Calendar of Events Dr. Seth Shostak

The Scientific Search for ET 7 p.m. Sunday May 9 Alderson Auditorium

Kansas Union

LOCAL PUBLIC OBSERVING After the City Band Concerts

South Park May 26, June 9, June 23,

July 7 9:30PM

President:

Rick Heschmeyer rcjbm@sbcglobal.net

Treasurer: Dr. Steve Shawl Shawl@ku.edu

University Advisor: Dr. Bruce Twarog btwarog@ku.edu

Webmaster: Gary Webber

gwebber@ku.edu Observing Clubs

Doug Fay dfay@ku.edu

Report from the Officers: The last meeting of the Spring semes-ter went well. The DVD detailing the history and development of the tele-scope was excellent (and only half the time of the two-part Nova episode). With the Summer nearly upon us, we discussed the plans for the summer public observing schedule. The dates for the post-band-concert events, as selected by Rick, are given in the schedule on the left. Four nights have been picked, but the weather is unlikely to cooperate for at least two. As the dates approach, please contact Rick about helping out, either by set-ting up a scope or simply helping with crowd control. Discussions are also under way about the possibility of identifying a dark site for observing by

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Volume 36 Number 05 May 2010

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

Planet Around Brown Dwarf 3

NASA Space Place 4

This Planet Tastes Funny 6

Fermi Maps Active Galaxy 7

HST Turns 20 8

Planet Funny (continued) 8

Orion Imaged 9

Asteroid (continued) 2

MSRAL Poster 5

Brown Dwarf (continued) 10

Of Local Interest: Asteroid Ice May Be 'Living Fossil' With Clues to Oceans' Origins

The first-ever discovery of ice and organic molecules on an asteroid may hold clues to the origins of Earth's oceans and life 4 billion years ago. Uni-versity of Central Florida researchers detected a thin layer of water ice and organic molecules on the surface of 24 Themis, the largest in a family of as-teroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Their unexpected findings are published April 29 in Nature, which will feature two complementary articles by the UCF-led team and by another team of planetary scientists. "What we've found suggests that an asteroid like this one may have hit Earth and brought our planet its water," said UCF Physics Professor Humberto Campins, the study's lead author (and alumnus of KU astronomy pro-gram). Some theories suggest asteroids brought water to Earth after the planet formed dry. Scientists say the salts and water that have been found in some meteorites support this view.

Using NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, Campins and his team (Continued on page 2)

A Hearty Welcome to new AAL Member Aden Huggins

About the Astronomy Associates of Lawrence

The club is open to all people interested in sharing their love for astronomy. Monthly meetings are typically on the second Fri-day of each month and often feature guest speakers, presentations by club members, and a chance to exchange amateur as-tronomy tips. Approximately the last Sunday of each month we have an open house at the Prairie Park Nature Center. Periodic

star parties are scheduled as well. For more information, please contact the club officers:our president, Rick Heschmeyer at rcjbm@sbcglobal.net, our webmaster, Gary Webber, at gwebber@ku.edu, or our faculty advisor, Prof. Bruce Twarog at

btwarog@ku.edu. Because of the flexibility of the schedule due to holidays and alternate events, it is always best to check the Web site for the exact Fridays and Sundays when events are scheduled. The information about AAL can be found at

http://www.ku.edu/~aal.

Copies of the Celestial Mechanic can also be found on the web at http://www.ku.edu/~aal/celestialmechanic

club members, coordinated whenever the mood strikes through the club Facebook page.. Among the events coming up in May, there are three scheduled talks at Linda Hall Library on the search for life in the Uni-verse. Reservations are required. Please consult the announcement below for more info. In case you can’t make the second talk by Dr. Seth Shostak, he will be speaking at KU on Sunday May 9 at 7:00 PM in Alderson Auditorium. As detailed in the poster on pg. 5, the Prairie Astronomy Club of Lincoln will be the host for MSRAL 2010 - the annual meet-ing of the Mid-States Region of the Astronomical League on June 4-5, 2010. For more info, check out http://www.msral2010.info/. As always, if anyone has any ideas, suggestions, or input on how we can make the club better, please contact Rick (rcjbm@sbcglobal.net).

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of researchers measured the intensity of the re-flected sunlight as 24 Themis rotated. Differ-ences in intensity at dif-ferent wavelengths helped researchers deter-mine the makeup of the asteroid's surface. Researchers were sur-prised to find ice and car-bon-based compounds evenly distributed on 24 Themis. More specifi-cally, the discovery of ice is unexpected because surface ice should be short lived on asteroids, which are expected to be too warm for ice to sur-vive for long. The distance between this asteroid and the sun

is about three times greater than between Earth and the sun. Researchers will continue testing various hypotheses to explain the presence of ice. Perhaps most promising is the possibility that 24 Themis might have preserved the ice in its subsoil, just below the surface, as a kind of "living fossil" or remnant of an early solar system that was generally considered to have disappeared long ago

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Planet Found Orbiting Brown Dwarf HST Press Release

As our telescopes grow more powerful, astronomers are uncovering objects that defy conventional wisdom. The latest example is the discovery of a planet-like object circling a brown dwarf. It's the right size for a

planet, estimated to be 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter. But the object formed in less than 1 million years — the approximate age of the brown dwarf — and much faster than the predicted time it takes to build planets

according to some theories.

Kamen Todorov of Penn State University and co-investigators used the keen eyesight of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Observatory to directly image the companion of the brown dwarf, which was

uncovered in a survey of 32 young brown dwarfs in the Taurus star-forming region. Brown dwarfs are ob-jects that typically are tens of times the mass of Jupiter and are too small to sustain nuclear fusion to shine as stars do.

The mystery object orbits the nearby brown dwarf at a separation of approximately 2.25 billion miles (3.6 billion kilometers — which is between the distances of Saturn and Uranus from the Sun). The team's re-search is being published in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

There has been a lot of discussion in the context of the Pluto debate over how small an object can be and still be called a planet. This new observation addresses the question at the other end of the size spectrum: How small can an object be and still be a brown dwarf rather than a planet? This new companion is within the range of masses observed for planets around stars — less than 15 Jupiter masses. But should it be called a planet? The answer is strongly connected to the mechanism by which the companion most likely formed.

There are three possible formation scenarios: Dust in a circumstellar disk slowly agglomerates to form a rocky planet 10 times larger than Earth, which then accumulates a large gaseous envelope; a lump of gas in the disk quickly collapses to form an object the size of a gas giant planet; or, rather than forming in a

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A Rock Hound is Born It’s tough to be a geologist when you can’t tell one rock from another. Is that a meteorite or a chunk of lava? A river rock or an impact fragment?

Houston, we have a problem! It’s a problem Spirit and Opportunity have been dealing with for the past six years. The two rovers are on a mission to explore the geology of the Red Planet, yet for the longest time they couldn’t recognize interesting rocks without help from humans back on Earth. Fortunately, it is possible to teach old rovers new tricks. All you have to do is change their programming—and that’s just what NASA has done. “During the winter, we uploaded new software to Opportunity,” says Tara Estlin, a rover driver, senior member of JPL’s Artificial Intelligence Group, and the lead developer of AEGIS, short for Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science. “AEGIS allows the rover to make some decisions on its own.” Estlin and her team have been working for several years to develop and upload increasingly sophisticated software to the rovers. As a result, the twins have learned to avoid obstacles, identify dust devils, and calcu-late the distance to reach their arms to a rock. With the latest upgrade, a rock hound is born. Now, Opportunity's computer can examine images that the rover takes using its wide-angle navigation camera (NavCam) and pick out rocks with interesting colors or shapes. It can then center its narrower-angle pano-ramic camera (PanCam) on targets of interest for close-up shots through various color filters. All this happens without human intervention. The system was recently put to the test; Opportunity performed splendidly. At the end of a drive on March 4th, the rover settled in for a bit of rock hunting. Opportunity surveyed the landscape and decided that one particu-lar rock, out of more than 50 in the NavCam photo, best met criteria that researchers had set for a target of interest: large and dark.

“It found exactly the target we would want it to find,” Estlin says. “It appears to be one of the rocks tossed outward onto the surface when an impact dug a nearby cra-ter.” The new software doesn’t make humans obsolete. On the con-trary, humans are very much “in the loop,” setting criteria for what’s interesting and evaluating Oppor-tunity’s discoveries. The main ef-fect of the new software is to strengthen the rover-human part-nership and boost their combined exploring prowess. Mindful that Opportunity was only supposed to last about six months after it landed in 2004, Estlin says “it is amazing to see Opportunity performing a brand new autono-mous activity six years later.” What will the rock hounds of Mars be up to six years from now? Stay tuned for future uploads!Learn more about how the AEGIS soft-

ware works at http://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/newsandevents/newsdetails/?NewsID=677. If you work with middle- or high-school kids, you’ll find a fun way to explore another kind of robot software—the kind that enables “fuzzy thinking”—at http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/educators/teachers_page2.shtml#fuzzy.

Opportunity spots a rock with its NavCam that its AEGIS software says meets all the criteria for further investigation.

Mid-States Region ConventionAstronomical League

The Prairie Astronomy Club of Lincoln, Nebraskainvites you to attend the MSRAL Convention, June 4-5.

Register online at www.msral2010.info

Featured Speakers:

Rob Landis, NASA, Lunar Surface Systems Project at Johnson SpaceCenter.

Dr. Peter Schultz, Brown University, Science Coordinator for NASA-Ames Vertical Gun Range. "Shooting the Moon: Results from theLCROSS Mission"

Rick Johnson is a founding member of the Prairie Astronomy Club.“Imaging at -40 degrees”

Larry Stepp, Telescope Department Head for TMT. "A brief history offuture giant telescopes"

Even though we already have some great speakers, we want your contribution.Consider giving a talk on some aspect of your hobby. See website for details.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTSJoin us for a Friday evening Star-B-Que at Hyde Observatory, withtour of Hyde and telescope viewing.

Saturday will be packed with speakers and two fulldomeplanetarium shows, vendor displays and a banquet at the KnollsCountry Club.

Sunday will start with complimentary continental breakfast, RickJohnson’s talk at 10am followed by the MSRAL business meeting.

DON’T MISS THIS GREAT LINEUP OF SPEAKERS! Sign up now online orprint and mail your registration form. PLEASE SIGN UP SOON so we willknow how many will be attending the conference and banquet.

This Planet Tastes Funny NASA Spitzer Press Release

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered something odd about a distant planet -- it lacks methane, an ingredi-ent common to many of the planets in our solar system.

"It's a big puzzle," said Kevin Stevenson, a planetary sciences graduate student at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, lead author of a study appearing tomorrow, April 22 in the journal Nature. "Models tell us that the carbon in this planet should be in the form of methane. Theorists are going to be quite busy trying to figure this one out."

The discovery brings astronomers one step closer to probing the atmospheres of distant planets the size of Earth. The methane-free planet, called GJ 436b, is about the size of Neptune, making it the smallest distant planet that any tele-scope has successfully "tasted," or analyzed. Eventually, a larger space telescope could use the same kind of technique to search smaller, Earth-like worlds for methane and other chemical signs of life, such as water, oxygen and carbon dioxide.

"Ultimately, we want to find biosignatures on a small, rocky world. Oxygen, especially with even a little methane, would tell us that we humans might not be alone," said Stevenson.

"In this case, we expected to find methane not because of the presence of life, but because of the planet's chemistry. This type of planet should have cooked up methane. It's like dipping bread into beaten eggs, frying it, and getting oat-meal in the end," said Joseph Harrington of the University of Central Florida, the principal investigator of the research.

Methane is present on our life-bearing planet, manufactured primarily by microbes living in cows and soaking in water-logged rice fields. All of the giant planets in our solar system have methane too, despite their lack of cows. Neptune is blue because of this chemical, which absorbs red light. Methane is a common ingredient of relatively cool bodies, includ-ing "failed" stars, which are called brown dwarfs.

In fact, any world with the common atmospheric mix of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen, and a temperature up to 1,000 Kelvin (1,340 degrees Fahrenheit) is expected to have a large amount of methane and a small amount of carbon mon-oxide. The carbon should "prefer" to be in the form of methane at these temperatures.

At 800 Kelvin (or 980 degrees Fahrenheit), GJ 436b is supposed to have abundant methane and little carbon monoxide. Spitzer observations have shown the opposite. The space telescope has captured the planet's light in six infrared wave-lengths, showing evidence for carbon monoxide but not methane.

"We're scratching our heads," said Harrington. "But what this does tell us is that there is room for improvement in our

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Fermi Maps an Active Galaxy's 'Smokestack Plumes'

Fermi Press Release

If our eyes could see radio waves, the nearby galaxy Centaurus A (Cen A) would be one of the biggest and bright-est objects in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon. What we can't see when looking at the gal-axy in visible light is that it lies nestled between a pair of giant radio-emitting gas plumes ejected by its supersized black hole. Each plume is nearly a million light-years long.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope maps gamma rays, radiation that typically packs 100 billion times the energy of radio waves. Nevertheless, and to the surprise of many as-trophysicists, Cen A's plumes show up clearly in the satellite's first 10 months of data. The study appears in Thursday's edi-tion of Science Express. "This is something we've never seen before in gamma rays," said Teddy Cheung, a Fermi team member at the Naval Re-search Laboratory in Washington. "Not only do we see the ex-tended radio lobes, but their gamma-ray output is more than ten times greater than their radio output." If gamma-ray tele-scopes had matured before their radio counterparts, astrono-mers would have instead classified Cen A as a "gamma-ray galaxy." Also known as NGC 5128, Cen A is located about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus and is one of the first celestial radio sources identified with a galaxy. "A hall-mark of radio galaxies is the presence of huge, double-lobed radio-emitting structures around otherwise normal-looking ellip-tical galaxies," said Jürgen Knödlseder, a Fermi collaborator at the Center for the Study of Space Radiation in Toulouse, France. "Cen A is a textbook example." Astronomers classify Cen A as an "active galaxy," a term ap-plied to any galaxy whose central region exhibits strong emis-sions at many different wavelengths. "What powers these emis-sions is a well-fed black hole millions of times more massive than our sun," said Yasushi Fukazawa, a co-author of the study at Hiroshima University in Japan. "The black hole somehow diverts some of the matter falling toward it into two oppositely directed jets that stream away from the center." Fueled by a black hole estimated at hundreds of millions of times the sun's mass, Cen A ejects magnetized particle jets moving near the speed of light. Over the course of tens of mil-

lions of years, these jets puffed out two giant bubbles filled with magnetic fields and energetic particles -- the radio lobes we now see. The radio waves arise as high-speed electrons spiral through the lobes' tangled magnetic fields. But where do gamma rays -- the highest-energy form of light -- come from? The entire universe is filled with low-energy radiation -- radio photons from the all-pervasive cosmic microwave background, as well as infrared and visible light from stars and galaxies. The presence of this radiation is the key to understanding Cen A's gamma rays. "When one of these photons collides with a super-fast particle in the radio lobes, the photon receives such an energy boost, it becomes a gamma ray," explained co-author Lukasz Stawarz at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in Sagamihara, Japan. Although it sounds more like billiards than astrophysics, this process, called inverse Compton scattering, is a com-mon way of making cosmic gamma rays. For Cen A, an especially important aspect is the case where photons from the cosmic microwave background ricochet off of the highest-energy particles in the radio lobes.In dozens of active galaxies, this process has been shown to produce X-rays. But the Cen A study marks the first case where astrono-mers have solid evidence that microwave photons can be kicked up to gamma-ray energies. Fermi cataloged hun-dreds of blazars and other types of active galaxies in its first year. Before its mission ends, that number may reach several thousand. But because Cen A is so close, so large and so vigorous, it may be the only active galaxy Fermi will view this way. With Centaurus A, Fermi hit the jackpot.

The gamma-ray output from Cen A's lobes exceeds their radio output by more than ten times. High-energy gamma rays detected by Fermi's Large Area Telescope are depicted as purple in this gamma ray/optical composite of the galaxy. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration, Capella Observatory

models. Now we have actual data on faraway planets that will teach us what's really going on in their atmospheres."

GJ 436b is located 33 light-years away in the constellation Leo, the Lion. It rides in a tight, 2.64-day orbit around its small star, an "M-dwarf" much cooler than our sun. The planet transits, or crosses in front of, its star as viewed from Earth.

Spitzer was able to detect the faint glow of GJ 436b by watching it slip behind its star, an event called a secondary eclipse. As the planet disappears, the total light observed from the star system drops -- this drop is then measured to find the brightness of the planet at various wavelengths. The technique, first pioneered by Spitzer in 2005, has since been used to measure atmospheric components of several Jupiter-sized exoplanets, the so-called "hot Jupiters," and now the Neptune-sized GJ 436b.

"The Spitzer technique is being pushed to smaller, cooler planets more like our Earth than the previously studied hot Jupiters," said Charles Beichman, director of NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology, both in Pasadena, Calif. "In coming years, we can expect that a space tele-scope could characterize the atmosphere of a rocky planet a few times the size of the Earth. Such a planet might show signposts of life."

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Starry-Eyed Hubble Celebrates 20 Years of Awe and Discovery:Star Birth in the Carina Nebula

Spitzer Press Release

A colony of hot, young stars is stirring up the cosmic scene in this new picture from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The image shows the Orion nebula, a happening place where stars are born. The young stars dip and peak in brightness due to a variety of reasons. Shifting cold and hot spots on the stars' surfaces cause brightness levels to change, in addi-tion to surrounding disks of lumpy planet-forming material, which can obstruct starlight. Spitzer is keeping tabs on the young stars, providing data on their changing ways.

The hottest stars in the region, called the Trapezium cluster, are bright spots at center right. Radiation and winds from those stars has sculpted and blown away surrounding dust. The densest parts of the cloud appear dark at center left.

This image is a combination of data from Spitzer and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). The Spitzer data was taken after Spitzer's liquid coolant ran dry in May 2009, marking the beginning of its "warm" mission. Light from Spitzer's remaining infrared channels has been color-coded: 3.6-micron light is green and 4.5-micron light is red. 2MASS 2.5 mi-cron light is blue.

AAL Astronomy Associates of Lawrence

University of Kansas Malott Hall 1251 Wescoe Hall Dr, Room 1082 Lawrence, KS 66045-7582

Celestial Mechanic May 2010

disk, a companion forms directly from the collapse of the vast cloud of gas and dust in the same manner as a star (or brown dwarf).

If the last scenario is correct, then this discovery demonstrates that planetary-mass bodies can be made through the same mechanism that builds stars. This is the likely solution because the companion is too young to have formed by the first scenario, which is very slow. The second mechanism occurs rapidly, but the disk around the central brown dwarf probably did not contain enough material to make an object with a mass of 5-10 Jupiter masses.

"The most interesting implication of this result is that it shows that the process that makes binary stars extends all the way down to planetary masses. So it appears that nature is able to make planetary-mass companions through two very different mechanisms," says team member Kevin Luhman of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State University. If the mystery companion formed through cloud collapse and frag-mentation, as stellar binary systems do, then it is not a planet by definition because planets build up inside disks.

The mass of the companion is estimated by comparing its brightness to the luminosities predicted by theoretical evolutionary models for objects at various masses for an age of 1 millon years.

Further supporting evidence comes from the presence of a very nearby binary system that contains a small red star and a brown dwarf. Luhman thinks that all four objects may have formed in the same cloud collapse, mak-ing this in actuality a quadruple system. "The configuration closely resembles quadruple star systems, suggest-ing that all of its components formed like stars," says Luhman.

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