Astronomy Down Under

Recent news

10 Jun at 15:24 by Wilson

I haven’t been updating this blog much lately… not for the lack of news to comment on, but more for a lack of free time. Now that I’m “back” and, hopefully, with a bit more of free time in the foreseeable future, we’ll see more content showing up here. And I’ll start with a quick rundown of what’s been in the news recently:

Atlantis The shuttle was launched yesterday, finally, and it reached orbit without incident. However, examinations of the thermal protection made in orbit found a 4-inch (10 cm) gap in one of the thermal blankets protecting the underside of the ship. NASA does not seem to be worried about it, as it is not located in any of the areas the suffer most of the heat of re-entry. The shuttle is expected to land on 19 June (Florida time).

Gliese 581c It is not a transiting planet, after all (that is, it never moves between Earth and its star during the orbit). That limits what information can be discovered about this planet in the near future. Still, it looks more and more likely that this planet is not as terrestrial as we’d like it to be; it’s more likely that it is more venusian than terrestrial, and the fact that it is tidally locked to its star can’t help the weather. Which brings us to…

Gliese 581d This planet received much less attention from the media, but some scientists believe it has a better chance of harbouring life than its more famous brother. Gl581d is significantly farther away from its star (0.25AU, versus 0.073AU for Gl581c), has a longer orbital period (84.4 days) and is more massive (8 Earth-masses). It is also tidally locked to the host star, though. One recent paper argues that a planet of this size is likely to have a dense atmosphere, and certain types of atmosphere would put it safely inside the habitable zone. More relevant still…

Red dwarfs …stars like Gliese 581 are very, very, very stable after they “mature” (conditions in their vicinity are probably not very friendly during their formative years, though). A planet like Gl581d might stay inside its habitable zone for many billions of years (as opposed to Earth, which will stay habitable for the next billion years or so), which gives it very good chances of eventually developing life. In a “good news, bad news” scenario, though, it is thought that the radiation emitted by the star in its first billion years of life might be strong enough to strip the atmosphere of any planet in the habitable zone without a strong magnetic field, and that any planet in the habitable zone would become tidally locked in its first 500 million years of existence and would lose its magnetic field, thus becoming uninhabitable. We’ll have to wait for more advanced instruments to be able to gather more information about what these planets are like today…

New planets There were quite a few; in fact, there were 28 new planets discovered over the last few months. There is a very dense “super-Jupiter” (eight times as massive as Jupiter, but only slightly larger) in a very elliptical orbit around a F-type star (larger and a bit hotter than the Sun) in the constellation Hercules; there was another hot Jupiter in Monoceros, which was interesting mostly because it was the first planet discovered by the European orbiting observatory COROT; another transiting hot Jupiter running a very short (31 hours long) orbit around its host star; a transiting hot Neptune around red dwarf GI-436 (a hot Jupiter is a planet similar to Jupiter — that is, composed mostly of hydrogen — orbiting close to its star; a hot Neptune is similar, but with much more water in its composition); and many more, as exoplanets.org reports.

That’s it for now. There are certainly many interesting events going on, and the last few months were very exciting in the field of astronomy; let’s hope that the trend continues.