf star in Libra.

New impact discovered on Jupiter

Not so new as it actually happened a couple of months ago! The Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley who spends 6 hours per week observing Jupiter with his 14.5-inch telescope made the discovery on July 19th, almost exactly one year after the collision of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.

Follow-up observations with NASA's infra-red telescope on Hawaii and the newly upgraded Hubble Space Telescope confirmed that a collision had occurred, probably of an object around 1km across. As Glenn Orton of JPL commented, "We were extremely lucky to be seeing Jupiter at exactly the right time, the right side of Jupiter, to witness the event."

New research suggests that Jupiter interacts with cometary interlopers more often than previously thought, The captured comet typically orbits for years or even decades before crashing into Jupiter or being ejected by the strong gravitational field, Keep observing the giant planet for the next big event!

Link

Jupiter had brief encounter with icy companion

GLAST telescope in orbit

NASA's latest space-based observatory, the Gamma-Ray Large Area Telescope (GLAST), is now successfully in orbit around Earth at 565 kilometres altitude. Launched on Thursday 11th June 2008 by a Delta II rocket at 17:05pm BST (12:05 EST), it is currently undergoing tests to ensure all the instruments are working correctly.

It carries two main instruments: the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the Burst Monitor (GBM). The first instrument will be used to reconstruct images at very high energies (photons with up to 300 GeV which are radiated by the most energetic events in the Universe). The second instrument is used to detect short-lived sources such as the Gamma-Ray Bursts of which around 200 will be discovered annully (around the same rate as Swift, which is dedicated to discovering GRBs).

Links

GLAST
Swift

"Molecules of Life" around galactic hypergiant

Sub-millimetre observations of one of the most luminous red giant stars have recently revealed several simple molecules such as HCN, NaCl, and a phosphorus-containing radical PN. Similar molecules are known to exist in large quantities in molecular clouds such as the Orion nebula where they are protected from ultraviolet starlight by copious quantities of dust. An analogous shielding mechanism seems to occur in the atmosphere of evolved, red giant and supergiant stars, which have cool extended atmospheres at temperatures of a few thousand Kelvin.

The star VY Canis Majoris is an extreme example of the red supergiant family, with a luminosity of 500,000 times the Sun's and an estimated mass of 25 times that of the Sun. For comparison, the well-known red supergiant Betelgeuse has a luminosity of 15,000 times the Sun's and a mass of perhaps 10 solar masses.

Seventeen species have been found in the oxygen-rich environment, including CS, HCO+ and HNC as well as the sulphur-containing compounds SO and SO2. The shapes of the lines suggest that SiO dominates in a roughly spherical wind-like outflow, while SO and SO2 are abundant in the collimated jet-like outflows. VY CMa has a strong stellar wind, losing an entire solar mass of material every 5000 years.

The discovery was made with a new detector destined for the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA), an array of telescopes built in the Atacama desert in Chile for observing short-wave radio and sub-mm wavebands. It was fitted to the 10-metre dish at Arizona Radio Observatory for these measurements, and contains a superconducting-isolating-superconducting (SIS) receiver to achieve quantum-limited sensitivity levels. ALMA will operate in the range 30 to 1000 GHz (0.3 to 9.6 millimetres) and will be ideal for observing star formation and interstellar chemistry.

Links

AAVSO article on VY Canis Majoris