MAC September 2012 Magazine by MAC Realta

Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

Sky Guide - Beginner’s targets for September We'll start our September tour of the heavens overhead in the constellations Andromeda and Cassiopea. M31 (the Andromeda Galaxy), to locate M31, find the "W" of the Constellation Cassiopea. The larger part of the base of the "W" points right at the Andromeda Galaxy. Simply follow this line approximately a fist's width and slightly toward the horizon and scan this area with your lowest power eyepiece. You will see a bright blob in the middle with light extending off of both sides. I've been told that on a very good night, from a dark site, Andromeda will fill the field of view of your eyepiece. The Andromeda Galaxy is the most distant object that can be viewed with the naked eye at about 2.2 million light years away, which makes this a very easy first galaxy target for your scope. T he A nd r om e d a G a l a x y is considered the Milky Way's twin and is a member of a group of galaxies known as the local group. It's made up of about 300 billion stars and is considerably larger than the Milky Way. M31 is a spiral galaxy, but as we are seeing it edge on no spiral structure can be detected. Within the same low power eyepiece view, you may also detect M32 which is an elliptical galaxy. M32 is a very small smudge just below Andromeda (in the telescope view). It appears to be more of a fuzzy star than a galaxy through most beginners instruments but it's still another distant galaxy composed of millions of stars. M32 is located approximately 20,000 lightyears South of Andromeda. It is an elliptical galaxy. Moving over to Cassiopea, M103 is our next target. To locate M103 find the star that makes up the bottom of the smaller part of the "W" of Cassiopea (Ruchbah), M103 is located right next to this star in a straight line from it toward the star that makes the end of the "W" (Epsilon Cygni). M103 is a very

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Issue 36 - September, 2012

loose open cluster of about 60 stars. Next, we'll use Ruchbah again, but with the other side of the "W" to find NGC's 869 and 884 (commonly referred to as the Perseus DoubleCluser). Follow this line down approximately a fist's width, and using your lowest power eyepiece, you will be treated to one of the most beautiful sights in the heavens. NGC 869 and 884 are a pair of Open Clusters each containing approximately 100 stars. It is located a a very rich area of stars which only adds to the beauty of this target. The sight is indeed a memorable one, and one I'm sure you'll return to often to show your friends. Planets in September Mercury is visible at the start of the month, rising at 05:30 but it soon moves too close to the sun to be visible. Venus is visible in the morning skies this month. At the start of the month, it rises at 02:25 and by month’s end rises at 03:25. It passes within 3° of M44 – The Beehive Cluster on the morning of the 13th.

just about every area of the sky.

By Kevin Daly

Above: Cassiopeia is easily recognizable due to its distinctive 'W' shape formed by five bright stars.

http://members.aol.com/kdaly10475/index.html

Mars is not visible this month. Jupiter is visible in the evening sky by month’s end. At the start of the month, it rises at 23:10 and by month’s end rises at 21:25. Saturn is not visible this month. Uranus is visible as an evening object this month in Pisces. It rises at 20:50 at the start of the month and during daylight hours by month’s end. Neptune is visible as an evening object this month in Aquarius and is visible as soon as darkness falls during the month. Enjoy the September skies, this is one of the best months for observing, not too cold, no bugs, and gorgeous sights to be had in

Club Notes Next Meeting: The next MAC meeting will be on the 2nd October at 8pm in the Presbyterian Church and Hall, Main Street, Tullamore. ______________________________________ Club Observing: Perseids StarBQ The next club meets every 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month for our observing sessions held in the MAC grounds. If you wish to be informed of these sessions please email your name and mobile number to midlandsastronomy@gmail.com who will confirm if the session is going ahead (depending on weather).

Latest Astronomy and Space News Kids Astronomy Quizzes and Games

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Monthly Sky Guide Internet Highlights

Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

Mars rover landing a success - What happens now? .............. 7 Moons of Uranus perform dance of death ............................. 8 The “Backward Bracket” Cluster ........................................... 9 The Sun’s almost perfectly round shape baffles scientists ...... 9

Kids Section Front cover image: NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula, is a cosmic bubble about 25 lightyears across, blown by winds from its central, bright, massive star. This colourful portrait of the nebula uses narrow band image data combined in the Hubble palette. NGC 6888's central star is classified as a Wolf-Rayet star (WR 136). The star is shedding its outer envelope in a strong stellar wind, ejecting the equivalent of the Sun's mass every 10,000 years. Burning fuel at a prodigious rate and near the end of its stellar life this star should ultimately go out with a bang in a spectacular supernova explosion. Found in the nebula rich constellation Cygnus, NGC 6888 is about 5,000 light-years away.

Credit & Copyright: J-P Metsävainio

Kids Korner ....................................................................... 10

Quizzes and Games Exercise your brain ............................................................ 11

Monthly Sky Guide Beginners sky guide for this month .................................... 12

Internet Highlights Special content only available with the online version of the magazine ................................................................ 13

3. Luna, Artemis and Selene are amongst the 9. The first manned landing on the moon was in the many names given to area known as what? the Moon by ancient Sea of Calmness cultures in their mythologies. Sea of Composure Sea of Serenity True Sea of Tranquillity False 4. A n c i e n t o b s e r v e r s 10.Evidence gathered in the “Clementine” mission thought that the dark suggests that there may spots on the Moon were be _________ in some what? deep craters near the Clouds Moon’s south pole. Oceans alien spaceships Alien Cities lava Trees new types of metal water ice 5. The Moon rotates on its own axis. True False

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4 5

Check your answers

the same face of the Moon.

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Answer 6: The correct answer was Lunar Eclipse. The shadow of the Earth is cast on to the Moon during an eclipse. This shadow is known as the "umbra". The "penumbra" is the area of broadening shadow.

Curious dark nebula seen as never before............................. 6

Answer 7: The correct answer was Newton. This crater's wall rises 2.25 km above the Moon's surface. Its diameter is 113 km.

Sugar found in space: A sign of life? ..................................... 6

Answer 1: The correct answer was Big Splat Theory. First, there was the "Coaccretion" theory, which said that the Moon and the Earth formed at the same time from the Solar Nebula. The "Fission" theory asserted that the Moon divided from the Earth. "Capture" theory, which stated that the Moon formed somewhere else and was later snared by the Earth's gravitational pull, was the last of these theories. All three of these didn't work very well.

A surprisingly bright superbubble ......................................... 5

Answer 8: The correct answer was True. The gravitational force of the Moon and the Sun on the Earth raises ocean tides. The Moon pulls up a bulge of water on the side of the Earth facing it. As the Earth rotates beneath this great bulge of water, high tides occur.

You can see more about the club and its events on www.midlandsastronomy.com or contact the club via e-mail at midlandsastronomy@gmail.com Meetings are informal and are aimed at a level to suit all ages.

Kepler discovers multiple planets orbiting a pair of stars ........ 5

Answer 2: The correct answer was Impact Theory. In 1974, Hartmann and Davis stated that the Earth, in its primitive history, had a violent encounter with another planet and collided with one another which created the Moon.

NASA's Curiosity rover has zapped its first Martian rock ......... 4

Answer 3: The correct answer is True. Each one of the names referred to the personified goddess of the moon.

Massive star collision spotted by Hubble ............................... 4

Answer 9: The correct answer was Sea of Tranquillity. The Apollo 11 mission landed on July 20th, 1969. in the area of the Moon known as "The Sea of Tranquillity".

What’s the minimum safe distance from a supernova? ........... 3

SUDOKU

Answer 4: This gave rise to the Latin name, mare, meaning "sea". The brighter regions of the Moon were believed to be land in the dark oceans.

Irish astronomer spots second supernova ............................. 3

1. There were three main 6. What is the name of the astronomical theories regarding the phenomenon that occurs moon's origin before the when the Moon passes Apollo missions. Which through the shadow cast one of the following is by the Earth? NOT one of those first three? Galactic Storm Capture Theory Solar Flare Big Splat Theory Lunar Eclipse Binary Accretion Sun Spots Fission Hypothesis 7. What is the name of the deepest crater in the 2. A f t e r the Apollo Moon? expeditions and the data that was gathered Aristotle during them, scientists Proclus were able to put forward Clavius a more educated Newton hypothesis regarding the Moon’s origin. What is the name of this theory? 8. The gravitational pull between the Earth and Big Bang Theory the Moon causes tides Impact Theory on Earth to rise. Hydroplate Theory True Exploding Planet Theory False

Answer 10: The correct answer was water ice. This information has now been confirmed by the "Lunar Prospector" mission. The discovery of ice on the Moon gives new light to the possibility of further exploration of space.

Latest Astronomy and Space News

All are welcome to attend. It also holds infrequent Observing Nights at its Observing Site in Clonminch, or at a member’s house (weather permitting) on the first Friday of every month..

Exercise your brain

contents

Answer 5: The Moon's rotation is in tune with its orbit, it rotates once with every orbit. This means that the Moon doesn't appear to rotate, but it does, making it possible for humans to see

MAC meets on the first Tuesday of the month in the Presbyterian Hall, High Street, Tullamore from 8pm.

Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

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Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

Kid’s Korner Build a Bubble Powered Rocket! Build your own rocket using paper and fizzing tablets! Watch it lift off. How high does your rocket go? Print this page for the instructions.

one right way to make a paper rocket. Try a long, skinny rocket or a short, fat rocket. Try a sharp nosecone or a blunt nosecone. Try it with fins or without fins. Experiment!

• Eye protection (like eye glass- Here's just one idea for how you es, sun glasses, or safety glasses)

might cut your whole rocket from one piece of paper:

Hints: Suggestion: Find a grown-up to do Right kind of film canister - The this activity with you. film canister MUST be one with a cap that fits INSIDE the rim instead Materials: of over the outside of the rim. Sometimes photography shops • Paper, regular 8-1/2have extras of these and will be by 11-inch paper, happy to donate some for such a such as computer worthy cause. printer paper or even notebook paper. • Plastic 35-mm film canister (see Keep in mind: Just like with real rockets, the less your rocket hints below) weighs and the less air resistance • Cellophane tape (drag) it has, the higher it will go. • Scissors

Here are the basic steps: Young rocket engineer

• Effervescing (fizzing) antacid Making the Rocket: • •

tablet (the kind used to settle an You must first decide how to cut your paper. You may cut it the upset stomach) short way or the long way to make Paper towels the body of the rocket. There is no Water

1. Cut out all the pieces for your rocket. 2. Wrap and tape a tube of paper around the film canister. Hint: Tape the canister to the end of the paper before you start wrapping. Important! Place the lid end of the canister down. 3. Tape fins to your rocket body, if you want. 4. Roll the circle (with a wedge cut out) into a cone and tape it to the rocket's top.

Blasting Off 1. Put on your eye protection. 2. Turn the rocket upside down and remove the canister's lid. 3. Fill the canister one-third full of water.

Irish astronomer spots second supernova

Now work quickly on the next steps!

An amateur astronomer has said he got the shock of his life when he made Ireland's second discovery of a supernova in less than two years.

4. D r o p o n e - h a l f o f a n effervescing antacid tablet into the canister. 5. Snap the lid on tight. 6. Stand your rocket on a launch platform, such as your sidewalk or driveway. 7. Stand back and wait. Your rocket will blast off!

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"I had the shock of my life. I was about to pack up and go to bed and the very last photo I took I downloaded and I nearly fell off my chair. I couldn't believe it," said the 41-year-old. "I knew exactly what it was. It wasn't a piece of dust on my camera, it was a supernova."

Mr Grennan said his latest find, on Monday August 22, is a tribute to his hero, moonwalker Neil Armstrong who died on Saturday.

Experts told him that the star was 100 times bigger than the sun and violently exploded Above: Dave Grennan and his wife Carol in an in another galaxy, observatory in their back garden in Raheny, north Dublin called IC2166, where observed the supernova in IC2611. because it got too support of his wife Car ol big and could not unwavering. Four years ago he support its own weight. discovered an asteroid, a minor "It is about 120 million light years planet just three metres wide, and away. That means it has taken 120 named it after his late mother million years for the light from this Catherine Griffin who encouraged explosion to travel the distance his interest in the stars when he across the depths of the universe was a boy. and reach us here on planet earth," www.independent.ie Mr Grennan said. "So we are looking back in time."

He said he was up until 4am examining his data

Mr Grennan described his love of the night sky as a vocation, and the

The software developer, who works for state transport company CIE, discovered the first supernova from Ireland using the same powerful telescope in September 2010.

What’s the minimum safe distance from a supernova? So apparently there are big burning things in the sky called stars. They are unstable and occasionally they explode. When they explode, you don't want to be near them. But how far are you supposed to get away? When a star gets sufficiently massive, its entire life is a balancing act between heat and gravity. As gravity pulls in the star's outer layers, the pressure of them causes the centre of the core to heat up through fusion. As the centre of the core heats up, it pushes the outer layers away, releasing pressure. Eventually, as fuel runs out in the inner core of the star, the outward push of the heat can suddenly fail, causing the outer layers to fall in fast. That causes a massive explosion of heat and energy inside the stars and blows off the outer layers once and for all in a supernova.

Roll this long piece around the film canister for the rocket body

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Dave Grennan was stargazing from his back garden in Raheny, north Dublin, when he spotted the 123 million-year-old exploding star spectacle in the sky.

Above: A finished rocket ready for lift-off.

For a nosecone, use a jar lid or something like that to trace the circle required.

Tape canister to the edge of paper before you start rolling paper around canister.

An amateur astronomer has said he got the shock of his life when he made Ireland's second discovery of a supernova in less than two years.

http://www.marcsobservatory.com/default.html

No one wants to be standing close

and searching records to check if anyone else in the world reported the star, before contacting the International Astronomical Union which f o r m a l l y designated the celestial explosion as 2012ej.

to that, for a lot of reasons. Not only can the outright heat and debris annihilate anything in its path, the gamma radiation radiation with high enough energy to rip electrons away from atoms will do a lot of damage as well. A too-near supernova could kill off most of life on Earth simply by allowing the radiation to strip away our ozone layer. Anyone who has taken a gander at the sky has noticed that these ticking time bombs are all around us. How close can we get to any of them before they blow us away? The liveable distance would depend on the size of the nova, but Earth has seen a couple of nearby

supernovas in its time. Millions of years ago, Australopithecans would have seen an extra sun in the sky for a little while. The brightness in the sky originated in the Sco-cen cloud, then between 130 and 450 light years away. Since then, supernovas have been recorded in the year 185, 1572, and 1604, their distances ranging from a few hundred to thousands of light years away, but none would have been as near as Sco-cen. So we can weather something between 130 and 450 light years away. Other than that, estimates cover a wide range. In 2010, there was a short kerfuffle when we were worried about a star 3,000 light years away. Back in 2002, we were concerned that a star about a 150 light years away would gather fuel and become large enough to eventually go nova.

However, it seems that NASA estimates, with a wide margin of error, that we'll keep struggling along as long as we have about 25 light years between us and a supernova. Since there are only about 75 stars within around 20 light years of us, it seems we don't need to be biting our fingernails just yet. www.io9.com

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Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

Massive star collision spotted by Hubble

The “Backward Bracket” Cluster

Cosmic crash may make astronomers rethink nature of star clusters.

As you tour the deep sky, sometimes you come across objects hard to sort out from the background stars, objects so loose and indistinct they test the patience and imagination of even skilled stargazers. Duds, in other words. The open star cluster M29 in the constellation Cygnus is just such an object. This unloved cluster is often overlooked for richer sights along the backbone of the Milky Way, but it’s not that hard to pick out of the background sky once you know what to look for, and it’s worth inspecting on a late northern-summer evening.

The impending cosmic crash is occurring within a 25-million-yearold giant star factory known as the Tarantula Nebula, or 30 Doradus, which is located 170,000 light-years away from Earth. The Tarantula Nebula is buried inside the Large Magellanic Cloud—a small companion galaxy of the Milky Way.

Sabbi and her team accidentally came across the merging objects while looking for runaway stars— massive suns thrown out of their nursery cluster at speeds of up to 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometres) per hour. The Tarantula Nebula is already known to contain such runaways.

"We think the merger is undergoing and our simulations indicate that it will take about three million years to b e c om p l e te d , " s a id E le na Sabbi, lead scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

The scientists suggest that the merging clusters' gravitational dance may have launched these high-velocity stars to begin with.

The larger cluster, containing 52,000 stars, has dramatically twisted and stretched out the previously unknown smaller cluster containing ten thousand stars to such an extent that it had been unrecognizable until now. "Hubble allowed us to observe for the first time the fainter and most numerous stars, revealing the presence of the second cluster," she said.

Understanding the origin of these runaway stars will help form more accurate computer models of the birth and evolution of star clusters across the cosmos, Sabbi added. "According to some current models, the giant clouds of gas and dust from which star clusters are created fall apart in smaller pieces, and these small parts can later merge into a heavy cluster. This is what we think we are observing for the first time in the most active region of star formation in the local universe."

While it’s bright enough at magnitude 6.6 to pick out with binoculars, M29 must be one of the least impressive objects in Messier’s

Above: Star clusters in the early stages of merging are seen in a Hubble image. This newfound cluster collision may also lead to a rethinking of the true nature of star clusters, which are found in all the universe's galaxies, noted University of Arizona astronomer Dennis Zaritsky, who is not associated with the study. "Stellar clusters have been thought of as a single-age, homogeneous population of stars with older clusters gravitationally self-bound,

but now, if clusters can be, in some cases, combinations of clusters, then we can no longer expect them to have a single-age or chemical abundance," Zaritsky said. "Bottom line is that this new evidence for an on-going merger will affect how we interpret all future cluster observations." www.nationalgeographic.com

NASA’s Curiosity rover has zapped its first Martian rock The robot fired its ChemCam laser at a tennis-ball-sized stone lying about 2.5m away on the ground. The brief but powerful burst of light from the instrument vaporised the surface of the rock, revealing details of its basic chemistry. This was just target practice for ChemCam, proving it is ready to begin the serious business of investigating the geology of the Red Planet. It is part of a suite of instruments on the one-tonne robot, which landed in a deep equatorial depression known as Gale Crater. Over the course of one Martian year, Curiosity will try to determine whether past environments at its touchdown location could ever have supported

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life. The US-French ChemCam instrument will be a critical part of that investigation, helping to select the most interesting objects for study. The inaugural target of the laser was a 7cm-wide rock dubbed "Coronation" (previously N165). It had no particular science value, and was expected to be just another lump of ubiquitous Martian basalt, a volcanic rock. Its appeal was the nice smooth face it offered to the laser. ChemCam zapped it with 30 pulses of infrared light during a 10-second period. Each

pulse delivered to a tiny spot more than a million watts of power for about five billionths of a second.

telescope; the component colours would have told scientists which atomic elements were present.

The instrument observed the r e s ulting s pa r k thr oug h a

www.bbc.co.uk

catalogue. Many new stargazers who come across this star cluster don’t know when it’s dead centre in the field of view. The cluster is located just 1.7º south of Sadr (gamma Cygni), so it should not be hard to find. But with only six bright stars, the c lus ter c an be mistaken for an accidental clump in the Milky Way. You can tell if you’re seeing M29 by the arrangement of the six bright stars in two

Above: According to the Sky Catalog 2000, M29 it's . Its age is estimated at 10 million years and is approaching us at 28 km/s. This cluster can be seen in binoculars but in telescopes, lowest powers are best. The brightest stars of M29 form a s"tubby dipper". The four brightest stars form a quadrilateral, and another three, a triangle north of them. A few fainter stars are around them, but the cluster appears quite isolated, especially in smaller telescopes. groups of three that look like backward curved brackets facing each other like this… )( A larger scope, say 6-8”, will reveal perhaps two dozen stars, but it’s hard to sort them out from the fairly rich stellar background.

www.oneminuteastronomer.com

In a sense, M29 is unjustly maligned. If not for intervening

They also found that the solar flattening is remarkably constant over time and too small to agree with that predicted from its surface rotation. This suggests that other subsurface forces, like solar The Sun is nearly the roundest object ever measured. If scaled magnetism or to the size of a beach ball, it would be so round that the t u r b u l e n c e , difference between the widest and narrow diameters would be may be a more powerful much less than the width of a human hair. influence than The Sun rotates every 28 days, and Imager (HMI) aboard the Solar expected. because it doesn’t have a solid Dynamics Observatory satellite to surface, it should be slightly obtain what they believe is the Kuhn, the flattened. This tiny flattening has definitive and baffling answer. team leader, been studied with many said, “For instruments for almost 50 years to Because there is no atmosphere in years we’ve learn about the Sun’s rotation, space to distort the solar image, believed our especially the rotation below its they were able to use HMI’s f l u c t u a t i n g surface, which we can’t see exquisite image sensitivity to measurements directly. measure the solar shape with were telling us unprecedented accuracy. The that the Sun Now Jeff Kuhn and Isabelle Scholl results indicate that if the Sun varies, but from the University of Hawaii at were shrunk to a ball one meter in these new Manoa, Rock Bush from Stanford diameter, its equatorial diameter results say University in California, and Marcelo would be only 17 millionths of a s o m e t h i n g Emilio from the State University of meter larger than the diameter d i f f e r e n t . Ponta Grossa in Brazil have used through its north-south pole, While just the Helioseismic and Magnetic which is its rotation axis. a b o u t

The Sun’s almost perfectly round shape baffles scientists

dust along the plane of the Milky Way, the 80 stars in this cluster would shine 15x brighter! This young cluster, just 10 million years old, lies about 4,000 light years from Earth.

everything else in the Sun changes along with its 11-year sunspot cycle, the shape doesn’t.” www.astronomy.com

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Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

Kepler discovers multiple planets orbiting a pair of stars

Moons of Uranus perform dance of death An intricate dynamical dance performed by the inner moons of Uranus could end in disaster as it appears that certain pairs of moons have the orbital equivalent to two left feet. Uranus is surrounded by 27 moons, which have been named after characters in Shakespeare’s plays, and 13 of these are classed as inner moons. The orbital stability of these moons has been called into question for years, and new simulations show that violent collisions will most likely occur between Cupid and Belinda, and also between Cressida and Desdemona. The chaotic orbits of Cupid and Belinda are most likely due to resonances. A resonance is the term used when a ratio exists between orbital periods of moons or planets. For example, Neptune and Pluto are in a 3:2 orbital resonance. This means that Neptune circles the Sun three times for every two orbits of Pluto. Resonances can either cause orbits to be stable or unstable, depending on how close the two bodies come to each other. The complicated interactions between the moons Cupid and Belinda will result in Cupid’s treacherous orbit bringing it precariously close to Belinda’s path, causing a collision between the two. The simulations suggest that this could occur between one thousand and ten million years from now. The future is also bleak for Cressida and Desdemona, where orbital crossing occurring between one hundred

The new research also suggests that Uranus may be recycling its moons, as there is only a tiny probability that we should be observing several moons towards the end of their lives. If this is the case, then new moons will replace the destroyed objects by reaccreting from the debris. Evidence for this theory comes from the existence of the ? (nu, pronounced “new”) ring around Uranus. “It’s entirely possible that the ? ring is the debris left over from a previous collision,” explains Robert French from the SETI Institute. “We also have Cupid, which seems to be in a highly unstable orbit, and thus probably hasn’t been there for long. Both suggest that there may have been collisions in the fairly recent past, astronomically speaking.”

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consequence, time intervals between the transits and their durations can vary substantially, sometimes short, other times long," said Jerome Orosz from San Die g o Sta te U niver s ity in California. "The intervals were the tell-tale sign these planets are in Coming less than a year after the circumbinary orbits." announce ment of the fir st circumbinary planet, Kepler-16b, The inner planet orbits the pair of this discovery proves that more stars in less than 50 days. While it than one planet can form and cannot be directly viewed, it is persist in the stressful realm of a thought to be a sweltering world binary star . The discove ry where the destruction of methane demonstrates the diversity of in its super-heated atmosphere planetary systems in our galaxy. might lead to a thick haze that could blanket the planet. At three Astronomers detected two planets times the radius of Earth, Keplerin the Kepler-47 system, a pair of 47b is the smallest-known orbiting stars that eclipse each transiting circumbinary planet. other every 7.5 days from our vantage point on Earth. One star is The outer planet, Kepler-47c, similar to the Sun in size, but only orbits its host pair every 303 days, 84 percent as bright. The second placing it in the so-called star is diminutive, measuring only "habitable zone," the region in a one-third the size of the Sun and planetary system where liquid water might exist on the surface of less than 1 percent as bright. a planet. While not a world "In contrast to a single planet hospitable for life, Kepler-47c is orbiting a single star, the planet in thought to be a gaseous giant a circumbinary system must transit slightly larger than Neptune where a ' m o v i n g t a r g e t . ' A s a an atmosphere of thick bright NASA's Kepler mission has discovered multiple transiting planets orbiting two suns for the first time. The system, known as a circumbinary planetary system, is 4,900 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.

These timescales are dependent on the density of the moons; however no accurate measurements yet exist. The densities are thus estima ted bas ed on othe r information that is available about the moons. For instance, the fact that they don’t reflect much light means they probably have more rock than ice, which helps astronomers to obtain density values. If the density of these moons turns out to be higher, then the timescales before orbit crossing occurs will be shorter.

Crossing orbits doesn’t necessarily

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This discovery proves that more than one planet can form and persist in the stressful realm of a binary star.

thousand and ten million years in the future. There is also a hint that Juliet will collide with the CressidaDesdemona system, or “Cresdemona”, further down the line.

Above: Annotated image of Uranus and moons from Hubble. spell doom for other moons in the Solar System. For instance, Saturn’s moons Janus and Epimetheus not only cross orbits safely, they also switch orbits every four years. The reason that Cupid and Belinda can’t share this peculiar fate is because of their mass difference, with Belinda being 100 times more massive than Cupid. In contrast, Janus and Epimetheus have similar masses, and their orbits have low eccentricities, meaning that their orbits are almost circular rather than elliptical. “As Cupid ‘laps’ Belinda every 70 days, Cupid has almost no effect on Belinda, but massive Belinda has a tremendous effect on tiny Cupid, often causing Cupid’s orbit to change dramatically by increasing its eccentricity,” French tells Skymania News. “As Cupid’s orbit becomes more eccentric, part of the orbit is inside of Belinda’s orbit, and part is outside. This is the ‘crossing’ that will eventually cause a collision.” www.skymania.com

To help find your way around the night sky, Skymaps.com makes available for free each month a map of the night sky. The Evening Sky Map is suitable for all stargazers including newcomers to astronomy and will help you to: • identify planets, stars and major constellations. • find sparkling star clusters, wispy nebulae & distant galaxies. • locate and follow bright comets across the sky. • learn about the night sky and astronomy.

A surprisingly bright superbubble

Above: This diagram compares our own solar system to Kepler-47, a double-star system containing two planets, one orbiting in the so-called h" abitable zone." water-vapour clouds might exist. "Unlike our Sun, many stars are part of multiple-star systems where two or more stars orbit one another. The question always has been: Do they have planets and planetary systems? This Kepler discovery proves that they do," said William Borucki from NASA's Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, California. "In our search for habitable planets, we have found more opportunities for life to exist." To search for transiting planets, the research team used data from the Kepler space telescope, which measures dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars. Additional g r o un d - b a s e d s p e c t r os c op ic observations using telescopes at Observatory’s telescope in Chile shows where ultraviolet radiation from hot young stars is causing gas in the nebula to glow.

For the first time, data of the N44 region in the Large Magellanic Cloud have allowed astronomers to distinguish between different A long-running problem in highX-ray sources produced by superbubbles. energy astrophysics has been that Many new stars, some of them quite massive, are forming in the star cluster NGC 1929, which is embedded in the nebula N44 — so named because it is the 44th nebula in a catalogue of such objects in the Magellanic Clouds. The massive stars produce intense radiation, expel matter at high speeds, and race through their evolution to explode as supernovae.

The winds and supernova shock waves carve out huge cavities called superbubbles in the surrounding gas. X-rays from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory show hot regions created by these winds and shocks while infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope outline where the dust and cooler gas are found. The optical light from the 2.2-meter Max Planck European Southern

some superbubbles in the LMC, including N44, give off a lot more Xrays than expected from models of their structure. These models assume that hot X-ray-emitting gas has been produced by winds from massive stars and the remains of several supernovae.

the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas at Austin helped characterize the stellar properties. "The presence of a full-fledged circumbinary planetary system orbiting Kepler-47 is an amazing discovery," said Greg Laughlin from the University of California, Santa Cruz. "These planets are very difficult to form using the currently accepted paradigm, and I believe that theorists, myself included, will be going back to the drawing board to try to improve our understanding of how planets are assembled in dusty circumbinary disks." www.astronomy.com

supernova shock waves striking the walls of the cavities and hot material evaporating from the cavity walls. The Chandra observations also show no evidence for an enhancement of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium in the cavities, thus ruling out this possibility as a third explanation for the bright X-ray emission. Only with long observations making full use of the capabilities of Chandra has it now become possible to distinguish between different sources of the Xrays produced by superbubbles. www.astronomy.com

A Chandra study published in 2011 showed that there are two extra sources of N44’s X-ray emission not inc lud e d in the s e m od e l s :

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Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

Sugar found in space: A sign of life?

Mars rover landing a success - What happens now?

Astronomers have made a sweet discovery: simple sugar molecules floating in the gas around a star some 400 light-years away, suggesting the possibility of life on other planets. The discovery doesn't prove that life has developed elsewhere in the universe—but it implies that there is no reason it could not. It shows that the carbon-rich molecules that are the building blocks of life can be present even before planets have begun forming. Scientists use the term "sugar" to loosely refer to organic molecules known as carbohydrates, which are made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. The molecules that the team detected in space are the simplest form of sugar, called glycoaldehyde, explained lead astronomer Jes Jørgensen of Denmark's Copenhagen University. Glycoaldehyde can be found on Earth, usually in the form of an odourless white powder. While it isn't used to sweeten foods, it is important because scientists think it plays a key role in the chemical

The rover has landed. Curiosity rover's "seven minutes of terror" evaporated in a swirl of fine-grained soil as six aluminium wheels touched the red planet for the first time. NASA had nailed the riskiest Mars landing ever. Now Curiosity's two-year search for signs of life begins, with the kind of extended stretch and warmup you might expect after a cramped, yearlong flight.

reaction that forms ribonucleic acid (RNA), a crucial biomolecule present in all living cells. It's still unclear exactly how glycoaldehyde is produced in space, but observations suggest it forms on ice-covered dust grains in the dense, cold parts of interstellar molecular clouds, Jørgensen said. Sugary Find a First in Space This marks the first time sugar has been spotted so close to a sun like star. Previously, glycoaldehyde had been found in only two other places in space: near the centre of the giant cloud of gas and dust at the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy, and in a massive star-forming region located 26,000 light-years from Earth. "Both of these regions are much further away and were observed with much worse resolution, [so] it

Above: The Perseids should offer their best viewing in the evening hours of the 12th of the month and peak on the 13th. The shower will appear to radiate from the Northeast from the constellation of Perseus.

Above: The simple sugar molecules were found in the Rho Ophiuchi star-forming region of the constellation Ophiuchus. w as not p oss ib le for the astronomers to pinpoint the location of the molecules," Jørgensen said. The new discovery, which focused on the warm gas swaddling a young star called IRAS 16293-2422, was made using the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA), a large radio telescope located in Chile.

darkness are lit up by new stars that are forming. Star formation is common within regions that contain dense, molecular clouds, such as in dark nebulae. The dust and gas will Barnard 59 forms the mouthpiece of the Pipe Nebula and is the clump together under the influence of gravity and more and more subject of this new image. material will be attracted until the This is a picture of part of a vast Milky Way in the constellation star is formed. However, compared dark cloud of interstellar dust called Ophiuchus the Serpent Bearer. to similar regions, the Pipe Nebula. The Wide Field the Barnard 59 Imager at the European Southern Barnard 59 forms the mouthpiece r e g i o n i s Observatory (ESO) in Chile, captured of the Pipe Nebula and is the u n d e r g o i n g this new and detailed image of what subject of this new image. This relatively little star strange and complex dark nebula formation and still is also known as Barnard 59. lies about 600 to 700 light-years has a great deal of The Pipe Nebula is a prime example from Earth. dust. of a dark nebula. Originally, astronomers believed these were At first glance, your attention is I f you look areas in space where there were no most likely drawn to the centre of carefully, you may stars. But it was later discovered that the image where dark twisting also be able to dark nebulae actually consist of clouds look a little like the legs of a spot more than a clouds of interstellar dust so thick it vast spider stretched across a web dozen tiny blue, can block out the light from the stars of stars. However, after a few green, and red beyond. The Pipe Nebula appears moments, you will begin to notice strips scattered silhouetted against the rich star several finer details. Foggy, smoky across the picture. clouds close to the centre of the shapes in the middle of the T h e s e are

Curious dark nebula seen as never before

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"These results are giving us and other astronomers ammunition," Jørgensen said, "to go out and look for other prebiotic, and possibly more complex, molecules in regions where stars and planets are forming." www.nationalgeographic.com

asteroids, chunks of rock and metal a few kilometres across that are orbiting the Sun. The majority lies in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Barnard 59 is about ten million times further away from Earth than these tiny objects. www.astronomy.com

If the rover's essential systems are working, then comes a gradual unfolding, deploying, and revving up of the ten science instruments and cameras that are Curiosity's reason for being. It's a process that will take days, and in some cases weeks or months. But the Curiosity team will know soon whether the key power and communication systems have sustained any damage during the 567-million-kilometre journey or during the high-wire landing. Communication is largely accomplished through relays to three satellites orbiting Mars or through the Deep Space Network, a system of giant interconnected antenna dishes in Madrid, Spain; Canberra, Australia; and the Mojave Desert. Assuming that communications are established, the first order of business will be to verify the health of the small nuclear battery that will provide power for the rover. Curiosity carries ten pounds of plutonium-238 dioxide as a heat source, which is then used to produce the on-board electricity

needed to move the rover, operate the instruments, and keep the frigid night time cold at bay. Curiosity Unpacks for a TwoYear Visit If all is well, what follows will be a highly choreographed unpacking of the rover. First the mast goes up, with its suite of cameras. Weather and radiation monitoring instruments are turned on, as well as the laser-camera combination that can zap rocks up to 7 meters away and take readings of the "excited" gases released in the process. By "sol 10" ("day 10" — each Martian solar day, known as a sol, is 24.66 hours long), all ten instruments should have been started up to see if they're working, and Curiosity is scheduled to take its first tentative steps— kind of like shaking one's legs to get rid of the pins and needles after a long journey. Only around sol 30 will the twometer robotic arm be tested, grabbing Martian soil for the first time to crush and deliver to the two rover mini-laboratories—

Above: NASA's Curiosity rover explores Mars's Gale Crater in an artist's conception. Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) and Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin). All the while, scientists will be determining exactly where Curiosity is in relation to both the walls of the 130-kilometre-diameter Gale Crater and the five-kilometrehigh Mount Sharp in the middle of its huge depression. Mars Time Gradually, the science team will take more control of the mission and address the first big questions: Where should Curiosity be headed? And then, which rocks should be sampled? Where does the soil look especially interesting and worthy of a full and time-consuming examination? "We'll have about two hundred to three hundred scientists on site at JPL, and I can assure you it will be both fascinating and gruelling," says Joy Crisp, deputy project scientist for the MSL (Mars Science Laboratory, another name for Curiosity) project.

"We'll be working 16-hour days for those first months, and we'll be entirely on Mars time." That means the data and instructions coming and going to Curiosity are pushed 40 m in ut e s la te r e a c h d a y to compensate for the extra length of the Mars sol. Eventually, the JPL team will be having science meetings and making decisions about the next day's instructions and activities at 3:00 in the morning. But seldom in human history has science had an opportunity this grand. Curiosity will be looking for the carbon-based building blocks of life, using instruments that have a good chance of finding them if they're present; it will be searching for habitats that could have once supported life; and just possibly it will find some bio-signatures that show, or at least strongly suggest, that Mars was indeed once home to living things. www.nationalgeographic.com

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