Gaia Satellite Will Take Five Months to Focus

The recently launched European telescope Gaia has just begun to focus its telescope, and will take up to five months to complete this before it can become fully operational.  Gaia is a telescope designed to survey the Milky Way using spectrophotometry and parallax measurements, it orbits the second Lagrange point of the Earth-Sun system.  As mentioned in lecture Gaia's instruments are significantly more precise than previous apertures so the data we get from this should be really useful.  Unfortunately the article mentions that it takes up to 3 years to process the data back and 5 years to collect... so we will have to wait until 2022 to get all the data!  While this is disappointing, I think it's great that Gaia will be able to collect data from up to a billion stars, as well as possible exoplanets that orbit those stars.  Maybe soon we can have those cool star wars holographic planetary maps.

Here's a pretty picture Gaia took.

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New Signs for Heavenly Objects Created

The Scottish Sensory Centre in cooperation with the Royal Observatory have created many new signs in British Sign Language for various planets and other astronomy related terms.

Here's the sign for supernova.  The similarity is uncanny.

Surprisingly, up until now, there were no signs for anything in space other than Earth and Sun, meaning that other planets or stars had to be spelled letter by letter.  This is a big step in the right direction, as the field of astronomy has long discriminated against mutes/deafs, what with their lack of means to communicate.  These new signs will help these forgotten souls finally rise up against the oppression.  Though if they do, they will find that they will be limited to the astronomy of our solar system.  The article reports that only 90 signs have been created, whereas there are billions of stars in the universe, meaning that at most only a few other stars have signs for them.  This is quite a big problem, since these mute/deaf astronomers will not be able to easily communicate about obscure stars with names like J05552+0724AP or PSR B1620-26.  Another problem is that these words only work in British Sign Language, which I'm pretty sure is not the most spoken (signed?) in the world.  I think we should have a sign language specifically for astronomy similar to how we have coordinate systems and date systems designed for it.  The system should be extremely convoluted and counter-intuitive to ensure that it fits in with the rest.

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Oldest Known Star Discovered (Again)

The supposed oldest star.

 

 

Astronomers from Australian National University have discovered a star that has an age that is older than any other currently known star.  According to the article, this star is about 13.6 billion years old and offers insight into the chemistry of older stars.  The star was discovered by the university's own telescope and was confirmed with the Magellan Telescope in Chile. 

The way the astronomers date these stars is by looking at the iron content of the stars.  The more iron it has the older the star is.  This is probably because stars make light by fusion, and fusion of elements gradually increases until it stops at iron.  According to a quick Wikipedia search, iron is the heaviest stable element created by stellar nucleosynthesis, any heavier element created will quickly decay into iron.  If a star doesn't have much iron that means it hasn't been performing fusion for a long time (relatively) and thus must be pretty new.  The researchers mentioned in this article stated that the iron content of this star was found to be 60 times less than "any other star" which sounds pretty vague to me.  Personally I don't think this article is that interesting because I seem to have read this same article on many different occasions and they'll probably find another star that's older than this pretty soon.

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An Abnormally Red Brown Dwarf

On February 5th, a team of astronomers from the University of Hertfordshire, England, published a paper about the discovery of an "extremely red L dwarf". 

A brown dwarf is a star that cannot sustain hydrogen fusion in their cores and thus are usually extremely small and cold compared to most other stars.  The small size poses a problem for distinguishing between these substellar masses and planets. The L spectral class of brown dwarves are more reddish than the other classes.

The astronomers noticed this particular peculiar L dwarf from the United Kingdom Infrared Deep Sky Survey Large Area Survey and then used the VLT to attempt to determine why the star was so red.  Using some complicated sounding and probably/possibly clever techniques such as  "applying a de-reddening extinction curve to its spectrum" and not so complicated things such as "increasing optical depth", the team was able to determine that the cause of the redness is due to the composition of the star's atmosphere.  More specifically, they extrapolated that the colors of the brown dwarves will be determined by the thickness of the dust cloud.  While this may not be the most interesting topic in astronomy, findings like these help further model ultracool atmospheres in low temperature stars which are apparently not very well understood.

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An artist's interpretation of what an L dwarf might look like.

Kepler Telescope Functional Again

For the first time in a year, the Kepler telescope managed to observe a distant exoplanet today.  The Kepler telescope suffered a mechanical failure last year, losing its ability to stay stable.  The telescope found exoplanets by looking for eclipsing binary systems.  Since the planets are usually extremely small compared to the stars, the precision must be very high for the telescope to detect the dimming of the star from an eclipse and time how long the eclipse lasts.  The unsteadiness caused by the mechanical failure meant that the telescope could not reach the desired precision to carry out its mission.  But the smart people who worked on the Kepler team came up with an idea last year to use radiation pressure from the Sun to hold the telescope steady, which can last up to 75 days at a time.  The plan was put into action just this year and the telescope looked at a known exoplanet found by another telescope and confirmed its location.  This means that the radiation induced stability worked as planned and the telescope is functional once again.

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