AstroNews May-Jul 2002

SOLSTICE SPECIAL

• MILKY WAY STARGAZING

• ASTERIOD WHIZZES BY

• SETI@home IS A BIG HIT

• CALLING ALL SATURN FANS!

• A COUSIN SOLAR SYSTEM

• AQUA DELIVERS

• MASSIVE SOLAR FLARE

Happy SUMMER SOLSTICE! June 22 brought us the longest day in the northern hemisphere, and the longest night in the southern.

It's a great time to spend evenings STARGAZING. Remember, try to get away from as many city lights if you can.

MILKY WAY STARGAZING

Find a dark spot and lie down (bring a sleeping bag if you like). Let your eyes adjust to the dark. Then you should be able to see the glorious Milky Way. Think about it, this is the glow of millions of stars in the disk of our Milky Way galaxy. The disk of the Milky Way has a spiral structure.

You are sitting on a tiny Planet called Earth at the outer regions of this galaxy. Earth is part of a solar system situated within a smaller spiral arm, called the Local or Orion Arm, which is merely connection between the inner and outer next more massive arms, the Sagittarius Arm and the Perseus Arm

You are well within the disk and only about 20 light years above the equatorial symmetry plane but about 28,000 light years from the Galactic Center.

So the Milky Way shows up as luminous band spanning all around the sky along this symmetry plane, which is also called the "Galactic Equator". The area generally thought to mark the Galactic center is in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, but very close to the border of both neighbor constellations Scorpius and Ophiuchus. Here in the center there is a massive black hole with a mass of more than 2 million of our suns. Don't try looking for it though.

ASTERIOD WHIZZES BY

An asteroid the size of a football field passed extremely close to Earth last week but it remained undetected until days later.

The visit was one of the closest recorded. The space rock missed Earth by 75,000 miles (120,000 km). That's one-third the distance to the moon.

Whizzing by at 6 miles (10 km) per second, the big boulder could have unleashed some major firepower had it struck. The destruction might have been comparable to that of the Tunguska Event. This refers to the time in 1908 when an asteroid or comet exploded over Siberia. It flattened 77 square miles (2,000 square km) of tundra and trees.

The asteroid, designated 2002 MN, is not in the same league as potential killer rocks measuring more than 0.6 miles (1 km) in diameter, some of which are known to lurk in our space neighborhood between Mars and Venus.

2002 MN is a lightweight among asteroids and incapable of causing damage on a global scale, such as the object associated with the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The closest near miss in recent decades took place in 1994, when asteroid 1994XL1 passed within 65,000 miles (105,000 km) of our planet.

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SETI@home: A BIG HIT

3.8 million! That is also the number of people who participate in the incredible SETI@home Project - a bold experiment that directly involves them in the search for life beyond Earth.

Parallel processing of radio telescope data on the unused cycles all these computers allows data from a wide band of the sky to be scanned every six months for intelligent signals.

This is now the largest computation ever performed. In three years SETI@home users have donated one million years of CPU time!

In recent months SETI@home became a victim of its own phenomenal success. It struggled to keep this gigantic network operating. The problem can be summed up in one word: "Bandwidth." Because of the enormous amount of web traffic it generates, SETI@home needs a very wide communications band to operate smoothly. And as time goes on, and more and more users join the SETI@home network, the bandwidth requirements only get larger and larger.

Months of gridlock, caused by insufficient bandwidth, are finally over for SETI@home users. On May 30 a new wide-band connection was brought on line.

SETI@home is not just about being directly involved in the adventure of exploration...it's about having a real shot at making the history books. After all, the day we discover life on another world is a day that will be remembered always. It will be marked as a pivotal point in human history, the instant that humanity's isolation in the cosmos disappears forever.

Get SETI@home version 3.03:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu

ASTROTIP

CALLING ALL SATURN FANS!

Is Saturn your favorite planet?

Do you want to share this jewel of our solar system with others? If so, NASA's wants you!

Last month NASA announced its new Saturn Observation Campaign.

Its goal is to "create opportunities for pro and amateur astronomers to engage the public in the excitement of the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn."

In July 2004, the Cassini spacecraft and Huygens probe will complete a seven-year journey across more than 2 billion miles (3.5 billion kilometers) and take up residence around the Ringed Planet.

Like the Galileo spacecraft has orbited Jupiter and studied the jovian system over the past six and a half years, Cassini will spend at least four years learning what it can about the second-largest planet of our solar system, those famous rings, and Saturn's swarm of satellites.

Cassini will release the Huygens probe, which will descend into the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

Members of Cassini's public outreach team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are seeking volunteers to help engage and educate people in their communities about Saturn and the Cassini-Huygens mission in addition to providing opportunities to observe Saturn.

Anyone around the world, from professional astronomers to members of the public, can enlist in the program. Astronomy clubs, museums, and other organizations also may apply as a group.

JPL Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/cassini/

Saturn Observation Campaign website:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/cassini/english/soc/

DISTANT DISCOVERIES

A COUSIN SOLAR SYSTEM

In the last century we found life in some bizarre and hostile places on our own planet — deep ocean thermal vents, inside nuclear reactors, and even in mining slag piles where bacteria breathe metal.

As of today, we now know of 90 planets — so called "extrasolar planets" — circling other stars. To date they have been mostly so-called "hot Jupiters," planets several times the size of Jupiter that orbit their parent star at very close distances.

These were the first worlds we found because finding this sort of system was easiest. The smaller the planets, the more observation and careful attention to measurement is required.

The famed planet-hunting team of Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler just announced the discovery of a solar system much like our own. The star is 55 Cancri — a star very much like our sun located 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer.

If you know where to look you can see this star WITHOUT a telescope. Marcy and Butler had already found a planet slightly smaller than Jupiter orbiting this star every 14.6 days at a distance one-tenth that of Earth's orbit around our sun.

This latest discovery reveals another Jupiter-sized world orbiting this same star at a distance of 512 million miles — slightly further out than Jupiter's orbit around our own sun. The orbit is slightly more elongated than Jupiter's and it takes 13 years for the planet to complete one orbit (Jupiter does this in 11.86 years).

Paul Butler referred to the 55 Cancri system as being "a first cousin of our own".

Why a cousin? Having a Jupiter-sized planet in an orbit like Jupiter's may be good for the chance of life developing on a planet located where ours is in relation to its parent star. During the formation of a solar system there is a lot of debris such as comets flying around. Jupiter and Saturn deflect comets away from the inner solar system, thus sparing our planet from a constant pummeling of the sort that presumably wiped out the dinosaurs. Without this "celestial vacuum cleaner," the chances that a planet would be suitable for life's origin — to say nothing of being able to support the development of intelligence — would be rather low.

Given the close proximity of this solar system to our own, it is likely that it will be among the first to be examined later this decade by the Terrestrial Planet Finder, a space-based telescope specifically designed to detect Earth-sized worlds around other stars.

While the smallest planets will be the hardest to find, we're getting closer every day.

California & Carnegie Planet Search
http://exoplanets.org/

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AQUA DELIVERS

NASA's Aqua satellite has generated its first result: a global map of sea surface temperatures.

This comes from the onboard Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) operated by the Japanese.

In the image, ice and snow are white and yellow, desert areas green, other land areas are dark colors, and oceans are in shades of blue.

The sea surface temperature map from AMSR-E is indicative of the high level of detail the microwave imager will routinely provide even in the presence of substantial cloud cover.

This data will lead to improved weather forecasts and a better understanding of Earth's climate system -- especially the role of water in it.

Aqua is a partnership between the USA, Japan and Brazil. The primary role of the spacecraft is to gather information about water in the Earth’s system.

NASA AQUA:
http://aqua.gsfc.nasa.gov

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FAR OUT FACTS

MASSIVE SOLAR FLARE

A solar eruption more than 30 times the length of Earth's diameter, blasted away from the sun today July 1, 2002.

A satellite captured graphic images of the event. Images are visible at the SOHO Web site. SOHO -- short for Solar and Heliospheric Observatory -- is run by NASA and the European Space Agency.

The a picture by SOHO shows a fiery looking "leg" in the lower-left corner of the image. The "leg" is what astronomers call an eruptive prominence, which is a loop of magnetic fields that trap hot gas inside.

As this prominence became unstable, it erupted into the area around the sun and appeared to dissipate.

If eruptions like these are aimed at Earth, they can disturb Earth's magnetosphere, but this one was not directed at our planet. Whew!

SOHO Website:
http://soho.nascom.nasa.gov

AstroNews is an electronic newsletter by Kahl Consultants. Stay abreast of astronomy and extraterrestrial news. 

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My god! It's full of stars!