Exoplanets: Too interesting, though too far away

It's been a while since my last post. Been busy like everybody else. But that does not mean I will stop posting. 

During the past decade we have been hearing news about new planets being discovered. And these are newly discovered planets OUTSIDE of our own Solar System.  

Simply put, an Exoplanet or Extrasolar planet is any planet outside the solar system. Wikipedia states that " A total of 871 such planets (in 682 planetary systems, including 130 multiple planetary systems) have been identified as of April 20, 2013". Since the first discovery of the first exoplanet in 1992 by Radio astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan (Polish) and Dale Frail (Canadian), we as humans, specially the ones aware of this, has been reflecting about the possibility of alien life, our place in the cosmos, and where's God in this picture. It gives us this wonderful insight in the world of Astronomy and would make any amateur science supporter to pursue such a career path. 

The most famous extrasolar planet is probably Gliese 581c, because of its relative proximity (20 light years), Earth-like mass, and its location within the "habitable zone" of its star, a zone which could theoretically sustain life.

Gliese 581 c or Gl 581 c is a planet orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 581. Second planet discovered in the system and third in order from the star. It has a mass at least 5.6 times that of the Earth. Known as a super-Earth (a planet of 1 to 10 Earth masses). It was the smallest known extrasolar planet around a main-sequence star. On April 21, 2009, another planet orbiting Gliese 581, Gliese 581 e, was announced with an approximate mass of 1.9 Earth masses.

Here are some facts about Exoplanets:



Most Massive: HD 43848

Discovered in 2008, this exoplanet has a mass that is 25 times the mass of Jupiter. Orbiting around a star that is a just a bit smaller than our sun, HD43848 is nearly 8000 times as massive as Earth.



The Smallest: CoRoT-7b

This planet is less than twice the size of Earth, and its density is similar to Earth's. Discovered in February 2009, CoRoT-7b takes 20.4 hours to orbit a star that is slightly smaller, cooler and younger than our sun.



The Most likely to Have Life: Gl 581 e

Of the four planets that orbit the star called Gliese 581, two are near the edges of what astronomers called the habitable zone, where liquid water may exist. One of these planets is near the cool edge of the zone, but Gl 581 e, spotted in April 2009, is in a warmer spot.



The Biggest Radius: CT Cha b

This gas giant has a radius that is more than twice as large as our largest planet, Jupiter, and 17 times as massive.



The Hottest: WASP-18b

Although the data is still preliminary, this 2009 discovery may be the hottest, says University of Central Florida professor Joseph Harrington, stealing the title from another planet that Harrington calculated to be the hottest in 2007. This speedy planet, which is 10 times the size of Jupiter, hauls its mass around its star in less than an Earth day. But title of "hottest" may still be under contention—because it is so close to its star, WASP-18b is likely to spiral into it within the next million years.



The Most Eccentric Orbit: VB 10 b

A planet that orbits its star in a perfect circle would have an eccentricity designated as 0. The eccentricity of Earth's orbit is 0.0167—a very slight oval. The orbit of VB 10 b is the most elliptical orbit known—with an eccentricity of nearly 0.98, it is even more stretched out than the orbit of Haley's comet.



The Baby: Fomalhaut b

Only 25 light-years away, Fomalhaut is a neighbor of our sun. In 2005, astronomers discovered the exoplanet Fomalhaut b hiding amid the interstellar dust surrounding Fomalhaut. The presence of the dust means that the system is still very young and is likely to have more planets form within it—Fomalhaut b may be just the first-born. And just like a baby, this planet is crawling; it takes about 876 years to orbit its star.



The Farthest from its Star: UScoCTIO 108 b

This planet, which has 14 times the mass of Jupiter, spends its days at about 670 astronomical units—about 64 billion miles—away from its star. That's about 17 times farther away than dwarf planet Pluto is from our sun.



The Farthest from Earth: OGLE-05-390L b

At 21,450 light-years away, this is the farthest exoplanet scientists have found. It is five times the mass of the Earth and twice the distance from its star and it trundles slowly around, taking 3500 days to orbit.

Referrences:


http://groovychk.deviantart.com/art/Gliese-581c-133733307

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-was-the-first-extrasolar-planet-discovered.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_planet

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/deep/4335269

26 Awe-Inspiring Reminders Of Just How Insignificant We Are

Prepare to feel tiny:

Source: nasa.gov

Furthest ever image of the universe

Source: Mike Read (WFAU), UKIDSS/GPS and VVV / via: ph.ed.ac.uk

One Billion Stars in just one galaxy

Source: eso.org

The View 50 Million Light Years Away

Source: eos.unh.edu

A rocket launch over an aurora

Source: nasa.gov

A Not so dark Dark core

Source: nasa.gov

Coronal Hole on the Sun

Source: spaceflight.nasa.gov

European Panorama at night from the international space station

Source: nasa.gov

Enterprise flying over NYC

Source: nasa.gov

Groundhog day on Mars

Source: nasa.gov

Janus, one of Saturns creepy moons

Source: eso.org

Moon and the Milky Way

Source: Michael Shainblum

Milky way in all its Splendor

Source: nasa.gov

New view of the blue marble

Source: Stéphane Guisard / via: astrosurf.com

Orion over the Temple of Kukulkan

Source: nasa.gov

Overlapping galaxies

Source: 360cities.net

Panorama of Mars

Source: apod.nasa.gov

Saturn's Storms

Source: eso.org

The Pencil Nebula

Source: Adam Block / via: skycenter.arizona.edu

9 Billion Pixels of the Milky Way Galaxy

Source: sci.esa.int

The remains of supernova W44

Source: eso.org

The slow death of R Sculptoris

Source: eso.org

Thors helmet revisited

Source: Greg Scheiderer / via: seattleastronomy.com

Transit of Venus

Source: nasa.gov

Transit of Venus up close

Source: nasa.gov

UFO Galaxy

Source: nasa.gov

Twister on Mars





Reposted with permission from myscienceacademy.com

The Rockstar Scientist

A Science Lecture - Can you imagine one speaker speaking to thousands of  attendees?

I would like to imagine that we live in a world where:

1. Science documentaries are shown regularly in Movie theatres.
2. Science TV shows have more ratings than reality shows and other shows on national television. 
3. Schools and Universities concentrate in teaching Science and Math than any other school subject. 
4. Where the majority of people appreciate and wonder with awe about the Cosmos. 
5. Where Scientists are regarded as heroes and receives more popularity, wealth and recognition just like Movie persons and athletes. 

The last one is quite interesting. Do you remember any time in history that lectures are sold out and has lots of people attending? To be honest, I don't know one, maybe you know. 

Scientists, most of the time depends on money from the government or from research grants from private individuals or private companies (aside from savings in their salaries from their respective Universities and Research facilities) in providing that boost in their research in terms of equipment, hiring staffs, and building infrastructure. As far as I can tell, most of these intelligent minds are not rich, some are struggling, and some does not even care about the money. Nikola Tesla, one of the geniuses of the 20th century, even died a poor man.

Yuri Milner (right) with Mark Zuckerberg. Yuri is also a stock holder of  Facebook.

But that changed in 2012, when Yuri Milner, a former physicist and Internet enterpreneur, created the Milner Prize, formally known as the Fundamental Physics Prize in which winners gets a lucrative $3 million, more than the Nobel and Templeton Prizes combined. This would be a great boost for physicists in terms of using the money for further scientific research or for projects in popularizing physics, specially science. 

Based on the Michael Brooks article "Can millionaire physicists draw masses to science?" for the website www.newscientist.com:

"As he told New Scientist recently, Milner plans to use his wealth to paint scientists as heroes, turning them into household names and stimulating an increase in research funding and in the number of young people wanting to become scientists. "The more attention you attract to science, the better off everybody will be," he said."

"The three-million-dollar question is: will it work? Probably not. Rewarding scientists financially is easy. Turning them into household names is not so simple. As became clear during the ceremony (latest Fundamental Physics Prize ceremony), theoretical physicists make terrible celebrities."

The article also cited that physicists are "very human". They interact with students, pupils, co-workers, spectators - ordinary people. And for me, that seems to be the most noble of all traits - humility, which fame and fortune couldn't buy. 

So I guess, my perceived world where Science is pouplar and the people pursuing it are also popular might be impossible here or maybe in some other Universe, but we'll never know what's next for our dear intellectuals. 


Referrences:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_Physics_Prize

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23319-can-millionaire-physicists-draw-the-masses-to-science.html

Is there life outside of Earth?

Watching the film "E.T." and "My Stepmother is an Alien" when I was a kid gave me that idea. "War of the Worlds", "Independence Day", "Star Trek", "Aliens", "Paul", "Star Wars" and the various UFO conspiracies gave me a different viewpoint - the normal views on extraterrestrials. My re-ignited interest in Science and Astronomy, changed that view again. Is there really life elsewhere in the cosmos?

That, I think would be the greatest question being asked by millions of people, for thousands of years. Several documentaries has tackled these questions like Carl Sagans' "Cosmos", Morgan Freeman's "Through the Wormhole", and Stephen Hawking's "Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking".  Though sadly, I have not seen any other documentaries maybe some forgotten titles from National Geographic or Discovery channel but the ones mentioned are the one's I clearly remember.

I think, Science fiction and conspiracy theories greatly contributed to the "belief" that aliens exist, PLUS that these aliens are intelligent, has a very high level of technology, and most of all, almost all of them want to conquer the Earth! I trembled before of these ideas, but I suspended ... or ignored these after I became aware of what the real deal with aliens is.

Since our technology brought us to the moon in 1969, we have been gazing to the stars ever since. Some are active in searching for life using radio waves, and some are using high-tech mobile explorers in Mars to find evidence of life, and some are simply trying to observe life here - specially ones that could survive in extreme environments to determine if there is a possibility that complex biological lifeforms might survive elsewhere in the universe. 

Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno (1548 - 1600), first gave the idea that there are infinite worlds populated by intelligent beings. His controversial concept (in a time where anybody who gives an idea contrary to the religious teachings of the Catholic church would mean instant jailtime and possible execution) cost him his life. Other revolutionary thinkers tend to be discreet at that time, fearing for their lives in the process.

The invention of the telescope and the acceptance of the Copernican or the Heliocentric system (where the sun is at the center of the solar system and not earth) are the main ingredients that fueled astronomers to think further and try to answer that question. William Herschel, the person who discovered Uranus is even convinced that the Solar System, as well as other systems are well populated with alien life. 

William Herschel

Even this idea has been endeared with the religious establishment also. The Mormons believe that God has created Earth and all Earth-like planets for humans to live in. Though most mainstream religions does not believe that there are other worlds populated with alien-life as it is their belief that only the Earth is the only planet that was created by God for humans and that our species and life itself is unique in the cosmos. 

Basis for possible life in the Cosmos:

1. That the biochemical components of life which is mainly Carbon-based, is abundant in the Universe. All the elements that make up the human body - mainly Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen and Nitrogen are abundant in the Universe, based on observations of the chemistry of stars and galaxies. 

2. That every solar system in the universe has a Goldilocks zone or a Habitable zone - named after the famous story where Goldilocks tried the porridge which is "not too hot, and not too cold". It applies to a region in the solar system where a planet is in a zone where the temperatures is not too hot for water to easily evaporate and where it is not too cold to easily turn it into ice. In our solar system Earth and Mars are considered in this zone. 

3. There is this hypothesis called Panspermia, wherein life on Earth was created by the seeds of extraterrestrial material (meteors, comets) coming from outerspace or from other planets, such as Mars. 

4. Water - an essential component in mixing different chemicals to form simple lifeform, could be found in large quantities in the Solar System. 

5. Extremophiles - organisms that can survive extreme habitats (extreme cold or hot environments) has been discovered and found that these are capable of living in these environments which can simulate extreme environments in outer space. 

There are three major ways to detect extraterrestrial life:

Kepler Space Telescope

1. Kepler Spacecraft - already in space scanning the skies for planets, specially those in the Goldilocks zone. 

SETI Farm

2. SETI - Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Uses an array of satellite dishes scanning for radio signals from outer space. 

Curiosity Rover in Mars

3. Robotic Exploration of the Solar System - Either in the form of a space probe (voyager 1 and 2 ) and robot explorers in other planets (notably Mars) like Curiosity. 

So it might take more than our lifetime to determine if aliens exist - even in its primitive simple form. But at least, when the time comes we can truly say.... We are not alone!


Referrence:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_life

Dark as Night

A simple question, really. But the answer is so complex, you won't believe that it is the reason. 

Ask anyone this question, and you'll get somehow the same answer. Why is it dark at night? Everybody or maybe, just maybe almost everybody will give you the same answer. 

"Because the Sun is not around, that's why it's dark."

"There is no Sun to shine down on Earth."

"Because it is night time! Duh!"

You might get a scientific form of an answer, maybe:

"Because we are in a position where we are facing away from the Sun." \

These answers actually, is far from the real cause why the night is dark.

This question stemmed from something called the Olber's paradox. www.deepastronomy.com states, 

"Simply stated, Olbers’ paradox says that if the universe is infinite and static, then at any given angle from the Earth the line of sight will end at the surface of a star. An infinitely old universe means that there has been plenty of time for the light from every star that has ever shined to reach our eyes. When we look up, there should be a star everywhere, in every piece of sky. Because of this, the sky at night should be just as bright as when the Sun is up."

From the 16th to the 19th centuries, it is believed that we are living in an infinite static or unchanging universe. There are no big bangs, no expansion, just an endless sea of stars and that really poses a problem to them at that time. 

The answer to this seemingly endless question lies with some of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century - That the Universe had a birthday and that same Universe is expanding. 

Simply put, because of this expansion, light from other stars, specially the distant ones does not have time to reach our eyes. And that the light that we see now, would not be able to illuminate the space between them since they are being stretched out. So in a sense, all the photons that was emitted since the beginning of time is being stretched out. 
All the light is there, all the photons are everywhere, our eyes are just not sensitive enough to see this. At least this is my point of view. 

To dig deeper, below is an excerpt from the book Cosmic Horizons: Astronomy at the Cutting Edge, edited by Steven Soter and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.*

The oldest and simplest astronomical observation tells us something profound about the universe. The sky is dark at night. It isn’t obvious why this should be so. If you stand in a small grove of trees and look toward the horizon, you can see patches of sky in the distance between the tree trunks. But if you stand in a large forest, your view is everywhere blocked by a “solid wall” of tree trunks. Extending the analogy to three dimensions, if the universe of stars is large enough, your line of sight should be blocked in every direction by a “solid wall” of stars. If you could magnify that view sufficiently, the sky would everywhere look something like the image on the left.

The entire sky would be about as bright, and as hot, as the surface of the Sun. The immense distance to the stars making up the “wall of light” would have no effect on the total amount of energy reaching us. We should be surrounded by a blazing oven of light. Instead the night sky is practically black. So where does the argument go wrong?

The German astronomer Johannes Kepler first posed this problem in 1610. He also suggested a solution: the universe of stars, he believed, extends only out to a finite distance; once your line of sight passes that boundary, it encounters only empty space. But how far is that boundary? Why is it there? And what lies beyond it?

Astronomers after Kepler proposed various solutions to the problem of the dark night sky, which came to be called Olbers’ Paradox. In 1823, the German astronomer Heinrich Olbers suggested that starlight is gradually absorbed while traveling through space, and this cuts off the light from any stars beyond a sufficiently great distance. But that doesn’t solve the problem, either. Any absorbing interstellar gas or dust would simply heat up until it reradiated all the starlight it absorbed, and the energy reaching us would be the same. By analogy, sprinkling the air in a hot oven with absorbing dust won’t cool it for very long.

So why is the night sky dark? The first scientifically reasonable answer was given in 1848 by the American poet and writer Edgar Allan Poe! He suggested that the universe is not old enough to fill the sky with light. The universe may be infinite in size, he thought, but there hasn’t been enough time since the universe began for starlight, traveling at the speed of light, to reach us from the farthest reaches of space.

Astronomers have concluded that the universe began some 12 to 15 billion years ago. That means we can only see the part of it that lies within 12 to 15 billion light-years from us. There may be an infinite number of stars beyond that cosmic horizon but we can’t see them because their light has not yet arrived. And the observable part of the universe contains too few stars to fill up the sky with light.

But that is not the whole solution to the paradox. Most stars, like the Sun, shine for a few billion years or so before they consume their nuclear fuel and grow dark. Dying stars spew gas and dust back into space, and this material gives birth to new generations of stars. But after enough generations, all the nuclear fuel in the universe is eventually exhausted, and the formation of luminous stars must come to an end. So even if the universe were infinitely old as well as infinitely large, it would not contain enough fuel to keep the stars shining forever and to fill up all of space with starlight. And so the night sky is dark.

References: 

http://www.deepastronomy.com/why-is-the-sky-dark-at-night.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox

http://www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl/web/essaybooks/cosmic/cs_paradox.html

* a publication of the New Press. © 2000 American Museum of Natural History.

What is Astrophysics?

Andromeda Galaxy

As defined by Wikipedia:

"Astrophysics (Greek: Astro - meaning "star", and Greek: physis – φύσις - meaning "nature") is the branch of astronomy that deals with the physics of the universe, including the physical properties of celestial objects, as well as their interactions and behavior."

Persons to remember:


Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310-250 BC) first gave the idea that the motions of the celestial bodies could be explained by assuming that the Earth and all the other planets in the Solar System orbited the Sun. It was deemed heretical at that time when most believed that the Earth is the center of the Universe.

Ptolemy (83-161 AD) Develops the Geocentric model of the Universe where the Earth is the center of everything.

Seleucus of Seleucia - Babylonian astronomer who is said to have proved the Sun-centered hypothesis through reasoning in the 2nd century BC. He used the phenomenon of tides to support that, which he correctly theorized to be caused by the attraction to the Moon and notes that the height of the tides depends on the Moon's position relative to the Sun.

Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) - wrote the Maqala fi daw al-qamar (On the Light of the Moon) some time before 1021. He concluded that it "emits light from those portions of its surface which the sun's light strikes."

Nicolaus Copernicus - in the 16th century, revived the Heliocentric idea that the Sun is the center of the Universe. 

Galileo Galilei - Discovered the four brightest moons of Jupiter in 1610, and documented their orbits about that planet, which contradicted the geocentric (earth-centered universe) doctrine of the Catholic Church of his time, and escaped serious punishment only by maintaining that his astronomy was a work of mathematics, not of natural philosophy (physics), and therefore purely abstract.



A Cornell University website explained the difference between Astronomy and Astrophysics in a simple way: 

"Technically speaking, astronomy is the science of measuring the positions and characteristics of heavenly bodies, and astrophysics is the application of physics to understand astronomy. However, nowadays, the two terms are more or less interchangeable since all astronomers use physics to understand their findings."

Image of the cosmic microwave background radiation

Wisegeek.org gives us some insight on what Astrophysicists do:

Astrophysicists are known for studying such phenomena as black holes, galaxies, superclusters, neutron stars, quasars, the Big Bang, dark matter and energy, cosmic strings, stellar evolution, the cosmic microwave background radiation, and many others. The cosmos is a good arena for studying pure physics because on such large scales, the particular type of element making up objects becomes less significant, and more general variables such as mass and velocity take primacy. Sometimes astrophysics is called "the study of the very large and the very small."


Well known Astrophysicists

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Neil DeGrasse Tyson - Neil deGrasse Tyson (born October 5, 1958) is an American astrophysicist and science communicator. He is currently the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and a Research Associate in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. 

Brian May

Brian May - Brian Harold May, CBE (born 19 July 1947) is an English musician and astrophysicist most widely known as the guitarist, songwriter and occasional singer of the rock band Queen. As a guitarist he uses his home-built guitar, "Red Special", and has composed hits such as "Tie Your Mother Down", "We Will Rock You" and "Fat Bottomed Girls". He was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005 for "services to the music industry and his charity work". May earned a PhD in astrophysics from Imperial College in 2007 and is currently the Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University. 

Alexei Filippenko

Alexei Filippenko - Alexei Vladimir Filippenko (born July 25, 1958, Oakland, California) is an American astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Filippenko received a Bachelor of Arts in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1979 and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology in 1984, where he was a Hertz Foundation Fellow. His research focuses on supernovae and active galaxies at optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared wavelengths. 

You can check out more astrophysicists by clicking the link in the reference section. 




References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophysics

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=30

http://www.wisegeek.org/what-is-astrophysics.htm

http://www.ranker.com/list/famous-male-astrophysicists/reference