Monthly Archives: April 2014

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Beaver Lake Nature Center Hosts “Spring Constellations And Planet Observation” – TONIGHT, 24 April 2014

Posted on April 24, 2014 10:29 am - - Leave a Comment

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Clear but cool and slightly windy skies are the order of the evening for our Beaver Lake session tonight. We’ll be running the entire discussion from the central yard in front of the main building, starting the lecture near the setting of the Sun and driving the discussion of Constellations and planets as they appear to our dark-adapting eyes. Festivities start around 7:30 p.m.


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We will again be using the CNYO Brochures How The Night Sky Moves and Guide For New Observers to drive discussion (and will have plenty on hand).

Spring Constellations and Planet Observation

Thursday, April 24th, 7:30 p.m.

Age Range: There are no age requirements, but please be aware (and make children aware) that fragile and expensive observing equipment will be present.

Description: This outdoor lecture by CNY Observers will describe the history of the spring constellations and offer tips for remembering their relative positions. Jupiter, Saturn and Mars will also be visible on this moonless night, making for great views through the large telescopes that will be present. (Cloud date is May 1.)

Admission

$4 per car • $20 per bus
Free for Friends of Beaver Lake – Click here for membership information.

Free Admission for Veterans and Active Military for one vehicle/car.
Present military I.D., Onondaga County FAVOR card, discharge papers or another form of official military identification at the Front Desk.

Contact

8477 East Mud Lake Road
Baldwinsville, NY 13027
T: (315) 638-2519
BLNC@ongov.net

We hope you can join us!

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AAVSO Writer’s Bureau Digest For 22 April 2014

Posted on April 22, 2014 4:23 pm - - Leave a Comment

2013dec20_aavso_logoThe AAVSO Writer’s Bureau, hosted by the American Association of Variable Star Observers (www.aavso.org), is a selective aggregator of high-quality science content for the amateur astronomer. Several astronomy bloggers, science writers, and official astronomy publishers and organizations provide articles free-of-charge for redistribution through the AAVSO-WB. The five most recent Writer’s Bureau posts are presented below with direct links to the full articles on the author’s own website. CNYO thanks the authors and the AAVSO for making these articles available for free to all astronomy groups!

Starbirth in the Neighborhood

C.C. Petersen, The Spacewriter

2014april22__5_M83Galaxies are huge collections of stars, gas, dust, black holes, and planets. The Milky Way is a good example of a spiral galaxy. It also happens to have a bar of gas and dust and stars across its center, and many places where stars are being born. It turns that when astronomers look at other galaxies, particular spiral galaxies (and many colliding galaxies), they also see regions of starbirth.

Hubble Space Telescope has been astronomy’s “go to” machine in space when astronomers want to look at something like a distant galaxy. This Hubble image shows the pinwheel (spiral) galaxy M83, which lies in our southern hemisphere skies in the constellation Hydra. It’s about 15 million light-years away, and, as you can see here, is ablaze with starbirth regions spread across 50,000 light-years of space.

Read the full article at: thespacewriter.com/wp/2014/01/26/starbirth-in-the-neighborhood/

A Cosmic Bubble That’ll Soon Pop. Hard.

Phil Plait, slate.com

2014april22__4_jeffhusted_sharpless2_308Sometimes, I’m pretty happy our planet circles a relatively calm, normal star. Because when I look at stars like EZ Canis Majoris (aka WR 6, HR 2583, HD 50896, and other aliases), I think that things around here could be a lot less conducive for life.

Why? Because this:

Pretty, isn’t it? But the beauty belies a true monster.

This photo was taken by Jeff Husted, an astrophotographer who observers in the western US. It shows the star EZ CMa (for short), the star just left of center of that ethereal glowing bubble of gas. It’s what’s called a Wolf-Rayet star, one of the more terrifying beasts in the galaxy’s menagerie. It’s a star that started out life with more than 40 times the mass of the Sun, which made it super-hot and extraordinarily luminous. Stars like that can be hundreds of thousands of times as bright as the Sun! A planet orbiting it as close as the Earth to the Sun would be cooked to a vapor pretty rapidly.

Read the full article at: www.slate.com/blogs/…cosmic_bubble_from_a_galactic_monster.html

The Final Countdown Before a Supernova

Phil Plait, slate.com

2014april22__3_hst_sbw1I’m sometimes asked what I think the next exploding star in our galaxy will be. Most people expect I’ll say Betelgeuse, the red supergiant marking Orion’s right shoulder.

But Betelgeuse may not go supernova for another million years, which is a long, long time. There are several stars much closer to The End, and I recently learned of a new one: SBW1.

The star is a blue supergiant, a hot, energetic beast probably about 20 or so times the mass of the Sun. Stars like that don’t live long, just a few million years tops. But we know (we think) it’ll explode much sooner than that, because of that ring you see in the Hubble picture above. How does that ring tell us anything? Ah, glad you asked.

Read the full article at: www.slate.com/blogs/…/sbw1_a_star_on_the_verge_of_supernova.html

A Superluminous Supernova

CfA News, Harvard

2014april22__2_su201401Supernovae are the explosive deaths of massive stars. Among the most momentous events in the cosmos, they disburse into space all of the chemical elements that were produced inside their progenitor stars, including most of the elements essential for making planets and life. Astronomers have recognized for decades that there are several different kinds of supernovae, most fundamentally those that originate from a single massive star and those that develop when one member of a pair of binary stars becomes massive by feeding on its neighbor. Other factors like the stellar composition also come into account. Sorting out all these various complications is critical if astronomers want to be able to reliably classify any particular supernovae and thereby infer its intrinsic brightness, and then use its observed brightness as a measure of its distance.

Recent wide-field surveys searching for supernovae have found that the conventional schema for classifying supernovae may be even more complicated than previously thought. A few years ago a new class called superluminous supernovae was found, characterized by their emitting total radiated energies equal to about ten billion suns shining for a year. Some of these new objects were discovered at cosmological distances, helping to cement the notion that new types were being discovered, and further studies have found even more subdivisions, also based among other things on composition. These new superluminous supernovae can be identified and characterized by the particular way their light fades away after the brightness peak, driven in part by the radioactive decay of elements manufactured in the explosions.

Read the full article at: www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/su201401

New Cutoff For Star Sizes

John Bochanski, Sky & Telescope

2014april22__1_Brown_DwarfAstronomers have found a gap between “real” and “failed” stars.

What does the smallest star look like? This question is deceptively difficult to answer. Stars spend most of their lives fusing hydrogen in their cores, a prime time of life called the “main sequence.” As you go down the scale of stellar sizes on this sequence, stars become dimmer, cooler, and less massive. But determining the absolute properties of the smallest stars — their mass, radius, temperature, and overall light output — is challenging for at least three big reasons.

Read the full article at: www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/new-cutoff-for-star-sizes/

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NASA News – NASA’s Kepler Telescope Discovers First Earth-Size Planet in ‘Habitable Zone’

Posted on April 17, 2014 4:33 pm - - Leave a Comment

Greetings fellow astrophiles,

Certainly NASA news worth posting! The constellation Cygnus returns to prime viewing in late Spring through the Summer and we’ll hope to have Kepler-186 found for the big Dob’s by then. Meantime, the NASA News Press Release is reproduced in its entirety below.

RELEASE 14-111 – April 17, 2014

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Caption: Kepler-186f resides in the Kepler-186 system about 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. The system is also home to four inner planets, seen lined up in orbit around a host star that is half the size and mass of the sun. Image Credit: NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech

Using NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the “habitable zone” — the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet. The discovery of Kepler-186f confirms that planets the size of Earth exist in the habitable zone of stars other than our sun.

While planets have previously been found in the habitable zone, they are all at least 40 percent larger in size than Earth and understanding their makeup is challenging. Kepler-186f is more reminiscent of Earth.

“The discovery of Kepler-186f is a significant step toward finding worlds like our planet Earth,” said Paul Hertz, NASA’s Astrophysics Division director at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “Future NASA missions, like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the James Webb Space Telescope, will discover the nearest rocky exoplanets and determine their composition and atmospheric conditions, continuing humankind’s quest to find truly Earth-like worlds.”

Although the size of Kepler-186f is known, its mass and composition are not. Previous research, however, suggests that a planet the size of Kepler-186f is likely to be rocky.

“We know of just one planet where life exists — Earth. When we search for life outside our solar system we focus on finding planets with characteristics that mimic that of Earth,” said Elisa Quintana, research scientist at the SETI Institute at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and lead author of the paper published today in the journal Science. “Finding a habitable zone planet comparable to Earth in size is a major step forward.”

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Caption: The diagram compares the planets of our inner solar system to Kepler-186, a five-planet star system about 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. The five planets of Kepler-186 orbit an M dwarf, a star that is is half the size and mass of the sun. Image Credit: NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech

Kepler-186f resides in the Kepler-186 system, about 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. The system is also home to four companion planets, which orbit a star half the size and mass of our sun. The star is classified as an M dwarf, or red dwarf, a class of stars that makes up 70 percent of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

“M dwarfs are the most numerous stars,” said Quintana. “The first signs of other life in the galaxy may well come from planets orbiting an M dwarf.”

Kepler-186f orbits its star once every 130-days and receives one-third the energy from its star that Earth gets from the sun, placing it nearer the outer edge of the habitable zone. On the surface of Kepler-186f, the brightness of its star at high noon is only as bright as our sun appears to us about an hour before sunset.

“Being in the habitable zone does not mean we know this planet is habitable. The temperature on the planet is strongly dependent on what kind of atmosphere the planet has,” said Thomas Barclay, research scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute at Ames, and co-author of the paper. “Kepler-186f can be thought of as an Earth-cousin rather than an Earth-twin. It has many properties that resemble Earth.”

The four companion planets, Kepler-186b, Kepler-186c, Kepler-186d, and Kepler-186e, whiz around their sun every four, seven, 13, and 22 days, respectively, making them too hot for life as we know it. These four inner planets all measure less than 1.5 times the size of Earth.

The next steps in the search for distant life include looking for true Earth-twins — Earth-size planets orbiting within the habitable zone of a sun-like star — and measuring the their chemical compositions. The Kepler Space Telescope, which simultaneously and continuously measured the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, is NASA’s first mission capable of detecting Earth-size planets around stars like our sun.

Ames is responsible for Kepler’s ground system development, mission operations, and science data analysis. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes Kepler science data. Kepler is NASA’s 10th Discovery Mission and was funded by the agency’s Science Mission Directorate.

The SETI Institute is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to scientific research, education and public outreach. The mission of the SETI Institute is to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe.

For more information about the Kepler mission, visit: www.nasa.gov/kepler

-end-

J.D. Harrington
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-5241
j.d.harrington@nasa.gov

Michele Johnson
Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
650-604-4789
michele.johnson@nasa.gov

Karen Randall
SETI Institute
650 960-4537
krandall@seti.org

NASA news releases and other information are available automatically by sending an e-mail message with the subject line subscribe to hqnews-request@newsletters.nasa.gov. To unsubscribe from the list, send an e-mail message with the subject line unsubscribe to hqnews-request@newsletters.nasa.gov.

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NASA Space Place – The Power of the Sun’s Engines

Posted on April 17, 2014 4:04 pm - - Leave a Comment

Poster’s Note: One of the many under-appreciated aspects of NASA is the extent to which it publishes quality science content for children and Ph.D.’s alike. NASA Space Place has been providing general audience articles for quite some time that are freely available for download and republishing. Your tax dollars help promote science! The following article was provided for reprinting in April, 2014.

By Dr. Ethan Siegel

2013february2_spaceplaceHere on Earth, the sun provides us with the vast majority of our energy, striking the top of the atmosphere with up to 1,000 Watts of power per square meter, albeit highly dependent on the sunlight’s angle-of-incidence. But remember that the sun is a whopping 150 million kilometers away, and sends an equal amount of radiation in all directions; the Earth-facing direction is nothing special. Even considering sunspots, solar flares, and long-and-short term variations in solar irradiance, the sun’s energy output is always constant to about one-part-in-1,000. All told, our parent star consistently outputs an estimated 4 × 1026 Watts of power; one second of the sun’s emissions could power all the world’s energy needs for over 700,000 years.

That’s a literally astronomical amount of energy, and it comes about thanks to the hugeness of the sun. With a radius of 700,000 kilometers, it would take 109 Earths, lined up from end-to-end, just to go across the diameter of the sun once. Unlike our Earth, however, the sun is made up of around 70% hydrogen by mass, and it’s the individual protons — or the nuclei of hydrogen atoms — that fuse together, eventually becoming helium-4 and releasing a tremendous amount of energy. All told, for every four protons that wind up becoming helium-4, a tiny bit of mass — just 0.7% of the original amount — gets converted into energy by E=mc2, and that’s where the sun’s power originates.

You’d be correct in thinking that fusing ~4 × 1038 protons-per-second gives off a tremendous amount of energy, but remember that nuclear fusion occurs in a huge region of the sun: about the innermost quarter (in radius) is where 99% of it is actively taking place. So there might be 4 × 1026 Watts of power put out, but that’s spread out over 2.2 × 1025 cubic meters, meaning the sun’s energy output per-unit-volume is just 18 W / m3. Compare this to the average human being, whose basal metabolic rate is equivalent to around 100 Watts, yet takes up just 0.06 cubic meters of space. In other words, you emit 100 times as much energy-per-unit-volume as the sun! It’s only because the sun is so large and massive that its power is so great.

It’s this slow process, releasing huge amounts of energy per reaction over an incredibly large volume, that has powered life on our world throughout its entire history. It may not appear so impressive if you look at just a tiny region, but — at least for our sun — that huge size really adds up!

Check out these “10 Need-to-Know Things About the Sun”: solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Sun.

Kids can learn more about an intriguing solar mystery at NASA’s Space Place: spaceplace.nasa.gov/sun-corona.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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Caption: Composite of 25 images of the sun, showing solar outburst/activity over a 365 day period; NASA / Solar Dynamics Observatory / Atmospheric Imaging Assembly / S. Wiessinger; post-processing by E. Siegel.

About NASA Space Place

The goal of the NASA Space Place is “to inform, inspire, and involve children in the excitement of science, technology, and space exploration.” More information is available at their website: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/

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TACNY Junior Cafe Scientifique: “The Snowball Earth”

Posted on April 11, 2014 7:27 pm - - 1 Comment

NOTE: This Jr. Cafe lecture coincides with the Climate Day festivities at the MOST. CNYO members will be in attendance in the afternoon running a solar observing session on the Creekwalk (and I (Damian) will be giving a lecture on the Sun-Earth Connection inside). If you show up for the Jr. Cafe lecture, your entrance to the MOST is free for the afternoon courtesy of TACNY (and thanks for mentioning this extra perk Howie Hollander)!

Saturday – April 19, 9:30-11:00am

Milton J Rubenstein Museum of Science & Technology – Syracuse, NY


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Earth’s climate has changed tremendously over its history. Did you know that the Earth nearly froze solid 2.3 billion years ago and again 700 million years ago? We will discuss how this may have happened, how the Earth warmed after the snowball events and how life survived.

People interested in learning more about climatology are invited to attend the free Junior Cafe presentation on Saturday, April 19, from 9:30 a.m. to 11 a.m. at the Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science and Technology (MOST) in Syracuse’s Armory Square. Walk-ins are welcome, but we ask that people RSVP by emailing jrcafe@tacny.org by April 16, 2014.

Presenters

Christopher K. Junium, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences in the Department of Earth Sciences at Syracuse University. Chris studies how life and climate interact of through Earth’s history by analyzing the chemistry of ancient sediments. He is particularly interested in how the concentrations of oxygen have changed in the atmosphere and ocean over time, and how life responds to transitions in Earth’s climate state. His research spans the last 2.5 billion years of Earth’s history, and his research has taken him as far away as the Arctic Circle and as close as Green Lakes State Park. Recently, he spent two months as a scientist aboard the research vessel JOIDES Resolution to recover sediment cores from the Atlantic Ocean in an effort to better understand the causes of extremely warm climate 50 million years ago.

Chris received his B.S. in Geology from Dickinson College in 2000 and his Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University in Geosciences in 2010. From there he moved to Northwestern University under an Agouron Institute Geobiology Fellowship. He started at Syracuse University in January of 2012.

TACNY Junior Cafe Scientifique

TACNY Junior Cafe Scientifique, a program for middle-school students founded in 2005, features discussions about topics in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics in an informal atmosphere and seeks to encourage students to consider careers in these areas. Students must be accompanied by an adult and can explore the MOST at no cost after the event.

Technology Alliance of Central New York

Founded in 1903 as the Technology Club of Syracuse, the nonprofit Technology Alliance of Central New York’s mission is to facilitate community awareness, appreciation, and education of technology; and to collaborate with like-minded organizations across Central New York.

For more information about TACNY, visit www.tacny.org.

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