Keeping Track of the Sky

The Stargazer’s Notebook

A portion of a wall painting showing what looks like Taurus the Bull, with the Pleiades over his back. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
A portion of a wall painting showing what looks like Taurus the Bull, with the Pleiades over his back. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

People have been writing down what they see in the sky for almost as long as people have been LOOKING at the sky. There are credible archaeological finds showing drawings of constellations and other sky sights going back thousands of years. For example, the the  marvelous cave paintings at Lascaux, France, have a number of objects that appear connected to sky sights, including a painting of what looks like the Pleiades hovering over the back of Taurus the Bull.

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The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Akkadians, and many other cultures also n0ted sky events and objects by making carvings, writing on papyrus, and including them in paintings. The advent of formalized writing allowed people to make more detailed descriptions of what they saw in the sky. Succeeding generations of skygazers, philosphers, and scientists also wrote down what they saw in the sky, often sketching their visions to preserve them.

With the advent of photography, modern astronomy took the science of observation one step further, and the digital revolution enabled astronomers to save data from both ground-based and space-based observations. And, amateur astronomers have access to many of the same (or similar) software and hardware tools to record their skygazing.

There are many stargazers who still like to record their views with sketches and notes. For them, Paul G. Abel has created a beautiful little book called The Stargazer’s Notebook. Abel is a Mathematics Teaching Fellow at University of Leicester in England, an astronomer, and a co-presenter on the BBC’s The Sky at Night show (which has a new broadcast slot after more than 40,000 people signed a petition to keep it on the air). His book has a gorgeous image of the constellation Orion on the cover, and is designed for observers at any level to record what they see in the sky. It provides several chapters of information about observing equipment, astronomy clubs, wish lists, observing planning pages, and much, much more. I could see this being a gift for a stargazer undertaking his or her first explorations of the sky. It’s always useful to get good observing and recording habits started at the same time you learn the sky, and an observing notebook like this one serves as a handy guide to the skies and beyond.

It’s Earth-sized, It’s Rocky…

But, it’s Too Hot to Support Life

Artist's impression of the planet Kepler-78b and its host star. Art by Karen Teramura (UHIfA)
Artist’s impression of the planet Kepler-78b and its host star. Art by Karen Teramura (UHIfA)

It had to happen eventually—the discovery of an exoplanet with the same rocky-iron composition and size as Earth, but orbiting another star. The latest planet found orbiting another were first observed by the Kepler mission. Astronomers targeted this world, called Kepler-78b, for followup observations using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, on the Big Island of Hawai’i. It lies about 400 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Cygnus, the Swan.

The planet has some peculiar characteristics, as does its star, which rotates very slowly—about 1.5 meters per second. At that speed the star completes one rotation on its axis every 12.5 days. To give you an idea of how slow that is, a typical jogger goes about the same speed here on Earth. In addition, the parent star for Kepler-78b has star spots, which make it more difficult to suss out any possible planets. Astronomers had to do quite a bit of observational analysis to separate out the planet in the observations.

Kepler-78b has a radius of 1.2 times Earth’s, and has about 1.7 times Earth’s mass. It follows an 8.5-hour orbit which is incredibly fast compared to Earth’s 365-day trip around the Sun. For the planet to orbit that fast, it lies about 15,000,000 kilometers from its star.That’s amazingly close, which explains why this planet is too hot to support life.  Measurements indicate that the surface temperature of this planet is 2,000 degrees hotter than Earth’s (which can get as high as 57.7° C or 135° F)  By comparison, Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, at at distance of 59 million kilometers. Its surface temperature gets as high as 630° C (1,140° F).  With such high surface temperatures, the surface of Kepler-78b could be a molten inferno.

As astronomers find more and more planets in the Kepler data, they’re able to classify them in different categories, such as “superEarths” and “hot Jupiters”. Kepler-78b is in a relatively new class called “ultrashort period planets. These are worlds discovered in Kepler observations that have orbital periods of less than 12 hours. They’re small, usually about one or two times the size of Earth, and all are so close to their planets that their surfaces are being scorched. It’s not clear how these rocky little worlds formed and survived in such close proximity to their stars.

This finding is just one of many discoveries flowing from the Kepler mission. Mechanical issues have ended the spacecraft’s most sensitive planet searches, but there is still plenty of work to do analyzing its vast treasure trove of information. Learn more about this most recent finding here. For more information about the Kepler telescope, visit the mission Web page.