Podcaster: Dr. Al Grauer
Title: Travelers in the Night Eps. 305E & 306E: Newborn Planets & Marrakech
Organization: Travelers in The Night
Link : Travelers in the Night ; @Nmcanopus
Description: Today’s two stories:
- Dr. Andrea Isella of Rice Univ. used the ALMA radiotelescope imaged the protoplanetary disk around HD 163296. It’s in the way of the Milky Way’s center and is 400 light years away. The dust has 2 lanes cleared out by a pair of Saturn-sized protoplanets.
- The Moroccan Oukaimeden Sky Survey or MOSS has discovered nearly 3,000 asteroids and several comets since 2011. 2016 HX3 approaches Mars more closely than it does Earth.
Bio: Dr. Al Grauer is currently an observing member of the Catalina Sky Survey Team at the University of Arizona. This group has discovered nearly half of the Earth approaching objects known to exist. He received a PhD in Physics in 1971 and has been an observational Astronomer for 43 years. He retired as a University Professor after 39 years of interacting with students. He has conducted research projects using telescopes in Arizona, Chile, Australia, Hawaii, Louisiana, and Georgia with funding from NSF and NASA.
He is noted as Co-discoverer of comet P/2010 TO20 Linear-Grauer, Discoverer of comet C/2009 U5 Grauer and has asteroid 18871 Grauer named for him.
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Transcript:
305E – Newborn Planets
The ALMA radio telescope located in the Atacama desert of northern Chile is able to see the faint millimeter wave length glow emitted by gas molecules and dust particles in the disk of material surrounding the very young star named HD 163296. This solar system in formation is located about 400 light years away in the constellation of Sagittarius. HD 162396’s age compared to our Sun is like that of a 3 day old human baby compared to a 65 year old adult.
Recently Dr. Andrea Isella of Rice University headed up a team which analyzed ALMA’s images of the proto-planetary disk of material surrounding HD 163296. Their work, published in Physical Review Letters, suggests HD 163296’s rings, in both the dust and CO gas, with gaps of material in between them, are consistent with two Saturn sized proto-planets plowing through the dust and gas, adding material to themselves, as they increase their growing masses.
We see a similar situation in Saturn’s ring system where some of it’s smaller moon’s produce rings and gaps.
Astronomers will need to obtain more data on the proto-planetary disk system surrounding HD 163296 to be sure that what they are seeing are new planets forming far from their parent star and not some other physical or chemical phenomena that occurs in baby solar systems.
306E – Marrakech
A location 9,000 feet above sea level in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco is ideal for an asteroid hunter since the weather is often clear and the skies are dark. It was thus intriguing for me to see that a new asteroid discovery was posted from J43 which is the Morocco Oukaïmeden [pronounced Oukaï-meden] Sky Survey or (MOSS) located near Marrakech , a name I had not encountered except in the Crosby, Stills, and Nash song “Marrakech Express”. The MOSS observatory has team members in Morocco, France, and Switzerland, call themselves amateurs, and produces professional quality results. The observatory is the result of a partnership between the Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakech which provided the building, the Jura Astronomy Observatory in Switzerland which provided the dome, and French amateur astronomer Claudine Rinner who provided the telescope. Claudine Rinner in France and Michel Ory in Switzerland have operated the telescope more than one thousand nights since 2011, remotely, with great patience, via a very slow internet connection. In the era of large funded surveys, sweeping through the sky, discovering numbers of asteroids, the MOSS group has been able to discover nearly three thousand of main belt asteroids as well as a number of Earth Approaching Asteroids and several comets.
A recent MOSS team’s discovery is 2016 HX3 a two football field diameter Earth approaching asteroid which makes much closer approaches to Mars than it does to Earth. Perhaps it will become interesting as a source of raw materials for future Martian colonists.
365 Days of Astronomy
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