Download Volume 20 Number 4 March 2012 - Forsyth Astronomical Society

THE YOUNG ASTRONOMERS NEWSLETTER
Volume 20
Number 4
STUDY + LEARN = POWER
OWER
March 2012
MOON’S FAR SIDE
BACTERIA FOUND IN DESERT
The GRAIL lunar spacecraft has returned its first view
of the far side of the Moon. GRAIL consists of two identical
spacecraft, named Ebb and Flow, each of which is
equipped with a MoonKAM - Moon Knowledge Acquired by
Middle school students.
The spacecraft were named by fourth graders at the
Emily Dickinson Elementary School in Bozeman, Mont., in
a nationwide student-naming contest.
Thousands of fourth-to-eighth-grade students will select
target areas on the lunar surface and send requests to the
GRAIL MoonKAM Mission Operations Center and photos
of the target areas will be sent back by satellite for
students to study. The MoonKAM program is led by Sally
Ride, America's first woman in space. See:
https://moonkam.ucsd.edu/
Scientists found bacteria and primitive micro-organisms
living six to ten feet below the surface of the Atacama
Desert in Chile.
The layer where the microbes live can attract the
limited moisture in the air, condensing it on the surface of
salt crystals and forming thin films of water. If there are
similar microbes on Mars, they could be detected with
instruments like those used in the research.
CHINA SPACE FLIGHT
China announced it will fly its next Shenzhou
spacecraft without a crew is against a tide of recent official
statements and general feelings within the spaceflight
community. It also represents an abrupt change in status
for China's human spaceflight program, which has been
moving forward with recent missions.
FASTEST BLACK HOLE WIND
ALIEN PLANETS
Astronomers have clocked the fastest wind yet
discovered - it is blowing off a disk around a large black
hole at about 20 million mph, or about 3 percent of the
speed of light. The wind speed matches some of the
fastest winds generated by supermassive black holes,
objects millions or billions of times more massive. Also,
this is nearly 10 times faster than any seen from a black
hole resulting from the collapse of an extremely massive
star (stellar-mass black hole).
To date, astronomers have discovered more than 700
planets beyond our solar system, with about 2,300 more
"candidates" awaiting confirmation. But now, scientists
have discovered a new type of alien planet — a steamy
waterworld that is larger than Earth but smaller than
Uranus. It orbits a red-dwarf star and has an estimated
surface temperature of 446 degrees Fahrenheit (230
degrees Celsius) — too hot to host life as we know it.
Alien planets are a diverse bunch. Astronomers have
found one planet as light and airy as Styrofoam and
another as dense as iron, and several alien worlds that
orbit two suns.
NEW JAPANESE MISSION
The Japanese are heading back into space on a
second attempt to collect samples from a nearby asteroid.
A Florida professor said that the asteroid selected, 1999
JU3 is a perfect specimen and should be rich in primitive
materials, specifically organic molecules and hydrated
minerals.
CARINA NEBULA
ESO's Very Large Telescope has delivered a detailed
infrared image of the Carina Nebula stellar nursery. Many
features in a spectacular landscape of gas, dust and young
stars, have emerged.
This cloud of glowing gas and dust is one of the closest
incubators of very massive stars to Earth and includes
several of the brightest and heaviest stars known. One of
them, the mysterious and highly unstable star Eta Carinae,
was the second brightest star in the entire night sky for
several years in the 1840s and is likely to explode as a
supernova. See:
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1208/
TEACHERS FLY WEIGHTLESS
More than 70 teachers experienced what it feels like to
float in space as they participated in the Reduced Gravity
Education Flight Program at NASA's Johnson Space
Center. They flew aboard an aircraft that flies parabolic
flight paths which create brief periods of weightlessness.
The teachers were selected through the Teaching from
Space and Explorer School Programs.
See: http://www.nasa.gov/education.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
FAS Free Public Observation – Stone Mt. on the 24th.
CLEANSPACE ONE
Earth's orbit is full of all kinds of floating debris - a
growing crowd of abandoned satellites, spent rocket
stages, bits of broken spacecraft, and fragments from
collisions - all rocketing around the planet at breathtaking
speeds.
To combat this scourge, the Swiss Space Center at
EPFL has announced the launch of CleanSpace One, a
project to develop and build the first installment of a family
of satellites specially designed to clean up space debris.
BLACK HOLE GRAZES ON ASTEROIDS
The giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way may
be vaporizing and devouring asteroids, and could cause
frequent flares. A cloud around ―Sagittarius a‖ contains
trillions of asteroids and comets stripped from their parent
stars. Passing within about 100 million miles of the black
hole they would be torn to pieces by the black hole’s tidal
forces.
MOON ACTIVITY
New images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance
Orbiter spacecraft show the Moon's crust is being
stretched, forming minute valleys in a few small areas on
the lunar surface. Scientists surmise this occurred less
than 50 million years ago. See: http://www.nasa.gov/
mission_pages/LRO/news/lunar-graben.html
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SCIWORKS – for information and planetarium
schedules call: 767-6730
The Sky Tonight? See - http://www.skymaps.com/downloads.html
and also http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/tonights_sky/
Astronomy Picture of The Day - http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
BUCKEYBALLS - Astronomers using Spitzer Space Telescope data, discovered buckyballs in a solid form in
space - the microscopic carbon spheres had been found only in gas form. Buckeyballs are made up of 60 carbon
molecules arranged into a hollow sphere, like a soccer ball. Their unusual structure makes them ideal candidates
for electrical and chemical applications on Earth, including superconducting materials, medicines, and armor.
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PUZZLES
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FIND THE WORD
H G I N F L O
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P E R A R R R
D E L A C G T
E I N E E H J
E C E T S E I
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J E I N O D S
C H A N T O A
O M E S K C A
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RECENT
SELECT
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SCRAMBLED ASTRONOMY
NORTHERN SKY
AXSTNTE __ __ __ __ __ __ __
SCHPEUE __ __ __ __ __ __ __
SIPPPU __ __ __ __ __ __
NCCREA __ __ __ __ __ __
CORDA
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(Answers below)
******
INTERNET SITES
******
 Kepler update -p://kepler.nasa.gov/news/mmu/index.cfm?fuseaction=ShowNews&NewsID=137
 Barred Spiral Galaxy - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16856812
 ISS views of U.S., Canada, and Northern Lights - http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov

SITE OF THE MONTH

CHANDRA PHOTO ALBUM - http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/index.html
******
MARCH MOON
******
Full Moon: 3/8 Last Quarter: 3/15 New Moon: 3/22 First Quarter: 3/30
Perigee: 3/10 5:03 AM 225,184 mi. (362399 km) Apogee: 3/26 2:05 AM 252,139 mi. (405779 km)
 This month's Full Moon was called The Crow Moon
 Best observing nights: 3/13 – 3/28
(the crows call farewell to Winter), and also The
 Daylight Savings Time begins on 3/11
Worm Moon (worms begin to come to the surface).
 3/20 is the first day of Spring
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PLANETS IN MARCH
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Venus and Jupiter are only 3° apart from the 11th to the 15th.
MARS is in the east 3/4 hour after sunset. On March 3rd, it is opposite the Sun as seen from Earth (opposition) and
at its brightest for 2012. Mars is in the morning sky until 1 1/2 hours before sunrise. It is at its closest distance from
Earth on the 5th – 62.6 million miles. JUPITER is in the southeast at dusk and moves to the southwest by dawn.
VENUS is to the upper left of the Sun before it sets and shines higher each evening in the southwest. SATURN is
in the southeast two hours after sunset on the 13th. MERCURY is 11 ° above the western horizon and sets 1 1/2
hours after sunset.
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METEOR SHOWERS
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NAME
DATES
BEST NIGHT
PER HOUR
WHERE TO LOOK
March has some weak southern showers and no major activity in the north. But this month is the best for seeing
―Zodiacal Light‖. It is the cone-shaped glow of meteoric dust that appears above the western horizon as twilight
fades to darkness, and when there is no or very little moonlight – the days before and after the 22nd..
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LOOK FOR: >>>>> Bright red Mars on the 5th at its closest. >>>>> Moon passing just north of Neptune
on the 20th and Jupiter on the 25th. >>>>> Super-bright Sirius is at its highest in the southwest, and then
look near the southern horizon as Canopus comes in to view. >>>>> In the northeast, the two end stars in
the Big Dipper’s bowl line up with Polaris, the North Star. Our North Pole points to it and the whole sky seems
to rotate around it.
55 CANCRI E
ANDROMEDA'S ODDITIES
Forty light years from Earth, "55 Cancri e" is a rocky
world circling perilously close to a stellar inferno.
Completing one orbit in only 18 hours, the alien planet is
26 times closer to its parent star than Mercury is to the
Sun. New observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope
suggest that the planet may be wetter and weirder than
anyone imagined.
55 Cancri e has a mass 7.8 times and a radius just
over twice that of Earth. Those properties place it in the
"super-Earth" class of exoplanets, only a few dozen of
which have been found.
Researchers think the planet's compounds likely exist
in a "supercritical" fluid state - a high-pressure, hightemperature state of matter best described as a liquidlike gas, and a marvelous solvent. Water becomes
supercritical in some steam turbines--and it tends to
dissolve the tips of the turbine blades.
Peering deep inside the hub of the Andromeda
galaxy, the Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a
large, rare population of hot, bright stars. Blue is typically
an indicator of hot, young stars but these stellar oddities
are aging, Sun-like stars that have prematurely cast off
their outer layers of material, exposing their extremely
blue-hot cores.
While Hubble has spied these ultra-blue stars before
in Andromeda, the new observation covers a much
broader area, revealing that these stellar misfits are
scattered throughout the galaxy's bustling center. As
these stars evolved, puffing up to become red giants,
they ejected most of their outer layers to expose their
blue-hot cores.
When normal Sun-like stars swell up to become red
giants, they lose much less material and therefore never
look as bright in the ultraviolet. It is likely that there are
many other similarly hot stars in this central part of
Andromeda at earlier stages of their lives. But such stars
are too dim for Hubble to see because they're mixed in
with a crowd of normal stars
CYGNUS X
The stars we see today weren't always as serene as
they appear - most stars, likely including the Sun, grew
up in cosmic turmoil. A new Spitzer image shows one of
the most active and turbulent regions of star birth in the
Cygnus X galaxy. It is home to thousands of massive
stars and many more stars around the size of the Sun or
smaller. We see bubbles carved out by massive stars,
pillars of new stars, dark filaments lined with stellar
embryos and more. Most stars are thought to form in
huge star-forming regions like Cygnus X. It's possible
that our sun was once packed tightly together with other,
more massive stars in a similarly chaotic, though less
extreme, region.
EARLY GALAXY CLUSTER
Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to
uncover a cluster of galaxies in the initial stages of
development, making it the most distant such grouping
ever observed in the early Universe. Five galaxies,
clustered together, are so distant that their light has
taken 13.1 billion years to reach us.
These galaxies are among the brightest galaxies at
that early stage of the Universe's history. They are also
very young: we are seeing them just 600 million years
after the Universe's birth in the Big Bang. Galaxy clusters
are the largest structures in the Universe, comprising
hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound together by
gravity. This developing cluster, or protocluster, seen as
it looked 13 billion years ago, presumably has grown into
one of today's massive cities of galaxies, comparable to
the nearby Virgo cluster of more than 2000 galaxies.
SUPERNOVAE
LSU astronomers have proven that thermonuclear,
or Type Ia, supernovae (tremendous explosions
where the light is often brighter than a whole galaxy)
are caused by a pair of white dwarf stars.
Their finding represents the culmination of more
than 40 years of worldwide study focused on what
produces these explosions.
The star system that produces the Type Ia
thermonuclear supernova had been determined to be
a closely orbiting pair of white dwarf stars that spiraled
inward for an explosive collision, or a star with an
orbiting companion.
NEW DATA SET
Caltech and University of Arizona astronomers have
released the largest data set ever collected documenting
the brightening and dimming of stars and other celestial
objects - two hundred million in total.
The sky is filled with objects like asteroids that dash
across the sky exploding stars, and variable stars-that
flash, dim, and brighten. Studying such phenomena can
help astronomers better understand the evolution of
stars, massive black holes in the centers of galaxies, and
the structure of the Milky Way.
PLANCK MISSION
ESA's Planck mission has completed its survey of the
remnant light from the Big Bang and ending its ability to
detect this faint energy. Less than half a million years
after the Universe was created in the Big Bang, the
fireball cooled to about 4000 degrees C, filling the sky
with bright, visible light.
As the Universe expanded, that light has faded. By
studying patterns imprinted in that light today, scientists
hope to understand the Big Bang and the very early
Universe, long before galaxies and stars first formed.
PLANET WITH A DUST RING.
A team of astrophysicists has discovered a ring
system in the constellation Centaurus that compares to
Saturn. They discovered a long, deep, and complex
eclipse event with significant on-and-off dimming. At the
deepest parts of the eclipse, at least 95% of the light
from the star was being blocked by dust.
They said that this is the first time astronomers have
detected an extrasolar ring system transiting a Sun-like
star, and the first system of discrete, thin, dust rings
detected around a very low-mass object outside of our
solar system - but many questions remain about what
exactly has been discovered.
ASTEROID VISIT
On January 27th, an asteroid about the size of a bus
shaved by Earth in what spacewatchers described as a
"near-miss." The asteroid was 20 to 62 feet in diameter
and came within 37,000 miles of Earth.
STARBURSTS
TITAN’S DUNE FIELDS
Astronomers combined observations to look at the
way bright, distant galaxies are gathered together in
groups or clusters. The galaxies are so distant that their
light has taken around ten billion years to reach Earth
and are undergoing the most intense type of star
formation activity known - a starburst.
The astronomers found that these distant starburst
galaxies eventually become giant elliptical galaxies - the
most massive galaxies in the Universe. They said it was
the first time that they have been able to show a clear
link between the most massive galaxies and the most
energetic starbursting galaxies in the early Universe.
Dune fields are common on Titan, the largest moon of
Saturn, second only to the uniform plains that cover most
of the surface. They stretch over 6 million sq mi. (about
the area of Canada) and cover almost 13% of Titan.
Titan's dunes are gigantic and are similar in shape to
the dunes found in the deserts of Namibia or southern
Arabia. They average .6 to 1.2 miles wide, hundreds of
miles long and more than 300 feet high.
KEPLER FINDS MORE PLANETS
The Kepler mission has discovered 11 new planetary
systems hosting 26 confirmed planets. These discoveries
nearly double the number of verified Kepler planets and
triple the number of stars known to have more than one
planet that transits (passes in front of) its host star. The
planets orbit close to their host stars and range in size
from 1.5 times the radius of Earth to larger than Jupiter.
They orbit once every six to 143 days and are closer
than Venus is to the Sun. Fifteen of them are between
Earth and Neptune in size - further observations will be
required to determine which are rocky like Earth and
which have thick gaseous atmospheres like Neptune.
In just two years, Kepler has discovered more than 60
planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates
A LOST PLANET?
A 2008 Hubble Space Telescope image of a pinpoint
of light orbiting Fomalhaut (in Piscus) was hailed as the
first actual picture of an exoplanet. But it has failed to
show up in recent Spitzer searches and scientists now
suspect the dot of light isn't a planet because it doesn't
radiate at exoplanet’s infrared wavelengths.
The object still puzzles astronomers, since it's proved
invisible to ground-based infrared telescopes and is
following an unexpected path around its star.
Explanations for the pinpoint of light range from a
background star to light scattered by a dust cloud that
surrounds Fomalhaut.
EARTH’S RADIATION BELTS
The Van Allen Radiation belts are filled with electrons
and energetic charged particles in .huge swaths of
radiation that encircle Earth. They The belts swell and
shrink in response to incoming solar energy, but no one
is quite sure how. What appears to be the same type of
incoming energy has been known to cause entirely
different responses on different occasions, - increased
particles in one case and particle loss in another.
SOLAR FLARES
In late January, the Sun launched the biggest coronal
mass ejection (CME) seen in nearly a decade. Just a few
days later, another flare delivered a powerful radiation
punch to Earth's magnetic field even though it was aimed
away from our planet.
The resulting high-energy protons that speed toward
Earth even faster than the four-million-mile-per-hour
solar wind demonstrated that dangerous "space weather"
can affect us even when the planet is not in the direct
path. See: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/
imagegallery/image_feature_2169.html
NEW HELIX NEBULA IMAGE
ESO's VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory in
Chile, has captured a striking new image of the Helix
Nebula. In infrared light, strands of cold nebula gas
invisible in images taken in visible light are seen in a rich
background of stars and galaxies.
The nebula formed when a Sun-like star was in the
final stages of its life. Unable to hold onto its outer layers,
the star slowly shed shells of gas before becoming a
white dwarf, the tiny blue dot seen at the image
center..See: http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1205/
HABITABLE PLANET
International astronomers said on they have found
the fourth potentially habitable exoplanet with
temperatures that could support water and life. It is about
22 light-years from Earth and orbits a dwarf star with
much less heat than our Sun.
At least three planets are orbiting close to the star,
and the one planet appears to be close enough that it
likely absorbs about as much incoming light and energy
as Earth, has similar surface temperatures, and perhaps
water. The star is part of a three-star system.
MARS LIFE
British researchers now say that life could not exist on
the surface of Mars because the planet has been in a
"super-drought" lasting 600 million years. They based
that assertion on analyses of Martian soil brought back to
Earth from the 2008 NASA Phoenix mission.
WETUMPKA CRATER
The ancient Wetumpka Meteor Crater is located a
dozen miles north of Montgomery, Alabama and is more
than twice as large as the famous Barringer Crater near
Flagstaff Arizona.
The crater is 4.8 miles in diameter and its age is
estimated to be about 83 million years (late Cretaceous)
based on fossils found in deposits. Conclusive evidence
of impact origin was discovered in a core drilled near the
center of the structure. In 2002, Auburn University
researchers published evidence and established the site
as an internationally recognized impact crater.
See: http://www.auburnastro.org/wetu.htm
SOMETHING STRANGE
Every 15.7 days, the light from a cool, low-mass star
observed by the Kepler mission dims for about 1.5 hours.
The dips in starlight aren’t always the same like the blip
caused by a planet passing in front of the star.
An international team of astronomers reported
recently that The signal might be from debris thrown off
by a small rocky planet as it disintegrates under the
star’s glare.
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The YOUNG ASTRONOMERS NEWSLETTER is
distributed by the Forsyth Astronomical Society.
OCARD ,RECNAC ,SIPPUP ,SUEHPEC ,TNATXES :SREWSNA Y’RTSA DELBMARCS