A planet made entirely of diamond, prosaically known as PSR J1719-1438, has been discovered by an international team of astronomers led by Professor Matthew Bailes at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, and including researchers from Australia, Germany, Italy, the UK and the USA. The discovery was initially made using the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia; a radio telescope which will be well known to those who’ve seen the movie The Dish as a vital part of the network that received signals from the Apollo 11 mission, covering most of the moonwalk. The discovery was subsequently confirmed using telescopes in Hawaii and the UK. Continue reading →
Fig 1. Hubble True-Color Image of the Cigar Galaxy (M82)
When we gaze into the night sky, we typically see only the tiny white dots of stars surrounded by the vast blackness of an apparently-empty space, but in truth space has far more color and interest than our naked eye can reveal. One of the primary questions that students would ask me when I worked at Summers-Bausch Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, was “What is the magnification power of this telescope?” The answer was between a factor of 10 and 100, depending on which eyepiece was in use. What people need to understand is that a telescope is not a giant microscope turned upside down. The problem is not that the objects of interest in space are so small, but that they are so faint. Many of the nebulae and galaxies that we observe are nearly the same angular size as the Moon, but the telescope’s advantage is that it can gather a large quantity of light and funnel it right into your eye or onto film. Continue reading →
Are you experiencing a slowdown in the speed at which you download kittens that look like Hitler? It might be the Sun’s fault. (Not really, but I can’t think of a way to open this.) On Monday, the Sun shot off an X 2 flare aimed at Earth. Solar flares are large eruptions in the atmosphere of the Sun. The white spot in the center of the above photo supplied by NASA shows this particular flare. They follow an 11 year cycle between activity, and dormancy, and are currently ramping up to a peak in May of 2013. The cycle is a result of the Sun’s magnetic field reversing itself. Every 11 years, its north pole becomes its south pole, and vice versa.
Solar flares are measured according to a scale that starts with A, B, C, M, or X. A is the small end of the scale, while X is the large end. The largest flare ever recorded was an X 28, or the equivalent to a magnitude 25 earthquake back in 2003. X flares, if they are aimed at Earth, are the ones we need to worry about. While the smaller ones may either bounce harmlessly off our magnetic field, or cause aurorae, the larger M and X class flares could disrupt communications here on Earth. Satellites don’t like excess energy, and solar flares are a massive stream of protons that can destroy these things. Already, there are interruptions with radio communication being reported in southern China.
The flare kicked off on Monday, and took eight minutes to hit Earth, because it travels at the speed of light, However, with the larger flares comes something called a Coronal Mass Ejection, which takes several days to reach Earth. This is where the nasty stuff is. A CME back in 1989 knocked out power to 6 million people in Quebec for more than 9 hours.
The CME from this flare is expected to hit sometime today. While nobody is telling people to run to Arken’s fall-out shelter, they do expect some hiccups in communications systems over the next few days.
This video will show you what the solar flare looks like, and help you to understand that the Sun is one giant disco. The juicy stuff hits about 20 seconds in.
Astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette believe they may have discovered a new planet in our solar system. Nicknamed Tyche, the object is believed to be the size of four Jupiters, comprised of helium and hydrogen, and orbits our sun at a distance of 15,000AU (one AU, or Astronomical Unit, is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, 15,000AU is roughly 1/4th of a light year). This orbit puts it well within the boundaries of the Oort Cloud — a cloud of debris orbiting our sun with a radius of one light year — where long-term comets (those with an orbit greater than 200 years) originate.
Matese and Whitmire first proposed the existence of Tyche in 1999 as a result of studying the origins of long-term comets. It was discovered that their orbits originated in a cluster that was roughly the same angle from the ecliptic, or the path of the Sun through space. An object at least the size of Jupiter in the Oort cloud could explain the disruption of debris along this plane, which could in turn account for the pattern of mass extinctions on Earth.
In 1984, paleontologists David Raup and Jack Sepkoski found a pattern of mass extinctions in the fossil record dating back 250 million years. They discovered that every 26 million years, a mass extinction occurred. The lack of any Earth-based evidence of any sort of change led the team to believe that the cause was extra-terrestrial. The existence of Tyche could explain this pattern due to the orbit of Tyche disrupting Oort Cloud objects and send them towards the inner Solar System, thereby increasing Earth’s chances of an impact like the one that is believed to have killed the dinosaurs.
NASA’s WISE Telescope (Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer) may have already discovered Tyche. In April, the first batch of data from the telescope is set to be released. Matese and Whitmire think that it will reveal the existence of Tyche within two years. The object they are looking for is believed to have cloud bands much like Jupiter, and have a temperature of -73C, or five times warmer than Pluto. The heat would be left over from its formation, and would take longer to cool off due to its size.
If Tyche is found to exist, though, it would not add to the number of planets in our Solar System, as it most likely formed around another star and then captured by the Sun’s gravitational field. The International Astronomical Union would most likely create a new category for this planet.
