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Calendar of Events PUBLIC OBSERVING

Prairie Park Nature Center Spring Schedule Sunday March 29 8:30—10:00 PM

MONTHLY MEETINGS

NONE in MARCH Friday, APRIL 17, 2009

Dr. Steve Hawley My Life with HST

SPECIAL EVENT Dr. James Kennett

4PM—THURS. March 5 3139 Wescoe Hall

Death from the Skies! SEE PG.6 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: A quick note to start: Because of the combination of Spring Break (last day of classes at KU is Fri-day, March 13) and the Big 12 basketball tournament starting on Thursday March 12, the draw of a meeting for March is severely diminished. Therefore, we have decided not to schedule a meet-ing this month. We will make up for it in two ways: (1) there is a special event THIS WEEK at KU dealing with catastrophic extinc-tions through collisions with space-based material. Please see the poster on pg. 6 and feel free to come if the time fits your sched-

ule; (2) in April, our speaker will be Dr. Steve Hawley, former astronaut and now pro-fessor of Physics and Astronomy at KU. In keeping with our theme of telescopes and the International Year of Astronomy, Dr. Hawley will give a presentation on My Life with the Hubble Space Telescope. This talk was selected because Steve was a key participant in the deployment and maintenance of HST and the next repair mis-sion is scheduled for launch in May 2009. Steve is an exceptionally entertaining

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Volume 35 Number 03 March 2009

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

Alien Life Explored 3

NASA Space Place 4

Extreme Gamma Ray Burst 5

MARCH SPECIAL EVENT 6

Carina in Detail 7

Searching for Inflation 8

Lunar Robots 9

Searching for Inflation (cont.) 3

KU researcher unearths new proof of die-off timetable LAWRENCE — Evidence uncovered by a University of Kansas researcher strongly supports the prospect that biodiversity on Earth grows and shrinks in a regular 62-million-year cycle, give or take a few million years. Adrian Melott, professor of physics and astronomy at KU, published his findings in the Dec. 24 edition of PLoS ONE, a peer-reviewed online publication. In his article, Melott shows that fossils of marine invertebrates in the Paleo-biology Database confirm 2005 findings of regular die-offs by separate re-searchers using another set of fossils.

“The same signal has been found in completely different data sets, making the likelihood that it’s a real signal much greater,” said Melott. “Since the data sets were constructed independently, and treated very differently by those who constructed them, this makes the chances vanishingly small that it is merely a coincidence.” The 62-million-year fluctuation in the array of life on Earth first was discovered in the Sepkoski data set and made public by University of California-Berkeley researchers Robert Rohde and Richard Muller. “Fossil biodiversity is a count of how many different kinds of creatures exist

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Artist’s conception for the design of the planned 30-meter telescope

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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 Friday of each month and often feature guest speakers, presentations by club members, and a chance to exchange amateur astronomy 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

speaker, so please keep Friday April 17 open on your calendar and bring a friend along to the talk.

The Feb. meeting went well. About 15 people showed up to hear a presenta-tion on the plans for the next generation of large, ground-based telescopes. The three telescopes of interest fall into two categories. The LSST and Pan-Starrs scopes are designed for large survey mode, imaging the sky repeat-edly to collect colors and magnitudes for everything in the field of view down to the very faint limits of the telescopes. LSST will generate a huge, publicly accessible database, while Pan-Starrs will search for selected samples of variable (in space and time) objects and then combine or jettison individual CCD frames. Both telescopes claim to be constructing the largest CCD cam-eras ever made. The TMT is, in some sense, a large telescope designed for “traditional” observing, i.e., it will obtain images and/or spectra of very specific

objects, using adaptive optics to improved the imaging quality down to limit of the telescope. It is designed as a telescope for fol-lowup to the large survey samples. Pan-Starrs is partially built and LSST has begun construction of the optics and the camera. The TMT is in the design and planning stage.

The public observing session (MARCH 01) was cancelled due to clouds, thankfully given the low temperatures. Hope you can make it out for the next session on March 29. At minimum, it should be warmer! If anyone has any ideas, suggestions, or input on how we can make the club better, please contact Rick (rcjbm@sbcglobal.net). Look forward to seeing everyone at the March 29 Open House and/or the Friday, April 17 meeting (2001 Malott—7:30 PM).

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on the Earth at a given time,” Melott said. “This number has been generally increasing for the last 500-plus million years. But there have been a lot of ups and downs within this trend. The pattern of these ups and downs includes a strong 62-million year cycle that Rohde and Muller said had a 1-in-100 chance of being a fluke, or chance happening. They had no explanation for why such a regular pattern should exist.” Last year, Melott and colleague Mikhail Medvedev, associate professor of physics and astronomy, offered a novel explanation for the pattern of disappearing species. The KU researchers proposed that the periodic die-offs might have a celestial cause. Melott and Medvedev showed that the seesawing motion of the solar system exposes Earth to an onslaught of cosmic rays on a schedule that is synchronized to the mass extinctions. “Cosmic rays may irradi-ate life forms on the ground, as well as change the atmosphere in ways that expose life to more cancer-causing UVB radiation and possibly cause additional cloud cover,” Melott said. “These stresses could act together with other things that happen, such as asteroid impacts or periods of increased volcanoes.” Despite his contention that the Earth inevi-tably will undergo another dose of higher-than-ordinary cosmic ray exposure, Melott assured that a die-off will not happen anytime soon — at least not one triggered by the motion of the solar sys-tem.“Everyone always asks where we are in the 62-million-year cycle,” said Melott. “According to that cycle, biodiver-sity should be on the way down now, reaching bottom within a few million years.” On Jan. 12 on the National Geo-graphic Channel, Melott appeared in the Naked Science episode “Extinctions,” which addressed similar themes.

Melott’s article is available on the Web site for PLoS ONE.

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Cosmologist Explores Notion Of 'Alien' Life On Earth Astrobiologists have often pondered "life as we do not know it" in the context of extraterrestrial life, says Paul Davies, an internationally acclaimed theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State Univer-sity. "But," he asks, "has there been a blind spot to the possibility of 'alien' life on Earth?" Davies chal-lenged the orthodox view that there is only one form of life in a lecture titled "Shadow Life: Life As We Don't Yet Know It" on Feb. 15 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His presentation was part of the symposium "Weird Life." "Life as we know it appears to have had a single common ancestor, yet, could life on Earth have started many times? Might it exist on Earth today in extreme environments and remain undetected because our techniques are customized to the biochemistry of known life?" asks Davies, who also is the director of the BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University in the College of Lib-eral Arts and Sciences. In the lecture, Davies presented, challenged and extended some of the conclusions from a July 2007 re-port by the National Research Council. That report looked at whether the search for life should include "weird life" – described by the Council as "life with an alternative biochemistry to that of life on Earth." "If a biochemically weird microorganism should be discovered, its status as evidence for a second gene-sis, as opposed to a new branch on our own tree of life, will depend on how fundamentally it differs from known life," wrote Davies in the Nov. 19, 2007, issue of Scientific American. Davies and other pioneers who speculate that life on Earth may have started many times are wondering "why we have overlooked this idea for so long?" The concept of a shadow biosphere, according to Davies, "is still just a theory. If someone discovers shadow life or weird life it will be the biggest sensation in biology since Darwin. We are simply saying, 'Why not let's take a look for it?' It doesn't cost much (compared to looking for weird life on Mars, say), and, it might be right under our noses." Davies, whose research is steeped in the branches of physics that deal with quantum gravity – an attempt to reconcile theories of the very large and the very small – is a prolific author (27 books, both popular and specialty works) and is a provocative speaker (he delivered the 1995 Templeton Prize address after receiving the prestigious award for initiating "a new dialogue between science and religion that is having worldwide repercussions"). Among his books are: "How to Build a Time Machine," "The Origin of Life," "The Big Questions," "The Last Three Minutes," "The Mind of God," "The Cosmic Blueprint" and his most recent book "The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the universe just right for life?" published in the United States under the title "Cosmic Jackpot."

inflation is gravitational waves. It's a prediction of inflation that is ubiquitous. It's a generic thing. If these waves are discovered ... if we detect gravitational waves from inflation, there is a real possibility of pin-ning things down enough so that one could perhaps convince every physicist that inflation happened."

Strangely, a negative finding disconfirms nothing, Krauss said. "The absence of gravitational waves is completely consistent with inflation," he said. Still it's hard to see how inflation theory could be wrong, said Scott Dodelson, a University of Chicago physicist who also spoke with reporters at AAAS, because it explains so many observations. "Inflation allows an explanation of many of those features which for right now, there is no other explanation," he said.

"We have these key components to our picture of the universe, but we really don't know what physics produces any of them," he said, referring to inflation, dark energy and dark matter — the proposed stuff that makes up the universe's missing mass. "The goal of the next decade is to identify the physics."

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Where did all these gadgets come from?!

Ion propulsion. Artificial intelligence. Hyper-spectral imagers. It sounds like science fiction, but all these technologies are now flying around the solar system on real-life NASA missions. How did they get there? Answer: the New Millennium Program (NMP). NMP is a special NASA program that flight tests wild and far-out technologies. And if they pass the test, they can be used on real space missions.

The list of probes that have benefited from technologies incubated by NMP reads like the Who’s Who of cutting-edge space exploration: Spirit and Opportunity (the phenomenally successful rovers exploring Mars), the Spitzer Space Telescope, the New Horizons mission to Pluto, the Dawn asteroid-exploration mission, the comet-smashing probe Deep Impact, and others. Some missions were merely enhanced by NMP technologies; others would have been im-possible without them. ”In order to assess the impact of NMP technologies, NASA has developed a scorecard to keep track of all the places our technologies are being used,” says New Millennium Program manager Christopher Stevens of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

For example, ion propulsion technology flight-tested on the NMP mission Deep Space 1, launched in October 1998, is now flying aboard the Dawn mission. Dawn will be the first probe to orbit an asteroid (Vesta) and then travel to and orbit a dwarf planet (Ceres). The highly efficient ion engine is vital to the success of the 3 billion mile, 8 year journey. The mission could not have been flown using conventional chemical propulsion; launching the enormous amount of fuel required would have broken the project’s budget. “Ion propulsion was the only practical way,” says Stevens. In total, 10 technologies tested by Deep Space 1 have been adopted by more than 20 robotic probes. One, the Small Deep Space Transponder, has become the standard system for Earth communi-cations for all deep-space missions. And Deep Space 1 is just one of NMP’s missions. About a half-dozen others have flown or will fly, and their advanced technologies are only beginning to be adopted. That’s because it takes years to design probes that use these technolo-gies, but Stevens says experience

shows that “if you validate experimental technologies in space, and reduce the risk of using them, missions will pick them up.” Stevens knew many of these technologies when they were just a glimmer in an engineer’s eye. Now they’re “all grown up” and flying around the solar system. It’s enough to make a program manager proud!

The results of all NMP's technology validations are online and the list is impressive: nmp.nasa.gov/TECHNOLOGY/scorecard/scorecard_results.cfm. For kids, the rhyming storybook, "Professor Starr's Dream Trip: Or, How a Little Technology Goes a Long Way" at spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/nmp/starr gives a scientist's perspective on the tech-nology that makes possible the Dawn mission. This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Califor-nia Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Dawn will be the first spacecraft to establish orbits around two separate target bodies during its mission—thanks to ion propulsion validated by Deep Space 1.

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NASA”s FERMI TELESCOPE SEES MOST EXTREME GAMMA-RAY BURST YET The first gamma-ray burst to be seen in high-resolution from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Tele-scope is one for the record books. The blast had the greatest total energy, the fastest motions and the highest-energy initial emissions ever seen. "We were waiting for this one," said Peter Michelson, the principal investigator on Fermi's Large Area Telescope at Stanford University. "Burst emissions at these energies are still poorly understood, and Fermi is giving us the tools to understand them." Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Astronomers believe most occur when exotic massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As a star's core collapses into a black hole, jets of material -- powered by processes not yet fully understood -- blast outward at nearly the speed of light. The jets bore all the way through the collapsing star and continue into space, where they interact with gas previously shed by the star and generate bright afterglows that fade with time.

This explosion (left), designated GRB 080916C, occurred at 7:13 p.m. EDT on Sept. 15, in the constellation Carina. Fermi's other instrument, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor, si-multaneously recorded the event. Together, the two instru-ments provide a view of the blast's initial, or prompt, gamma-ray emission from energies between 3,000 to more than 5 billion times that of visible light. Nearly 32 hours after the blast, Jochen Greiner of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Ger-many, led a group that searched for the explosion's fading afterglow. The team simultaneously captured the field in seven wavelengths

using the Gamma-Ray Burst Optical/Near-Infrared Detector, or GROND, on the 2.2-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory in La Silla, Chile. In certain colors, the brightness of a distant object shows a characteristic drop-off caused by inter-vening gas clouds. The farther away the object is, the redder the wavelength where this fade-out occurs (right). This gives as-tronomers a quick estimate of the object's distance. The team's follow-up observations established that the explosion took place 12.2 billion light-years away. "Already, this was an exciting burst," said Julie McEnery, a Fermi deputy project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "But with the GROND team's distance, it went from exciting to extraordinary." With the distance in hand, Fermi team members showed that the blast exceeded the power of approxi-mately 9,000 ordinary supernovae, if the energy was emitted equally in all directions. This is a stan-dard way for astronomers to compare events even though gamma-ray bursts emit most of their en-ergy in tight jets. Coupled with the Fermi measurements, the distance also helps astronomers determine the slowest speeds possible for material emitting the prompt gamma rays. Within the jet of this burst, gas bullets must have moved at 99.9999 percent the speed of light. This burst's tremendous power and speed make it the most extreme recorded to date. One curious aspect of the burst is a five-second delay separating the highest-energy emissions from the lowest. Such a time lag has been seen clearly in only one earlier burst. "It may mean that the highest-energy emissions are coming from different parts of the jet or created through a different mechanism," Michelson said.

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Violent Carina Nebula Seen in Detail ESO Press Release A new image from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) reveals amazing detail in the intricate struc-tures of one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky, the Carina Nebula (NGC 3372).

The Carina Nebula is located about 7500 light-years away in the constellation of the same name (Carina; the Keel). Spanning about 100 light-years, it is four times larger than the famous Orion Nebula and far brighter. It is an intensive star-forming region with dark lanes of cool dust splitting up the glowing nebula

gas that surrounds its many clusters of stars. The glow of the Carina Nebula comes mainly from hot hydrogen bask-ing in the strong radiation of monster baby stars. The interaction between the hydrogen and the ul-traviolet light results in its characteristic red and pur-ple color.

The new image of the nebula was produced by combining exposures through six different filters from the Wide Field Imager (WFI), attached to the 2.2 m ESO/MPG tele-scope at ESO's La Silla Observatory, in Chile. The immense nebula contains over a dozen stars with at least 50 to 100 times the mass of our Sun. Such stars have a very short lifespan, a few million years at most, the blink of an eye compared with the Sun's expected lifetime of

ten billion years.

One of the Universe's most impressive stars, Eta Carinae, is found in the nebula. It is one of the most mas-sive stars in our Milky Way, over 100 times the mass of the Sun and about four million times brighter, mak-ing it the most luminous star known. Eta Carinae is highly unstable, and prone to violent outbursts, most notably the false supernova event of 1842. For just a few years, Eta Carinae became the second brightest star in the night sky and produced almost as much visible light as a supernova explosion (the usual death throes of a massive star), but it survived. Eta Carinae is also thought to have a hot companion that orbits around it in 5.54 years, in an elliptical orbit. Both stars have strong winds, which collide, leading to interest-ing phenomena. In mid-January 2009, the companion was at its closest distance to Eta Carinae. This event, which may provide a unique insight into the wind structure of the massive stars, has been followed by a flotilla of instruments on several of ESO's telescopes.

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New Search for Cosmic Inflation Mounted Space.com A telescope at the South Pole is being fine tuned to search for gravity waves, hypothetical distortions of space-time that, if confirmed to exist, could further validate Einstein and reveal convincing evidence for a big cosmology theory. Cosmic inflation theory proposes that the early Universe passed through a phase of exponential expansion, ballooning almost instantaneously from less than the size of an atom to about golf-ball size. The theory is widely accepted. It's tied up with the big bang theory of how the universe started and predicts the existence of gravity waves, as well as fluctuations in the density and temperature of radiation left over from the big bang (called the cosmic background , or CMB) and the mass density of the universe. However, unlike CMB and mass density observations, gravity waves have remained elusive.

University of Chicago astrophysicist John Carlstrom and his colleagues now plan to place a new instrument on the South Pole Telescope to search for signals of gravita-tional waves, taking delicate measurements of the CMB. The telescope already has been probing the CMB for dark energy, a repulsive force that pushes the universe apart and overwhelms gravity. "We'll know in 10 years whether or not we can detect gravitational waves from inflation," Carlstrom said last week to a group of reporters at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Chicago.

Inflation theory predicts that gravitational waves were im-printed on the CMB when space-time inflated. The waves travel at the speed of light, but they are so weak that scientists expect to detect only those created during colossal cosmic events, such as black hole merg-ers. Also they have a wavelength that is hard to fathom — almost the size of the visible universe. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Livingston, La., is one detector already designed to spot the elusive waves. Einstein's theory of general relativity also predicted that shifts in large amounts of mass or energy would disrupt the fabric of space-time and generate regional ripples of gravitational radia-tion. They would be imperceptible to us. However, the gravitational radiation could also be detected indi-rectly through its polarizing effect on the CMB.

Here is how it could work. Inflation theory predicts that quantum fluctuations in the universe have been stretched out to cosmic sizes and became the seeds for the large-scale structure of the universe. One class of these fluctuations has already been observed — fluctuations in the density of subatomic particles throughout the universe, Carlstrom said. A second class of these fluctuations is gravity waves, which he and other physicists think could be detected by telescopes tuned to the proper frequency of electromagnetic ra-diation. Carlstrom's team is building a special instrument, a polarimeter, to be attached to the South Polar Telescope, to search for gravity waves. The telescope operates at submillimeter wavelengths, between mi-crowaves and infrared on the electromagnetic spectrum. The idea is to search for the signature of gravita-tional waves in the CMB, which could be imprinted with polarization as a result of the waves.

A European space mission called Planck, more sensitive than the mission that found the cosmic microwave background, is set to launch in April, also in an effort to look for the polarization feature. It's possible that inflation theory is entirely wrong. So discovery of gravity waves would be a big deal and go a long way to-ward validating the theory, as well as the big bang and some other big cosmological claims.

At the AAAS meeting, Arizona State University's Lawrence Krauss said he was pessimistic about the poten-tial for cosmology to make new discoveries, based on the expansion of the universe. However, the possible detection of gravity waves excites him. "The amazing thing about inflation is that it is completely consistent with what we see," he told reporters. "I think many people think that what's been called a smoking gun of

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Small Robots Can Prepare Lunar Surface For NASA Outpost ScienceDaily Small robots the size of riding mowers could prepare a safe landing site for NASA’s Moon outpost, accord-ing to a NASA-sponsored study prepared by Astrobotic Technology Inc. with technical assistance from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. Astrobotic Technology and Carnegie Mellon researchers analyzed mission requirements and developed the design for an innovative new type of small lunar robot under contract from NASA’s Lunar Surface Systems group.

The results were presented February 27 in Washington, D.C., at a NASA Lunar Surface Systems confer-ence co-sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its Space Enterprise Council. “NASA faces a challenge in planning the layout for its outpost, which is expected to begin operations in 2020,” said Wil-liam “Red” Whittaker, chairman and chief technical officer of Astrobotic and a Carnegie Mellon professor of robotics. “For efficient cargo transfer, the landing site needs to be close to the outpost’s crew quarters and laboratories. Each rocket landing and takeoff, however, will accelerate lunar grit outwards from the pad. With no atmosphere to slow it down, the dry soil would sandblast the outpost.”

The research examined two potential solutions: 1) construction of a berm around the landing site, and 2) creation of a hard-surface landing pad using indigenous materials. In the first solution, re-searchers found that two rovers weighing 330 pounds each would take less than six months to build a berm around a landing site to block the sandblasting effect. A berm 8.5 feet tall in a 160-foot semi-circle would require moving 2.6 million pounds of lunar dirt. Robots this size can be sent to NASA’s planned polar outpost site in advance of human ex-

peditions. Astrobotic Technology Inc. has proposed that landing site preparation be provided by commer-cial ventures.

In the second solution, researchers showed how small robots could comb the lunar soil for rocks, gather-ing them to pave a durable grit-free landing pad, said John Kohut, Astrobotic’s chief executive officer. “This might reduce the need to build protective berms. To discern the best approach, early robotic scout-ing missions need to gather on-site information about the soil’s cohesion levels and whether rocks and gravel of the right size can be found at the site.”

Also at Carnegie Mellon, Whittaker is directing the development of Astrobotic’s first lunar robot, which has been undergoing field trials for several months. The company’s first mission, to win the $20 million Google Lunar X prize by visiting the Apollo 11 landing site and transmitting high-definition video to Earth, is set for December 2010.

Small excavation robots, such as these conceptual vehicles, would be capable of preparing lunar landing sites for a future outpost, a new study shows. (Credit: Astrobotic Technology Inc)

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AAL Astronomy Associates of Lawrence

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

Celestial Mechanic March 2009