Things have been quiet here at the Ramblings the past three weeks because I was out doing an astronomy speaking gig on a cruise ship. Internet access is slow and expensive from the ship, so I really didn’t post much. I’m back now, though, and it’s time to get in gear talking about the sky.
First, after you get done reading this entry, check out my ‘Casts and Videos page. When you get there, scroll down to a pair of programs I’ve been producing for Astrocast.TV. One is a look at Big Astronomy called The Astronomer’s Universe.
The other is a monthly sky guide called Our Night Sky. Think of them as short-subject films about astronomy to help you get started as a stargazer and/or learn more about what astronomers are finding out about the cosmos. If you’re a planetarium or observatory, Our Night Sky is available free of charge for you to post on your institution’s web site as an embed.
Finding Jupiter this week. Courtesy Sky&Telescope.com (a great source for astronomy information). Click to Jovianate.
So, for most folks in the world, October is a pretty good month for stargazing. Here in the northern hemisphere, the night aren’t snowy and cold yet (particularly in the higher elevations or northerly latitudes. That means that you can still get out there and find some cool stuff without freezing yourself. In the southern hemisphere, the climate is shifting to spring—and while it might be
chilly and cold in some places, the skies are quite rewarding to look at. Wherever you are, dress for the weather and as they say in the cruise advertisements: get out there!
When we were landing at the airport the other night we had a lovely view of moonrise. Not long after that, we spotted a white starlike object in the eastern sky. Not a star though… it’s a planet: it’s Jupiter! Check it out through binoculars or a small telescope. It’s a rewarding sight. I had a lot of people on the ship asking me about it, and when I got home, I even had a friend from Hawai’i call and ask me what it was. Jupiter was the planet that fired up Galileo Galilei’s imagination and scientific instincts back in 1610 when he looked at it through his telescope. What he saw advanced astronomy from a passive activity of simply looking at stuff in the sky to one where scientists could speculate about the true nature of what they saw and construct theories and models based on their observations. Yep, that’s what Jupiter did for Galileo. See what it can do for you! And, keep looking up!
This artist's concept illustrates Kepler-16b, the first planet known to definitively orbit two stars -- what's called a circumbinary planet. The planet, which can be seen in the foreground, was discovered by NASA's Kepler mission. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle.
It’s all over the news today—the Kepler Mission has found a planet called Kepler-16b that has two suns its sky. It is, in essence, orbiting two stars. And, of course, the Star Wars comparisons to Tatooine are ricocheting around the blog-o-sphere and news media sites faster than you can say “Kessel Run.”
It’s completely appropriate to think back to that place in a galaxy far far away that has captivated so many fans of the Star Wars universe. I remember being completely awed by the view of the two suns setting in that alien sky, and yet it felt organic and real to me. Maybe that’s a tribute to the artists at LucasFilm and the care they took to make it seem real. But, as one of those artists—John Knoll, visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic—said about the story released today, “Working in film, we often are tasked with creating something never before seen. However, more often than not, scientific discoveries prove to be more spectacular than anything we dare imagine. There is no doubt these discoveries influence and inspire storytellers. Their very existence serves as cause to dream bigger and open our minds to new possibilities beyond what we think we ‘know.'”
That’s what’s so cool about today’s planetary discovery announcement. It takes us to alien worlds that we now KNOW exist. This exploration has moved from science fiction to science fact. That world is there and those stars are there, and NASA-funded scientists and missions help us look at them. In fact, exoplanet discovery is a world-wide science industry. Earlier this week, scientists at the European Southern Observatory announced that they’d found more than 50 new exoplanets, using a specialized instrument attached to the La Silla Observatory in Chile. Among their finding are 16 super-Earths, worlds that are more massive than Earth but much less massive than the gas giant planets. At least one of those planets exists on the edge of its system’s habitable zone, which is the distance from its star where an Earth-like planet could have liquid water on its surface.
Now, Kepler16-b isn’t the hot, desert world of Tatooine. It’s not a super-Earth. It’s actually about the size of Saturn, made of of half rock and half gas, and is cold. Really cold. The stars it orbits are smaller than our Sun. One of them is only about 20 percent the size of our warm, yellow star. This means they’re dwarf stars. Kepler-16b takes 229 days to orbit its suns, and it is just far enough away that liquid water would not exist on its surface. So, there’s likely not life there. (If you want more details on the discovery and the orbital information, check out the Kepler announcement here.)
But, let’s say there were intelligent life forms on that planet. They would be different from us simply because the evolution of life on any planet is going to depend on the materials and elements available in that particular star-and-planet-system’s birth cloud. And, that raises a lot of very interesting conjectures about what life would evolve to be like on a planet with two suns, where the temps are low and the magnetic field environments would be different from ours. Imagine two “solar wind” streams. Imagine trying to tell time! Early civilizations wouldn’t be able to use simple sundials. What would they use? How would they live? What would they look like? And what would the weather be like on such a world? These may be questions that science fiction writers can and will answer in stories about this place. Perhaps they already have. Time to go read some more SF and learn about the cosmos!
