Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: Space Scoop: Baby Pictures of a Solar System
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : astrosphere.org ; http://unawe.org/kids/unawe1604/
Description: Space scoop, news for children.
Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society and President of 3D – Drumm Digital Design, a video production company with clients such as Kodak, Xerox and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He has found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.
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Transcript:
This is 365 Days of Astronomy. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Today’s story is:
Baby Pictures of a Solar System
I’m going to do something a little different from what I usually do for today’s UNAWE show. I’m going to dedicate this show to the little guy you see in today’s album artwork. He’s Ben Ventura of North Carolina.
Hey Ben! How you doing?
That picture’s Ben a few years ago when he was little. He’s huge now, being 4 years old and all. 4 years is like FOREVER!
Baby pictures are cute and Ben’s is no exception.
But do you want to talk about the ultimate baby picture? Astronomers have taken an image that shows new planets being born around a distant young star! Now this has been done before, most notably with HL Tauri in the constellation Taurus the Bull. Google it. It’s an amazing image.
In this case the astronomers calculated the temperature of the dust disk where the baby planets are forming and it’s surprisingly cold.
The spectacular space photo in today’s album artwork background, shows an area of space filled with new-born stars and gas & dust.
The zoomed in section in the artwork reveals a so-called “protoplanetary” disc surrounding the star. The dust is the dark stripe running down the middle between the 2 bright spots.
Those two spots are one star, not two, and the dust is in a ring around the star. We’re seeing this system edge-on. This disc of cosmic dust will one day form into planets. It might take a few million years, but we’ve got the time.
The larger region is called the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, in the constellation Ophiuchus in our northern hemisphere summer time night skies. Ophiuchus is “The Serpent Bearer” or what we’d call a doctor. Back in ancient Greece doctors would use snake bites to supposedly cure diseases. It didn’t cure any diseases, but they felt like they were doing something. Eek! I’m glad doctors don’t do that stuff any more!
Anyway, the star of today’s story is called 2MASS J1628 1370-243 1391.
That unwieldy mess of a name and the familiar shape of this object has led to its nickname: the Flying Saucer. So we’ll just call it that.
The blue part on the upper right is called IC4603, for the 4,603rd object in the Index Catalog of 5,386 cosmic gas clouds and star clusters. The blue part on the left is called IC 4605. The reddish part at the bottom is called the Antares Nebula, as it’s right next to the red giant star Antares in the neighboring constellation Scorpius.
To find this cloudy area, start at Antares and go north just a little. Ben, your dad can show you with his telescope this summer. Right now in February this part of the sky rises at 3:30am. This is a really good time to be asleep.
If you wait till summer it’ll be up when the Sun goes down and easy to see, you won’t loose any sleep. It won’t look anything like this photo, though, because the photo is a time exposure several hours long.
Long exposures like this are a standard practice with astronomers. I wish we could see stuff like this with our naked eyes! That’d be way cool! The Flying Saucer star is much too faint to be seen by eye in a telescope anyway, so don’t bother looking for it. Just enjoy all the other stars that you can see. Saturn is just to the east of here now, and there’s no finer sight than that in the whole night sky!
Just 4.5 billion years ago our very own Earth, the only known planet in the Universe that has both pizza and Sponge Bob, our Earth was born from a similar disc. However, we still don’t understand exactly how these dusty rings transform into full-grown planets.
To help fill in the gaps in our knowledge, astronomers have been gathering as much information as they can on these planet-forming discs. Recently, they managed to measure the temperature of the dust grains inside a disc for the first time — the very disc in this picture to be precise, the Flying Saucer!
They used the ALMA array of radio telescopes to gather the data they used to take the temperature of the dust that we see here in the close-up Hubble Space Telescope image in today’s graphic.
They measured a phenomenally bitter cold temperature of –266°C. Not only is that much colder than they’d anticipated but it’s only 7° C above absolute zero.
Absolute zero is the coldest temperature possible — there is literally nothing colder. Ben: All the atoms that make up a thing and which vibrate when there’s heat, stop vibrating completely when they’re at absolute zero. That’s the definition of absolute zero. No molecular vibrations.
The temperature result with the Flying Saucer Star was a huge surprise to scientists. To grow so cold, the dust grains must be very different than what they expected. It means that all the explanations of how these discs clump together into planets now needs to be rethought. Watch this, uh, space and I’ll keep you updated on new discoveries!
Hey, Here’s A Cool Fact:
Where is the coldest place we know of in the Universe? Well it’s right here on Earth! The coldest temperature ever recorded was in a laboratory on Earth where the temperature dipped to a frigid -273 °C (less than 1° C above absolute zero!). That’s colder than the empty space between galaxies!
So Ben, you keep looking at space and learn as much as you can. There’s lots of cool stuff out there to learn and you’re just the person to learn it! Heck, you’re just the person to discover it!
Thank you for listening to 365 Days of Astronomy!
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Astrosphere New Media. Audio post-production by Richard Drumm. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. This year we will celebrate more discoveries and stories from the universe. Join us and share your story. Until tomorrow! Goodbye!