Discovery of a Sub-Neptune Sized Planet
There is a new instrument putting out science on the Hobby Eberly Telescope. The new Planet Finder Spectrograph is designed to measure the gravitational effects close in planets have on their stars while eliminating the possibility of a star or other object being present. This allows them to validate the discovery of planets found via the transit method, which look at dips in a stars light.
History of the Sombrero Galaxy
Today it was announced that the halo of the Sombrero galaxy is populated with metal rich stars, that could only have found their way to this weird location through some kind of a merger event in the past. In astronomy terms, metal-rich just means that a star has formed from materials enriched through multiple supernova and other mass loss events. This material has a higher concentration of heavier elements than our universe formed with. In general, metal rich stars can be found most often in the dense disks of galaxies, while the largely empty empty galactic halos are metal poor.
Astronomers Capture Rare Stellar Evolutionary Phase
A pair of stars in the globular cluster Terzan 5 are undergoing, in unison, a rarely seen phase in evolution. This system consists of a neutron star and a lower mass companion star. Due to their close orbit, the neutron star periodically steals material from its companion. As it falls toward the neutron star, this material gets swept up into an accretion disk that can be seen in the X-ray.
Deflecting Earth-Bound Asteroids
One of the complexities we have to deal with in trying to understand planet formation is things don’t stay where you put them. Worlds that start in one orbit may end up somewhere entirely different, as objects ranging from comets to ice giants to rocky asteroids all get tossed about through gravitational interactions.
Planet Formation
One of the things we talk about is planet formation. Or, more importantly, how we really don’t understand planetary formation. Part of the problem is, we only had one example of a solar system for the nearly 400 years between when Galileo started making scientific observations and when 51 Peg was discovered to have a planet in 1995.
NASA’s Juno Provides Update About Jupiter Water Mystery
JunoCam image of Jupiter's southern equatorial region. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill The interplay between forming stars and their planetary disks can have profound effects on how planets form. We observe young stars blasting their inner solar...
Rare Ice Volcanos on Lake Michigan Beach
Folks around Sagatuk, Michigan, which is vaguely near Grand Rapids, are observing on ice volcanoes on the beaches of Lake Michigan. These amazing piles of ice are geysering slush in ways we talk about happening on other worlds and we can now see on our own.
Falcon 9 Starlink 5 Launch
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched another 60 Starlink satellites on February 17, 2020 at 3:05 PM (UTC). For those of you keeping track at home, SpaceX has now launched 180 satellites in the first two months of this year.
Arianespace Deploys Two Satellites to Orbit
On February 18, 2020 at 10:18 PM (UTC) an Arianespace Arian 5 rocket successfully lifted off from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana with its payload of two satellites, both of which were successfully deployed into orbit within 35 minutes of liftoff.
Northrup Grumman Launches CRS2 NG-13
On February 15, 2020 at 8:21 PM (UTC) Northrop Grumman launched the CRS2 NG-13 (Cygnus) mission atop its Antares rocket. This was a routine resupply mission to the ISS packed full of science, supplies, and hardware.
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