Science Tidbits 3

[RJDiogenes]

It's absolutely worth pursuing. The pure science and spin-off technologies alone will be worth it.

[RJDiogenes]

I got pinged about another new Exoplanet. It's a very hot Jupiter, so no chance of life, but I always check out the map, which overlays the habitable zone in green and a map of the solar system for perspective. I thought this one was interesting.



It's a binary star and the planet in question is too close to the A component for the orbit to show at this distance, but look at the habitable zones and how the overlap. The habitable zone of the A component overlaps right into the middle of the B component. That wouldn't work. And even if you had a planet that cruised through the middle of the point where the green zones overlap-- which would be impossible considering the proximity of the stars-- the cumulative heat would be too high. They need to smarten up their algorithms for drawing habitable zones.

[Lupine]

I wonder though if a large body could form in the Lagrange points. If I'm looking at this right, L4 and L5 would be in the habitable zone.

[RJDiogenes]

Good point. I've often wondered that about the Lagrange points of a Superjupiter in the Goldilocks zone. It would be even more likely with a binary like this.

[RJDiogenes]

Today was a busy day for far-out space nuts like us.

First I got a couple of Hubble emails. An incredible picture of Andromeda and an improved view of The Pillars of Creation.

Then my Exoplanet app pinged me about a total of twelve new planet discoveries, several of which are very interesting:

HD 145934 b is in a picture-perfect circular orbit just inside the orbit of Jupiter, which is smack dab in the middle of the habitable zone. It's 2.3 Jupiter masses.

Kepler-439 b is between Mercury and Venus, which is just at the inner edge of the zone. No mass, but it is 2.24 Earth radii.

Kepler-440 b is just about at the orbit of Mercury, although perfectly circular, and is snugly in the center of the zone. No mass, but it's 1.86 Earth radii.

Kepler-442 b is, coincidentally, in exactly the same orbit as 440 b, but is toward the inner edge of a slightly larger zone. No mass, but it is 1.33 Earth radii. It is described as the most Earth-like planet yet found.

Kepler-443 b is, coincidentally, in a very similar orbit to the last two, but is at the very inner edge of a large habitable zone that would extend all the way out to Earth orbit. No mass, but it's 2.33 Earth radii.

HD 564 b is between the orbits of Earth and Mars, in a circular but slightly off center orbit. It is .33 Jupiter masses.

HD 108341 b is in a highly eccentric orbit that takes it from inside the orbit of Mercury to almost Jupiter. The habitable zone extends from inside the orbit of Venus to almost Mars. Its 3.5 Jupiter masses and its year is about three Earth years. It looks like it would only spend a month or two inside the inner edge of the zone and a couple of years past the outer edge. Considering its size, I wonder if the environment would be fairly stable deep inside the atmosphere and be conducive to life.

[Lupine]

You beat me to the punch! I just read an article on Bad Astronomy about these planets. A bounty of planets!
Kepler 422b is quite exciting.

[RJDiogenes]

Well, that's interesting. He says eight planets in the habitable zone. When I got pinged by my app, the message said eight planets in the habitable zone. But when I looked at them, only four of them were in the habitable zone, according to the maps. I just double checked 438b, and the map shows it well inside the inner edge of the green zone. Strange.

Although he also mentions how fuzzy the notion of a habitable zone is, so....

[Lupine]

An update on New Horizons! I'm a little disappointed that we might not see any real good images of Pluto until August, but this should still be a great moment.
Also the article refers to Pluto as a "planet".

[RJDiogenes]

Then the writer is my friend.

Looks like my estimate of May 1st was a bit optimistic, but it does say that the "best ever" pics of Pluto will be taken by mid-May.

I had forgotten that Pluto has five moons. That boggles my mind.

But we still have a long road-- it will take sixteen months to download all the data from the flyby. I'm sure everybody on the team will be biting their nails, hoping that nothing malfunctions. And there's still the possibility of adding another KBO to the agenda.

[Lupine]

Speaking of planets, Bad Astronomy has an article on a segment from QVC. I saw the clip on the Rachel Maddow Show Thursday night and it is simultaneously hilarious and depressing, though Phil Plait is fairly diplomatic about it.

And in other planetary news, here's an article about the possibility of super-earth sized planets beyond Neptune. I really hope that this is the case. First off it would be seriously cool, and also I'd love to see the IAU try to justify classifying a body 10-times Earth mass as a "Dwarf Planet"/asteroid (come on IAU, will you guys clean this mess up already).
Though the theory that Sedna might have been captured from another star would be cool as well.

[RJDiogenes]

Speaking of planets, Bad Astronomy has an article on a segment from QVC. I saw the clip on the Rachel Maddow Show Thursday night and it is simultaneously hilarious and depressing, though Phil Plait is fairly diplomatic about it.

Yeah, very diplomatic. I don't recall ever hearing any scientific debates about whether or not the Moon is a star. It often horrifies me how ignorant the general public is. I'm wondering if those people even know what the Earth is.

And in other planetary news, here's an article about the possibility of super-earth sized planets beyond Neptune. I really hope that this is the case. First off it would be seriously cool, and also I'd love to see the IAU try to justify classifying a body 10-times Earth mass as a "Dwarf Planet"/asteroid (come on IAU, will you guys clean this mess up already).

That would be fantastic. And I love how Phil Plait was a lot less diplomatic about that stupid definition. He's a lot less forgiving of professionals-- as he should be.

Though the theory that Sedna might have been captured from another star would be cool as well.

How would they classify that, I wonder. A Step-Planet?

[Lupine]

It would be classified as a "Step-Dwarf Planet, that's an Asteroid, but we'll call it a Dwarf Planet because we don't like Pluto".

[RJDiogenes]

Biggest asteroid EVUH!

[Lord_Plecostomus]

Been reading up on the Shuttle program and the missteps that lead to what we had.

Originally it was envisioned as an inexpensive freight-truck that could deliver a payload, land, be refurbished in 2-3 weeks and re-launched. As designed it was little more than a cockpit, engines, cargo-bay and wings. It was designed so we could build HUNDREDS of them.

Then NASA wanted it to have science capabilities, so they installed living quarters of a sort and a second deck. Then the Air Force came up with a list of demands regarding the engines, flight profile and the heat-shield.

All of these things took away from the original "space truck" concept and made the shuttle heavy and complex... Thanks to certain requirements tacked on at the last moments of the design work what would have been able to be refurbished in a month would now take far longer and be much more expensive.

In other words NASA put all it's eggs in one basket. Instead of developing complimentary technologies such as Apollo-style single use pods for certain missions, they built a ship that could do everything sort of and nothing very well.

This is why we are going back to pods. Individual pods can be tailored to specific missions. Military wants a special pod they can build one. Science community wants a lab-pod, they can build one. Each pod will be a fraction of the cost of a single shuttle launch and far safer too.

It seems on the surface to be a step back, but it's actually a huge leap forward.

[Lupine]

One of the books I have details the early days of the Shuttle design. It indicated that NASA budget cuts also took their toll on the program.