Astronomy And Neighbours In Space

So often during the night of the summer months in this beautiful part of Spain, the southeast's night sky is so clear and awesome that when you arrive home in the dark, you feel the need, or I certainly do, to observe the sky to try and understand the grandiose, limitless wonder of the universe, or simply to just enjoy the constellations and distant planets and stars.

An app on my phone can tell me all sorts of great, interesting information (not sure how the astronomers arrived at such detailed distances and composition) about the stars in the night sky. But I use it in those months when the temperatures at night, in our terraces, make it so comfortable to wonder in awe at the vastness of space. I need to invest in a powerful telescope to appreciate the night sky with more accuracy and clarity.

Solar Walk App - Saturn and its Moons.

It has been 3 years since I had that kind of thought after arriving here to retire, and I know that eventually, I will treat myself to such a device. But so many people also share this kind of fascination for our night sky, especially scientists who are constantly studying the Universe, searching for new planets, galaxies, or solar systems where there could be inhabited planets similar to our own.

My phone app says there are many moons orbiting our solar system's nine planets. Their names? I don't know; there could be over 150 of them! Some astronomers speak of 170 or more, maybe too many names to learn... Now they also talk in terms of Pluto's downgrading as a planet. Is it not out there now? I believe it is, but if it is no longer a planet, what has it become?

Winter Constellations - Image by AstronomyTrek.com.

So what do we have out there? Constellations, solar systems, galaxies, planets, asteroids, stars of all sizes and distances from our planet, dwarf planets, and all kinds of floating bodies in the sky: celestial bodies around our sun and many other stars. And astronomers say the Universe is growing constantly, towards where? How can there be so much space out there? They know there is, but how is it growing? They say they are discovering new solar systems all the time, and in them, more and more planets.

Can we say it is unimaginable that we are alone in outer space? Clearly, they think otherwise, or else they would not be searching all the time for other inhabited planets out there. As a matter of fact, only a few months ago, NASA issued the news of several planets that could possibly have a similar life as our own planet. In that vastness of space, one day, a few planets will be discovered with a life of some sort or another, and perhaps with beings possessing superior technology than our own.

Maybe they are visiting us right now or have done so in the past and found us so primitive that they did not bother to say hello, and left us behind in our survival. But now we are traveling to other planets or will be soon, and already touched our moon, so we are advancing all the time in our search for better space fuels to propel us through to other planets and eventually to other galaxies, perhaps.

Science fiction now has to look for much further horizons, and I am sure it is all the time because so many of the so-called science fiction technology gadgets are already in our hands, in everyday use by almost everyone.

If our planet were formed as a result of a giant explosion of gas and matter that made our star the sun and its other neighboring planets around it, how many other planets can exist out there formed from the continuous explosions of gas and clouds of matter that perhaps one day will be called our space neighbors? Even if they happen to be hundreds of light-years away from us?

You pay a visit to your neighbors frequently or from time to time, but how can we visit any of our neighbors in outer space? Well, scientists and astronomers are busy on that front every day, and they do not stop amazing us with their findings and wisdom.

These ideas and thoughts during the summer are present quite often in my mind because of the sheer beauty of the sky at night in this part of the world. Writing this article to publish it also like a post on my site http://www.SweetHolidayHomes.com may give you the desire to visit this part of the world next time you feel you need a vacation to enjoy this part of the world.

German Calvo

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?Astronomy-And-Neighbours-In-Space&id=9239432

Read More

Featured Deep-Sky Object - M104 Sombrero Galaxy

The spring evening sky presents a plethora of galaxies to observe through remote robotic and backyard telescopes. One galaxy in particular that has interesting and unique characteristics is known as The Sombrero Galaxy, also called M104 or NGC 4594.

The Sombrero Galaxy is about 28 million light-years (50,000 light-years in diameter) from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The galaxy is so named because the halo-like features surrounding its disc are unusually large, making it look like a sombrero. It's not exactly known who discovered the galaxy. The discoverer was either Pierre Mechain or Charles Messier. William Herschel independently discovered the object in 1784, even though it had already been discovered by others.

M104  - "Sombrero Galaxy" in Virgo Imaged by Sam P. and Tom M.

The Sombrero Galaxy is a favorite target for well-equipped amateur astronomers. If you have a good dark-sky site, the object can be spotted through binoculars (those with large telescopes can spot the dust lane). This spring and early summer object can be found halfway between the constellations Virgo and Corvus.

Location of M104 in the Constellation Virgo

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope have been used to study the Sombrero in visible and infrared light. The star-birth regions stand out in infrared wavelengths and are mostly located along the outer rim of the dust ring surrounding the galaxy’s core. The Sombrero Galaxy looks as it does partly because we are viewing it “edge-on” from our point of view here on Earth.

"Close observations of the central bulge display many points of light that are actually around 2000 globular clusters that hover around the core of the galaxy, and the number could be related to the size of the central bulge. M104's spectacular dust rings host many younger and brighter stars, and show intricate details astronomers don't yet fully understand," stated the NASA website Astronomy Picture Of The Day in a July 2013 entry.

Examination of the galaxy in recent years revealed that it had a sort of "split personality," NASA said on another website, showing that is a large elliptical galaxy that has a disk galaxy embedded inside of it. The reason this happened is still poorly understood.

The image to the upper-left was acquired by 6th-grade students at the Plymouth Community Intermediate School located in Massachusetts as part of a class astronomy education project called "The Galaxy Project - What Lies Beyond the Stars?" The image was taken with a 17" telescope remotely in New Mexico with a 5-minute exposure.

Sources: Space.com, Space-Facts.com

Read More

Exoplanet LkCa 15b

As I was researching astronomy education projects pertaining to exoplanets, (my interest has been growing on the subject lately) I stumbled upon an interesting article on the web about an alien planet announced back in November of 2015. The alien planet, called LkCa 15 b, orbits a star 450 light-years away and appears to be on its way to growing into a world similar to Jupiter.

LkCa 15 b is a candidate protoplanetary object in orbit around LkCa 15, a star in the Taurus-Auriga Star-Forming Region. The object was discovered by direct imaging techniques using the Keck II telescope in 2011 by Adam Kraus and Michael Ireland. A 2015 study of observations from the Magellan Telescope and the Large Binocular Telescope argued that the planet is forming through accretion. It is the first of its kind to be seen in the process of active accretion.

The artist's illustration shows how planets could form in

a transition disc around a star similar to LkCa 15 b.

Credit: NASA/JPL - Caltech.

"This is the first incontrovertible detection of a planet still in the process of forming--a so-called 'protoplanet'," commented Dr. Kate Follette in a November 18, 2015, Stanford University Press Release. Dr. Follette is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford in Palo Alto, California, and a co-lead author of the study published in the November 19, 2015, issue of the journal Nature. Dr. Follette's work produced a remarkable digital image of LkCa 15 b glowing in the glaring light of searing-hot hydrogen gas--which is a prediction of planet-formation theories that have now been verified directly by the important observations of Dr. Follette and her co-authors.

The observation was combined in the paper with data that had been provided by Steph Sallum, the co-lead author and doctoral student at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who independently observed the same parent star with a complementary technique. Using the University of Arizona’s Magellan Telescope in Chile, Follette, her adviser at Stanford, Professor Bruce Macintosh, and their co-authors at the University of Arizona were able to hone in on this particular shade of red H-alpha light emanating from LkCa 15 b.

The planet is forming in a transition disk, a doughnut-like ring of dust and rocky debris orbiting its parent star, LkCa 15. The central clearings within transition disks are believed to be created by the formation of planets, which sweep up dust and gas from the disk as they orbit the star. Astronomers have long speculated that investigating these gaps could lead to the discovery of protoplanets, but getting a good look at these infant worlds has been challenging.

Adaptive optics observations from

the Large Binocular Telescope and the

Magellan Adaptive Optics System.

Credit by: Steph Sallum.

The team confirmed the existence of LkCA 15b, imaging it directly in hydrogen-alpha photons, a type of light that's emitted when superheated material accretes onto a newly forming world. (Like newborn stars, newborn planets are surrounded by disks of feeder material.)

In the November 2015 journal Nature, study team members reported that other LBT observations revealed the presence of another newborn planet, LkCA 15c, inside the gap and suggested that a third (LkCA 15d) exists there as well.

"We're seeing sources in the clearing," Sallum said. "This is the first time that we've been able to connect a forming planet to a gap in a protoplanetary disk."

"The researchers' discovery provides stringent constraints on planet formation theories," Zhaohuan Zhu of Princeton University, who was not affiliated with the new study, wrote in an accompanying "News & Views" piece in the same issue of Nature. "For example, such theories now have to explain how a giant planet can form 15-16 AU from its star within 2 million years, and still be growing after this time."

"The new technique demonstrated by Sallum and her team could lead to the discovery of many other newly forming exoplanets, allowing astronomers to learn much more about the distribution of young worlds",  Zhu added.

"Such an understanding of the young planet population will shed light on the decades-old problem of planet formation, and reveal how young planetary systems can evolve into older ones such as our solar system, billions of years after they were born," Zhu wrote.

Sources: Astronomy Now, Wikipedia, Space.com

Read More