Download Feb 2016 - Sudbury Astronomy Club

Club Website
www.sudburyastronomyclub.com
Fri Feb 5, 2016
Time 7:30 pm
Agenda:
1) Greetings from Pete Marshall
2) The Planets by Dan Madden
3) Linda Pulliah—Update on 2016 Star Parties
4) Break—
5) Steve Dodson will Darken the Dome
I just love Calvin and Hobbes, and this picture is what I feel like when I look up!
Pete Marshall
Astronomers say a Neptune-sized planet lurks beyond
Pluto
By Eric HandJan. 20, 2016
The solar system appears to have a new ninth planet. Today, two scientists announced evidence that a body nearly the size of Neptune—but as yet unseen—orbits
the sun every 15,000 years. During the solar system’s infancy 4.5 billion years ago,
they say, the giant planet was knocked out of the planet-forming region near the sun.
Slowed down by gas, the planet settled into a distant elliptical orbit, where it still lurks
today.
The claim is the strongest yet in the centuries-long search for a “Planet X” beyond
Neptune. The quest has been plagued by far-fetched claims and even outright quackery. But the new evidence comes from a pair of respected planetary scientists, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in
Pasadena, who prepared for the inevitable skepticism with detailed analyses of the orbits of other distant objects and months of computer simulations. “If you say, ‘We have
evidence for Planet X,’ almost any astronomer will say, ‘This again? These guys are
clearly crazy.’ I would, too,” Brown says. “Why is this different? This is different because this time we’re right.”
Outside scientists say their calculations stack up and express a mixture of caution and
excitement about the result. “I could not imagine a bigger deal if—and of course that’s
a boldface ‘if’—if it turns out to be right,” says Gregory Laughlin, a planetary scientist
at the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz. “What’s thrilling about it is [the planet]
is detectable.”
Batygin and Brown inferred its presence from the peculiar clustering of six previously
known objects that orbit beyond Neptune. They say there’s only a 0.007% chance, or
about one in 15,000, that the clustering could be a coincidence. Instead, they say, a
planet with the mass of 10 Earths has shepherded the six objects into their strange elliptical orbits, tilted out of the plane of the solar system.
The orbit of the inferred planet is similarly tilted, as well as stretched to distances that
will explode previous conceptions of the solar system. Its closest approach to the sun
is seven times farther than Neptune, or 200 astronomical units (AUs). (An AU is the
distance between Earth and the sun, about 150 million kilometers.) And Planet X
could roam as far as 600 to 1200 AU, well beyond the Kuiper belt, the region of small
icy worlds that begins at Neptune’s edge about 30 AU.
If Planet X is out there, Brown and Batygin say, astronomers ought to find more objects in telltale orbits, shaped by the pull of the hidden giant. But Brown knows that no
one will really believe in the discovery until Planet X itself appears within a telescope
viewfinder. “Until there’s a direct detection, it’s a hypothesis—even a potentially very
good hypothesis,” he says. The team has time on the one large telescope in Hawaii
that is suited for the search, and they hope other astronomers will join in the hunt.
Cont’d
Cont’d from previous page
Batygin and Brown published the result today in The Astronomical Journal. Alessandro Morbidelli, a planetary dynamicist at the Nice Observatory in France, performed
the peer review for the paper. In a statement, he says Batygin and Brown made a
“very solid argument” and that he is “quite convinced by the existence of a distant
planet.”
Championing a new ninth planet is an ironic role for Brown; he is better known as a
planet slayer. His 2005 discovery of Eris, a remote icy world nearly the same size as
Pluto, revealed that what was seen as the outermost planet was just one of many
worlds in the Kuiper belt. Astronomers promptly reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet—
a saga Brown recounted in his book How I Killed Pluto.
Now, he has joined the centuries-old search for new planets. His method—inferring
the existence of Planet X from its ghostly gravitational effects—has a respectable
track record. In 1846, for example, the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier predicted the existence of a giant planet from irregularities in the orbit of Uranus. Astronomers at the Berlin Observatory found the new planet, Neptune, where it was supposed to be, sparking a media sensation.
Remaining hiccups in Uranus’s orbit led scientists to think that there might yet be one
more planet, and in 1906 Percival Lowell, a wealthy tycoon, began the search for what
he called “Planet X” at his new observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. In 1930, Pluto turned
up—but it was far too small to tug meaningfully on Uranus. More than half a century
later, new calculations based on measurements by the Voyager spacecraft revealed
that the orbits of Uranus and Neptune were just fine on their own: No Planet X was
needed.
Yet the allure of Planet X persisted. In the 1980s, for example, researchers proposed
that an unseen brown dwarf star could cause periodic extinctions on Earth by triggering fusillades of comets. In the 1990s, scientists invoked a Jupiter-sized planet at the
solar system’s edge to explain the origin of certain oddball comets. Just last month,
researchers claimed to have detected the faint microwave glow of an outsized rocky
planet some 300 AU away, using an array of telescope dishes in Chile called the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). (Brown was one of many skeptics, noting that
ALMA’s narrow field of view made the chances of finding such an object vanishingly
slim.)
Brown got his first inkling of his current quarry in 2003, when he led a team that found
Sedna, an object a bit smaller than both Eris and Pluto. Sedna’s odd, far-flung orbit
made it the most distant known object in the solar system at the time. Its perihelion, or
closest point to the sun, lay at 76 AU, beyond the Kuiper belt and far outside the influence of Neptune’s gravity. The implication was clear: Something massive, well beyond
Neptune, must have pulled Sedna into its distant orbit.
Enjoy Five-Planet Mornings
Posted on January 27, 2016
By Gary Seronik
The morning sky is a planet observer’s paradise.
Set your alarm for about 6:45 a.m., local time — roughly an hour ahead of sunrise — and here’s
what will greet you. High in the west-southwest is Jupiter. The big planet shines at magnitude –2.3,
but is starting to lose altitude. It’s best seen between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. when it’s near the meridian
and at its highest. Due south is Mars. It’s bright, but at magnitude 0.9, much fainter than Jupiter. In
the south-southeast is Saturn, not far from the bright star Antares. The 0.5-magnitude ringed planet
is about 20-degrees above the horizon and high enough for good telescopic views if the seeing conditions are reasonably steady. Facing east-southeast you’ll see the two inner planets, Venus and Mercury. Venus is an obvious, magnitude –4.0 beacon, while Mercury is a tougher
find. The speedy planet is only half as high as Venus and shines a much, much fainter magnitude
0.3. You’ll probably need binoculars to fish Mercury out of the horizon haze.
The view facing south-southeast one hour before sunrise on February 4.
Exploring Galileo’s Moon
Posted on January 13, 2016
By Gary Seronik
Use your telescope to follow in the great astronomer’s footsteps.
Galileo first trained his telescope on the Moon in the autumn of 1609, but no one knows the exact date.
His first lunar sketches appeared in the pamphlet, Sidereus Nuncius, published the following year. However, dating these drawings is a tricky exercise fraught with difficulty since Galileo failed to note when
he made his observations. However, a little detective work and time on the computer makes it seem
likely that the rendering shown below depicts the first-quarter Moon as Galileo saw it on the evening of
December 3, 1609.
Galileo’s drawings shows few features — certainly much less than what you can see even in 10×50 binoculars. Although his telescope was crude by today’s standards, its greatest limitations were its low
power (typically 20×) and narrow field of view (about 14 arc minutes, or half a Moon diameter).
This photo of the Moon matches the phase and libration angle on the night in 1609 when Galileo made this telescopic
sketch of the Moon’s “rough and unequal” surface. Photo courtesy Gary Seronik
*Updated* Star Party List for 2016
Frozen Banana Star Party May 5-8, Mew Lake Campground, Algonquin
Prov. Park
New Moon in June Star Party June 2-5, Grundy Lake Prov. Park
Star Gazing Manitoulin July 1-4, Gordon’s Park
Gateway to the Universe July 7-10, Marten River Prov. Park
August Star Party August 4-7, Marten River Prov. Park
Perseids Meteor Party August 12-15, Gordon’s Park
Half the Night Star Party Aug 25-28, Halfway Lake Prov. Park
Manitoulin Star Party August 5-8, Gordon’s Park
Killarney Star Party September 22-25, Killarney Prov. Park
Granite Ridge Star Party September 29-Oct 2, Granite Ridge Campground
Dark Side of the Moon Party September 30-Oct 3, Gordon’s Park
Aurora Borealis Weekend Sept 2-5 (Labour Day Weekend), Gordon’s Park
Capture the Night Sky (Astrophotographers Only): Sept 30-Oct 2
Northern Lights Party October 7-10 (Thanksgiving Weekend)
Linda Pulliah-Sudbury Astronomy Club [email protected]
Bill Montague-North Bay Astronomy Club [email protected]
Bob+Lil Chapman-North Bay Astronomy Club [email protected]
Rita Gordon-Gordon’s Park [email protected]
Note: bookings for provincial park campsites can be done 5 months in advance
No bookings required for Marten River events, contact Bill M.
Gordon’s Park is holding their star parties in an effort to raise funds so
that they can continue to provide and improve services in their RASC
dark sky preserve.
Our Valued Sponsors
Our Valued Sponsors
WHO IS STARGAZER STEVE!!
and What does he do?
Steve Dodson is a fellow amateur astronomer, who as a 2nd grader saved his allowance for a Telescope, and made his first 6-inch scope in grade 8.
As Stargazer Steve, he makes Telescopes that are designed to give more observing satisfaction to
beginners and experts alike, by focusing on design for performance.
In 1981, already an amateur astronomer with decades of observing experience, Steve built the largest mobile Telescope in Canada, and brought it to the Star Party that launched the Sudbury Astronomy Club.
In the 1990's Steve pioneered high-performance low-cost Reflecting Telescope Kits.
Steve has participated in the building of
over 4000 Telescopes, including solo
projects and activities with children, Astronomy Clubs and people of all ages.
The International Astronomical Union has
named Asteroid #13822
“Stevedodson”.
Over 2000 Stargazer Steve Telescopes
have been shipped throughout Canada,
the US, and around the World.
More Info at http://stargazer.isys.ca
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/orbits/ (Put
13822 in the blue box)