Tag: star systems (page 1 of 5)

Desperately Seeking ET: Fermi’s Paradox Turns 65 ~ Part 2

May 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comIntroductionWhy is it so hard to find ET? After 50 years of searching, the SETI project has so far found nothing. In the latest development, on April 14, 2015 Penn State researchers announced that after searching through...

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High School students spots relic of ancient sun with super wide orbit

May 3, 2015 / / 0 Comments



Pulsars are types of neutron stars; the dead relics of massive stars. What sets pulsars apart from regular neutron stars is that they’re highly magnetized, and rotating at enormous speeds.

Excerpt from uncovercalifornia.com

A Pulsar with the widest orbit around a neutron star has been discovered by a team of high school students and the discovery has been confirmed by astronomers. High School students from many states who participated in NSF-funded educational outreach program have found the pulsar after analyzing data from Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT).

In a research paper accepted by the Astrophysical Journal, lead author Joe Swiggum, a graduate student in physics and astronomy at West Virginia University in Morgantown, said, “Pulsars are some of the most extreme objects in the universe. The students' discovery shows one of these objects in a really unique set of circumstances.”

The object has been codenamed PSR J1930-1852 by astronomers. It was discovered in 2012 by Cecilia McGough from Strasburg High School in Virginia and De'Shang Ray from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Baltimore, Maryland.

The discovery of a pulsar with extra wide orbit could help in understanding the concepts behind binary neutron star systems. Nearly 10 percent of known pulsars are in binary systems with most of them orbiting white dwarf companion stars. The Pulsar has been found with the widest separation from the other star in the binary neutron system.

During Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC) workshop in summer, students who are interested in analyzing survey data collected by Green Bank Telescope (GBT), spend weeks in checking data plots and searching for unique signatures of pulsars.

The Pulsar Search Collaboratory is a joint venture between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and West Virginia University which offers real research opportunity to students.

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Huge Alien Planet Bathes in the Light of Four Suns

April 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments



30 Ari with its newly discovered companion stars
Karen Teramura

Excerpt from nbcnews.com


Astronomers have spotted a fourth star in a planetary system called 30 Ari, bringing the number of known planet-harboring quadruple-sun systems to two. 

"Star systems come in myriad forms. There can be single stars, binary stars, triple stars, even quintuple star systems," study lead author Lewis Roberts, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. "It's amazing the way nature puts these things together." 

30 Ari lies 136 light-years from the sun in the constellation Aries. Astronomers discovered a giant planet in the system in 2009; the world is about 10 times more massive than Jupiter and orbits its primary star every 335 days. There's also a pair of stars that lie approximately 1,670 astronomical units away. (One AU is the distance between Earth and the sun — about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers).

The newfound star circles its companion once every 80 years, at a distance of just 22 AU, but it does not appear to affect the exoplanet's orbit despite such proximity. This is a surprising result that will require further observations to understand, researchers said. 

To a hypothetical observer cruising through the giant planet's atmosphere, the sky would appear to host one small sun and two bright stars visible in daylight. With a large enough telescope, one of the bright stars could be resolved into a binary pair. 

The discovery marks just the second time a planet has been identified in a four-star system. The first four-star planet, PH1b or Kepler-64b, was spotted in 2012 by citizen scientists using publicly available data from NASA's Kepler mission. 

Planets with multiple suns have become less of a novelty in recent years, as astronomers have found a number of real worlds that resemble Tatooine, Luke Skywalker's home planet in the Star Wars films. 

The research was published online this month in the Astronomical Journal.

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Why Luke Skywalker’s binary sunset may be real after all

March 30, 2015 / / 0 Comments






Excerpt from csmonitor.com

Researchers have found Jupiter-scale gas giants orbiting binary stars and estimate that Earth-like planets orbiting binary stars could be as numerous as rocky planets orbiting single-star systems.


For all the sci-fi charm of watching a pair of suns sink below a distant horizon on a planet in a galaxy far, far away, conventional wisdom has held that binary-star systems can't host Earth-scale rocky planets.

As the two stars orbit each other like square-dance partners swinging arm in arm, regular variations in their gravitational tug would disrupt planet formation at the relatively close distances where rocky planets tend to appear.

Not so fast, say two astrophysicists. They argue that only are Tatooine-like planets likely to be out there. They could be as numerous as rocky planets orbiting single-star systems – which is to say, there could be large number of them.

Building rocky planets in a binary system not only is possible, it's "not even that hard," says Scott Kenyon, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who along with University of Utah astrophysicist Benjamin Bromley performed the calculations.
Researchers have found Jupiter-scale gas giants orbiting binary stars and have estimated that such gas giants are likely to be as common in binary systems as they are in systems with a single star.
"If that's true, then Earth-like planets around binaries are just as common as Earth-like planets around single stars," Dr. Kenyon says. "If they're not common, that tells you something about how they form or how they interact with the star over billions of years."

The modeling study grew out of work the two researchers were undertaking to figure out how the dwarf planet Pluto and its largest moon Charon manage to share space with four smaller moons that orbit the two larger objects. 

Pluto and Charon form a binary system that early in its history saw the two objects graze each other to generate a ring of dust that would become the additional moons.

The gravity the surrounding dust felt as Pluto and Charon swung about their shared center of mass would vary with clock-like precision.

Conventional wisdom held that this variable tug would trigger collisions at speeds too fast to allow the dust and larger chunks to merge into ever larger objects.

Kenyon and Dr. Bromley found that, in fact, the velocities would be smaller than people thought – no greater than the speeds would be around a single central object, where velocities are slow enough to allow the debris to bump gently and merge to build ever-larger objects.

They recognized that binary stars hosting planets are essentially scaled-up versions of the Pluto-Charon system. So they applied their calculations to a hypothetical binary star system with a circumstellar disk of dust and debris.

"The modest jostling in these orbits is the same modest jostling you'd get around a single star," Kenyon says, allowing rocky inner planets to form.

As for the Jupiter- or Neptune-scale planets found around binary stars, they would have formed farther out and migrated in over time, the researchers say, since there is too little material within the inner reaches of a circumstellar disk to build giant planets.

The duo's calculations imply that as more planets are discovered orbiting binary stars, a rising number of Tatooines will be among them. 

Tatooine "was science fiction," Kenyon says. But "it's not so far from science reality."

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Exoplanet Imager Begins Hunt for Alien Worlds

March 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments


This infrared image shows the dust ring around the nearby star HR 4796A in the southern constellation of Centaurus.


Excerpt from news.discovery.com

By Ian O'Neill

A new instrument attached to one of the most powerful telescopes in the world has been switched on and acquired its ‘first light’ images of alien star systems and Saturn’s moon Titan.
The Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (or SPHIRES) instrument has been recently installed at the ESO’s Very Large Telescope’s already impressive suite of sophisticated instrumentation. The VLT is located in the ultra-dry high-altitude climes of the Atacama Desert in Chile.

In the observation above, an ‘Eye of Sauron‘-like dust ring surrounding the star HR 4796A in the southern constellation of Centaurus, a testament to the sheer power of the multiple technique SPHIRES will use to acquire precision views of directly-imaged exoplanets.

The biggest problem with trying to directly image a world orbiting close to its parent star is that of glare; stars are many magnitudes brighter that the reflected light from its orbiting exoplanet, so how the heck are you supposed to gain enough contrast between the bright star and exoplanet to resolve the two? The SPHIRES instrument is using a combination of three sophisticated techniques to remove a star’s glare and zero-in on its exoplanetary targets.

This infrared image of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, was one of the first produced by the SPHERE instrument soon after it was installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in May 2014.
ESO 
The first technique, known as adaptive optics, is employed by the VLT itself. By firing a laser into the Earth’s atmosphere during the observation, a gauge on the turbulence in the upper atmospheric gases can be measured and the effects of which can be removed from the imagery. Any blurriness caused by our thick atmosphere can be adjusted for.

Next up is a precision coronograph inside the instrument that blocks the light from the target star. By doing this, any glare can be removed and any exoplanet in orbit may be bright enough to spot.

But the third technique, which really teases out any exoplanet signal, is the detection of different polarizations of light from the star system. The polarization of infrared light being generated by the star and the infrared glow from the exoplanet are very subtle. SPHIRES can differentiate between the two, thereby further boosting the observation’s contrast.

“SPHERE is a very complex instrument. Thanks to the hard work of the many people who were involved in its design, construction and installation it has already exceeded our expectations. Wonderful!” said Jean-Luc Beuzit, of the Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble, France and Principal Investigator of SPHERE, in an ESO press release.

The speed and sheer power of SPHIRES will be an obvious boon to astronomers zooming in on distant exoplanets, aiding our understanding of these strange new worlds.


The star HR 7581 (Iota Sgr) was observed in SPHERE survey mode (parallel observation in the near infrared with the dual imaging camera and the integral field spectrograph ). A very low mass star, more than 4000 times fainter that its parent star, was discovered orbiting Iota Sgr at a tiny separation of 0.24". This is a vital demonstration of the power of SPHERE to image faint objects very close to bright ones.
ESO

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Astronomers Find Massive Exoplanet With Four Parent Stars

March 6, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Artist rendering of the system 30 Ari with its exoplanet and four stars. Excerpt from techtimes.com By Dianne Depra  Researchers seeking to study the complexities of exoplanets with multiple stars have found a new system with four. Cal...

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New data that fundamental physics constants underlie life-enabling universe

January 19, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from spacedaily.com For nearly half a century, theoretical physicists have made a series of discoveries that certain constants in fundamental physics seem extraordinarily fine-tuned to allow for the emergence of a life-enabling universe.Thi...

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Stunning 3-D Models Reveal Bizarre Double Star Ready to Explode

January 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments


Picture of Eta Carinae star in the southern constellation of Carina
The supermassive star pair Eta Carinae erupted in the 1840s and produced this double-lobed cloud of dust called the Homunculus Nebula.

Excerpt from news.nationalgeographic.com

The star system Eta Carinae sends out the brightest flares yet recorded.

SEATTLE—Armed with a 3-D printer, a supercomputer, and several space telescopes, astronomers have gotten their best look yet at one of the galaxy's biggest, weirdest double star systems.

Surprising new observations of the system, known as Eta Carinae, described Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society's annual winter meeting, include a set of oddly bright flares that might signal a change in the two stars' billowing stellar winds. What's more, 3-D printed simulations show unexpected anatomy within the star system's churning, tempestuous center.

Scientists have kept a close eye on Eta Carinae since the 1840s, when a series of unexpected eruptions briefly transformed it into the brightest star in the southern sky. At any time, the unstable system could explode in a spectacular supernova. (Don't worry—Earth will be fine. But the light show will be unforgettable.)

The new observations don't pin down when Eta Carinae might explode, but they are helping astronomers better understand the turbulent pair.

"It's not only the most massive and luminous object that's close to us, but it's also extremely erratic," says astronomer Michael Corcoran of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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Exozodiacal Light Could Prevent Astronomers from Identifying Exo-planets

November 4, 2014 / / 0 Comments


Exozodiacal Light could Prevent Astronomers from identifying Exo-planets


Excerpt from
uncovermichigan.com 

Astronomers have revealed that their efforts to spot earth-like planets, also called as exo-planets, could be undermined by space dust and grit from asteroid collisions in addition to comet remnants. According to them, exozodiacal light, which is a light reflected from dust and grime of asteroids, could hide exo-planets and their alien suns.

The researchers put the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) located in Chile into use to detect the exozodical light from far away galaxies. Researchers compared the results with the data available from previous studies to produce a clearer, more complete picture. Habitable areas in nine alien star systems were probably surrounded by these light formations.

Zodiacal light can be seen from earth as a white glow in areas with completely dark skies. It seems to be emanating from the horizon around the sun. The best time to spot zodiacal light is usually before sunrise or right after sunset. According to experts, the white glow appears to be triangular in shape and it seems to emanate directly from the sun itself.

Sunlight reflecting off gas and dust surrounding the sun lead to creation of zodiacal light seen on earth’s skies. However, it was certainly the first time when the exozodiacal light was witnessed on alien solar systems, thanks to the VLTI telescope. 


Details of the study have been published online this week in the journal Nature Physics.

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Today’s Message from the Inner Workings of the Earth 5/20/12

May 22, 2012 / / 0 Comments

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Posted: 20 May 2012 05:57 PM PDT

Today we find ourselves basked in a great workload, where beings from many different star systems throughout this universe are coming and going and assisting in their own ways make this a smoo...

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Message from the Galactic Federation of Light 5/19/12

May 21, 2012 / / 0 Comments

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Posted: 19 May 2012 07:03 PM PDT

Allow each successive leadership role to come naturally and come often to you, as there are many tasks needed to be accomplished and many leaders needed to step up and take charge of these pro...

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Transcript of Our Galactic Family with Wes Annac, April 29, 2012

May 9, 2012 / / 0 Comments

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May 7

Posted by Wes Annac

Note from Wes: I’m still on this ‘vacation’ if one wishes to call it that, which is really just a resting and absorbing of the incredibly pure energies being given while ...

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MESSAGE FROM THE ARCTURIANS (15): ORCHESTRATION OF AWAKENING

April 19, 2012 / / 0 Comments

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18 April 2012

Channeler: Ute

Image by Ute Posegga-Rudel, Copyright ©2012

Watch on YouTube (recommended)

Dearest Ones, We are the Arcturians!

Today we wish to present to you a point of view about the ...

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