Have you ever come across this kind of description of an astronomical event?

“…astronomers have witnessed a supermassive black hole blasting its galactic neighbor with a deadly beam of energy…Both galaxies are situated about 1.4 billion light-years away from Earth…The offending galaxy probably began assaulting its companion about 1 million years ago…”

How can that be, asks Sciencebase reader Adam Azman. If the event is at a distance of 1.4 billion light years from Earth it will have had to have started its journey from that point in space to reach us 1.4 billion years ago, yet, the article tells us the event only began 1 million years ago. It seems quite paradoxical, but according to Dave Mosher, author of the article Galaxy Blasts Neighbor with Deadly Jet, the explanation is quite simple and essentially glosses over Einstein’s theory of relativity to help astronomers talk about the times and distances as if there were a fixed universal frame of reference.

“Most astronomers,” he told Sciencebase, “refer to time relative to Earth when they say something happened. E.g. as an observer on Earth 1 million years ago, the event would have just been getting started. They avoid stating it happened 1.401 billion years ago because of the quirkiness of relativity…in other words, just because light appears to be 1.401 by old doesn’t mean it actually is… there’s too much fudge factor to be certain. It’s more accurate AND precise to say the light reached Earth 1 million years ago.” He admits that the issue sometimes “fries his brain”, and tells me that he is “really going to start putting an explanatory graph in my stories from now on… there’s no way around it.”

Meanwhile, Azman, a chemistry student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, had also done some digging of his own and had spoken to Bryan Preston, a political blogger who often writes about cosmological matters. Preston’s explanation is close to that of Mosher, “The ‘million years ago’ bit is a reference to ‘as seen from earth’ - if we’d
had
a Hubble
telescope a million
years ago,
we could have
seen this event beginif we’d had a Hubble telescope a million years ago, we could have seen this event begin,” he says, “But the event actually happened 1.4 billion years ago and it took the light that long to get to us to see it in the first place.” He adds that, “if we’d been technologically advanced a million years ago, we’d have used that technology to see the start of the Death Star’s bombardment of its neighbor. To have seen it all happening when it actually happened, we’d have had to be at the scene, 1.4 billion light years away from Earth.”

These timelines can be confusing and are a constant source of letters to the editor of popular press publications. “For instance,” adds Preston, “we name supernovae by the year they were observed to have blown up, hence SN1987A. But that star was 100,000 light years away, so it actually blew up 100,000 years ago, and we just saw it blow up in 1987 because it took the light 100,000 years to get here.”

It’s all relative, you see?

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A Billion Light Years from Home

In the late 1990s, the universe changed. The sums suddenly did not add up. Observations of the remnants of stars that exploded billions of years ago, Type Ia supernovae, showed that not only are they getting further away as the universe expands but they are moving faster and faster. It is as if some mysterious hidden force that pervades the cosmos is working against gravity and accelerating the expansion of the universe. This force has become known as dark energy and although it apparently fills the universe, scientists have absolutely no idea what it is or where it comes from, several big research teams around the globe are working with astronomical technology that could help them find an answer.

Until type Ia supernovae appeared on the cosmological scene, scientists thought that the expansion of the universe following the Big Bang was slowing down. Type Ia supernovae are very distant objects, which means their light has taken billions of years to reach us. But, their brightness could be measured to a high degree of accuracy that they provide astronomers with a standard beacon with which the vast emptiness of space could be illuminated, figuratively speaking.

The supernovae data, obtained by the High-Z SN Search team and the Supernova Cosmology Project, rooted in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, suggested that not only is the universe expanding, but that this expansion is accelerating. to make On the basis of the Type Ia supernovae, the rate of acceleration of expansion suggests that dark energy comprises around 73% the total energy of the universe, with dark matter representing 24% of the energy and all the planets, stars, galaxies, black holes, etc containing a mere 4%.

HETDEX, TEX STYLE

Professor Karl Gebhardt and Senior Research Scientists Dr Gary Hill and Dr Phillip McQueen and their colleagues running the Hobby Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) based at the McDonald Observatory in Texas are among the pioneers hoping to reveal the source and nature of dark energy. Those ancient supernovae are at a “look-back time” of 9 billion years, just two-thirds the universe’s age. HETDEX will look back much further to 10 -12 billion years.

HETDEX will not be looking for dark energy itself but its effects on how matter is distributed. “In the very early Universe, matter was spread out in peaks and troughs, like ripples on a pond, galaxies that later formed inherited that pattern,” Gebhardt explains. A detailed 3D map of the galaxies should reveal the pattern. “HETDEX uses the characteristic pattern of ripples as a fixed ruler that expands with the universe,” explains Senior Research Scientist Gary Hill. Measuring the distribution of galaxies uses this ruler to map out the positions of the galaxies, but this needs a lot of telescope time and a powerful new instrument. “Essentially we are just making a very big map [across some 15 billion cubic light years] of where the galaxies are and then analyzing that map to reveal the characteristic patterns,” Hill adds.

“We’ve designed an upgrade that allows the HET to observe 30 times more sky at a time than it is currently able to do,” he says. HETDEX will produce much clearer images and work much better than previous instruments, says McQueen. Such a large field of view needs technology that can analyze the light from those distant galaxies very precisely. There will be 145 such detectors, known as spectrographs, which will simultaneously gather the light from tens of thousands of fibers. “When light from a galaxy falls on one of the fibers its position and distance are measured very accurately,” adds Hill.

The team has dubbed the suite of spectrographs VIRUS. “It is a very powerful and efficient instrument for this work,” adds Hill, “but is simplified by making many copies of the simple spectrograph. This replication greatly reduces costs and risk as well.”

McQueen adds that after designing VIRUS, the team has built a prototype of one of the 145 unit spectrographs. VIRUS-P is now operational on the Observatory’s Harlan J. Smith 2.7 m telescope, he told us, “We’re delighted with its performance, and it’s given us real confidence in this part of our experiment.”

VIRUS will make observations of 10,000 galaxies every night. So, after just 100 nights VIRUS will have mapped a million galaxies. “We need a powerful telescope to undertake the DEX survey as quickly as possible,” adds McQueen. Such a map will constrain the expansion of the universe very precisely. “Since dark energy only manifests itself in the expansion of the universe, HETDEX will measure the effect of dark energy to within one percent,” Gebhardt says. The map will allow the team to determine whether the presence of dark energy across the universe has had a constant effect or whether dark energy itself evolves over time.

“If dark energy’s contribution to the expansion of the universe has changed over time, we expect HETDEX to see the change [in its observations],” adds Gebhardt, “Such a result will have profound implications for the nature of dark energy, since it will be something significantly different than what Einstein proposed.”

SLOAN RANGER

Scientific scrutiny of the original results has been so intense that most cosmologists are convinced dark energy exists. “There was a big change in our understanding around 2003-2004 as a triangle of evidence emerged,” says Bob Nichol of the University of Portsmouth, England, who is working on several projects investigating dark energy.

First, the microwave background, the so-called afterglow of creation, showed that the geometry of the universe has a mathematically “flat” structure. Secondly, the data from the Type Ia supernovae measurements show that the expansion is accelerating. Thirdly, results from the Anglo-Australian 2dF redshift survey and then the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) showed that on the large scale, the universe is lumpy with huge clusters of galaxies spread across the universe.

The SDSS carried out the biggest galaxy survey to date and confirmed gravity’s role in the expansion structures in the universe by looking at the ripples of the Big Bang across the cosmic ocean. “We are now seeing the corresponding cosmic ripples in the SDSS galaxy maps,” Daniel Eisenstein of the University of Arizona has said, “Seeing the same ripples in the early universe and the relatively nearby galaxies is smoking-gun evidence that the distribution of galaxies today grew via gravity.”

But why did an initially smooth universe become our lumpy cosmos of galaxies and galaxy clusters? An explanation of how this lumpiness arose might not only help explain the evolution of the early universe, but could shed new light on its continued evolution and its ultimate fate. SDSS project will provide new insights into the nature of dark energy’s materialistic counterpart, dark matter.

As with dark energy, dark matter is a mystery. Scientists believe it exists because without it the theories that explain our observations of how galaxies behave would not stack up. Dark matter is so important to these calculations, that a value for all the mass of the universe five times bigger than the sum of all the ordinary matter has to be added to the equations to make them work. While dark energy could explain the accelerating acceleration our expanding universe, the existence of dark matter could provide an explanation for how the lumpiness arose.

“In the early universe, the interaction between gravity and pressure caused a region of space with more ordinary matter than average to oscillate, sending out waves very much like the ripples in a pond when you throw in a pebble,” Nichol, who is part of the SDSS team, explains. “These ripples in the matter grew for a million years until the universe cooled enough to freeze them in place. What we now see in the SDSS galaxy data is the imprint of these ripples billions of years later.”

Colleague Idit Zehavi now at Case Western University adds a different tone. Gravity’s signature could be likened to the resonance of a bell she suggests, “The last ring gets forever quieter and deeper in tone as the universe expands.” It is now so faint as to be detectable only by the most sensitive surveys. The SDSS has measured the tone of this last ring very accurately.”

“Comparing the measured value with that predicted by theory allows us to determine how fast the Universe is expanding,” explains Zehavi. This, as we have seen, depends on the amount of both dark matter and dark energy.

The triangle of evidence - microwave background, type Ia supernovae, and galactic large-scale structure - leads to only one possible conclusion: that there is not enough ordinary matter in the universe to make it behave in the way we observe and there is not enough normal energy to make it accelerate as it does. “The observations have forced us, unwillingly, into a corner,” says Nichol, “dark energy has to exist, but we do not yet know what it is.”

The next phase of SDSS research will be carried out by an international collaboration and sharpen the triangle still further along with the HETDEX results. “HETDEX adds greatly to the triangle of evidence for dark energy,” adds Hill, “because it measures large-scale structure at much greater look-back times between local measurements and the much older cosmic microwave background,” says Hill. As the results emerge, scientists might face the possibility that dark energy has changed over time or it may present evidence that requires modifications to the theory of gravity instead.

The Anglo-Australian team is also undertaking its own cosmic ripple experiment, Wiggle-Z. “This program is measuring the size of ripples in the Universe when the Universe was about 7 billion years old,” Brian Schmidt at Australian National University says. Schmidt was leader of the High-Z supernovae team that found the first accelerating evidence. SDSS and 2dF covered 1-2 billion years ago and HETDEX will measure ripples at 10 billion years. “Together they provide the best possible measure of what the Universe has been doing over the past several years,” Schmidt muses.

INTERNATIONAL SURVEY

The Dark Energy Survey, another international collaboration, will make any photographer green with envy, but thankful they don’t have to carry it with them. The Fermilab team plans to build an extremely sensitive 500 Megapixel camera, with a 1 meter diameter and a 2.2 degree field of view that can grab those millions of pixels within seconds.

The camera itself will be mounted in a cage at the prime focus of the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, a southern hemisphere telescope owned and operated by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). This instrument, while being available to the wider astronomical community, will provide the team with the necessary power to conduct a large scale sky survey.

Over five years, DES will use almost a third of the available telescope time to carry out its wide survey. The team hopes to achieve exceptional precision in measuring the properties of dark energy using counts of galaxy clusters, supernovae, large-scale galaxy clustering, and measurements of how light from distant objects is bent by the gravity of closer objects between it and the earth. By probing dark energy using four different methods, the Dark Energy Survey will also double check for errors, according to team member Joshua Frieman.

WFMOS

According to Nichol, “The discovery of dark energy is very exciting because it has rocked the whole of science to its foundations.” Nichol is part of the WFMOS (wide field multi-object spectrograph) team hoping to build an array of spectrographs for the Subaru telescopes. These spectrographs will make observations of millions of galaxies across an enormous volume of space at a distances equivalent to almost two thirds the age of the universe. “Our results will sit between the very accurate HETDEX measurements and the next generation SDSS results coming in the next five years,” he explains, “All the techniques are complimentary to one another, and will ultimately help us understand dark energy.”

DESTINY’S CHILD

If earth-based studies have begun to reveal the secrets of dark energy, then three projects vying for attention could take the experiments off-planet to get a slightly closer look. The projects all hope to look at supernovae and the large-scale spread of matter. They will be less error prone than any single technique and so provide definitive results.

SNAP, SuperNova/Acceleration Probe, is led by Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, one of the original supernova explorers. SNAP will observe light from thousands of Type Ia supernovae in the visible and infra-red regions of the spectrum as well as look at how that light is distorted by massive objects in between the supernovae and the earth.

Adept, Advanced Dark Energy Physics Telescope, is led by Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. This mission will also look at near-infrared light from 100 million galaxies and a thousand Type Ia supernovae. It will look for those cosmic ripples and so map out the positions of millions of galaxies. This information will allow scientists to track how the universe has changed over billions of years and the role played by dark energy.

Destiny, Dark Energy Space Telescope, led by Tod Lauer of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, based in Tucson, Arizona, will detect and observe more than 3000 supernovae over a two-year mission and then survey a vast region of space looking at the lumpiness of the universe.

LIGHTS OUT ON DARK ENERGY

So, what is dark energy? “A this point it is pure speculation,” answers Hill, “The observations are currently too poor, so we are focusing on making the most accurate measurements possible.” Many scientists are rather embarrassed but equally excited by the thought that we understand only a tiny fraction of the universe. Understanding dark matter and dark energy is one of the most exciting quests in science. “Right now, we have no idea where it will lead, adds Hill.

“Despite some lingering doubts, it looks like we are stuck with the accelerating universe,” says Schmidt. “The observations from supernovae, large-scale structure, and the cosmic microwave background look watertight,” he says. He too concedes that science is left guessing. The simplest solution is that dark energy was formed along with the universe. The heretical solution would mean modifying Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, which has so far been a perfect predictor of nature. “Theories abound,” Schmidt adds, “whatever the solution, it is exciting, but a very, very hard problem to solve.”

This David Bradley special feature article appeared originally in StarDate magazine - 2007-07-01-21:12:X1

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Cosmic Effort Sheds Light on Dark Energy

Among the score of small chemical species detected in the environment around the supergiant star VY Canis Majoris is common salt (NaCl), hydrogen isocyanide, phosphorus nitride, and protonated carbon monoxide ions. These materials contain several of the elements critical to the formation of life, explain the researchers, something that was not expected to be found in the atmosphere of a cool dying star.

“I don’t think anyone would have predicted that VY Canis Majoris is a molecular factory. It was really unexpected,” says Arizona chemist Lucy Ziurys, Director of ARO, “Everyone thought that the interesting chemistry in gas clouds around old stars was happening in envelopes around much closer, carbon-rich stars.

We are all made of stars, but whether or not this latest evidence points to a stellar origin for life on earth remains to be seen. Apparently, comets and meteorites dump about 40,000 tonnes of interstellar dust on our planet each year, presumably this figure was much higher when the earth was mere millions of years old and given that most of its original carbon evaporated away from its primordial methane atmosphere it is very possible that we do indeed owe our existence to a heavenly body.

You can read my full write-up on this over on SpectroscopyNOW.com

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We are all made of stars

Caltech astronomer Richard Ellis exploited “gravitational lensing”, an effect by which light from distant stars and galaxies is focused towards us by intervening massive objects. Ellis presented his images of these faint and distant objects today at a conference entitled “From IRAS to Herschel and Planck” being held conference at the Geological Society in London.

The Caltech-led group used massive clusters of galaxies, as the most
powerful
gravitational lenses aroundthe most powerful gravitational lenses around to locate galactic systems more distant than any previously observed. They used the Keck II 10 m diameter reflector telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, to make their observations.

The resulting images can be seen on the Caltech site. These galaxies represent the earliest seen twinklings of the universe following the so-called Dark Ages before which no stars shone. Pinpointing the moment of “cosmic dawn” is one of the major quests of modern astronomy.

Of course, the observations may not be definitive, confesses Ellis. “As with all work at the frontiers, skeptics may wish to see further proof that the objects we are detecting with Keck are really so distant,” he explains.

“We can infer the Universe had a lot of star formation at these early times from Spitzer Space Telescope measurements of larger galaxies seen when the Universe was about 300-500 million years older”, explains Mr Stark. “These galaxies show the tell-tale sign of old stars (and were described in earlier work by University of Exeter scientist Andrew Bunker). To produce these old stars requires significant earlier activity, most likely in the fainter star-forming galaxies we have now seen.”

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Cosmic dawn

The eZipSky recently announced its Interactive SkyEngine, possibly the simplest way to search for many common features of the sky at night. Enter your zipcode and an object of desire - the moon, ISS, a planet, constellation - and the SkyEngine returns that object’s location or tells you when it will next be visible from your location.

Available sky objects include the sun, the moon, the naked-eye planets, the constellations, the 150 brightest stars, the brightest star clusters and galaxies, and upcoming meteor showers. It also provides hits for the International Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope, more than 100 other earth-orbiting satellites, and, when it’s in Earth orbit, the Space Shuttle.

Imagining I was in Cambridge, MA, as opposed to Cambridge, UK, I tried out the zipcode for Harvard Science, 02138, and apparently I should “Look for
the
Andromeda Galaxy
after it rises tonightLook for the Andromeda Galaxy after it rises tonight at 20:51 and before sunrise tomorrow morning at 5:14.” The results provided also offer tips on what to search for next, so following their lead I ran a search on Mars and got a similar pair of times to watch out for it. Something that was lacking when I first visited the site was reference compass points to help newbie amateur astronomers pinpoint their objects of desire and not spend all night looking at some random twinkling object rather than the ISS, Mars, or a neighbouring galaxy.

I mentioned this to eZipSky’s Peter Busch and he tells me that the web team has now implemented my idea. Now, that’s service for you!

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A space-age search engine

Home Plate has a finely layered appearance and so made it a tantalizing target for Spirit, according mission controller Steve Squyres. The rover captured its first panoramic image of Home Plate in August 2005 from the summit of Husband Hill and reached the plateau in the Columbia Hills’ inner basin in February 2006. Squyres called one of those images, “one of the neatest pictures we’ve taken with the rovers.”

The image shows nothing more than a small (4 cm) fragment of rock cradled within a downward deflection in otherwise straight layers. Earthly geologists refer to such features as bomb sags and they are usually formed only when a rock fragment (the bomb) is flung upward in an explosion and lands in soft material, causing it to sag.

Chemical analysis has demonstrated that the Martian rock is composed of basalt, a volcanic rock, which precludes it being a meteorite. The rock also carries tiny coagulated ash particles, which could only be present after ash rains down following a volcanic eruption.

NASA says any volcanic activity at Home Plate probably occurred billions, of years ago. “There are lots and lots of places on Mars where, from orbit, you see layered deposits locally that kind of look like this,” says Squyres, “and so it really raises the possibility that a lot of these things all over the planet could be explosive volcanic deposits.”

The fact that the Home Plate rocks are basalt also suggests water may have been present. Basalt is not normally associated with explosions. “When basalt erupts, it often does so as very fluid lava, rather than erupting explosively,” Squyres explains A notable exception comes when hot basalt meets water to cause a steam-driven explosion.

The Science paper is based on data collected during a frenetic few months in 2006, as Spirit was rolling down the Columbia Hills toward a safe place to ride out the Martian winter. The route to safety included a path across Home Plate - leaving Spirit’s drivers on Earth with a dilemma.

“There was all this fabulous science around us,” Squyres says. But with winter approaching, the team had to get Spirit to its safe spot on time, while gathering as much data as possible along the way. “We got an amazing amount of science done, all things considered,” he said. “But there’s more work to be done here.” Spirit is now back at Home Plate, continuing exploration there.

The team published further details of their findings in Science this week (2007, 316, 738-742).

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Martian volcanoes hit home plate

A team led by Martin Barstow of Leicester University, England, has used data from the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) satellite to map the space in between the stars within a sphere of radius 300 light years. He reported details of the observations to the Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting in Preston in April, explaining how the FUSE results show a distinct lack of oxygen. Received astronomical wisdom has it that local interstellar medium including the whole Solar system is embedded in a wispy diffuse cloud of hot gas, the so-called Local Fluff.

The findings, or lack of finding oxygen, suggests that an ancient stellar explosion, a supernova, blew away the gas from within the local interstellar medium leaving us with a less than fluffy cloud. More in this week’s SN.

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Local fluff is no gas

Well, astronomers have finally discovered an Earth-like planet beyond the Solar System and it is bigger by half than earth. Most importantly, the exoplanet, spotted with the ESO 3.6 m telescope, by a team of Swiss, French and Portuguese scientists is capable of having liquid water. Could this Earth 2.0 offer human kind a planetary upgrade?

Well, it might be inhabitable, but the beta version has a few technical problems that might be difficult to overcome. First, aside from being 50% bigger than earth and therefore offering a lot of storage space, it also has a mass about five times that of the Earth, which means even the leanest among us will tip the scales. But, perhaps more importantly it orbits a red dwarf rather than a nice life-supporting star like the Sun. Of interest, but not necessarily a problem this planet has a couple of near neighbours, a Neptune-mass planet, and at least one more planet of about eight times the mass of the Earth.

More worrying, though the planet’s clock speed, or “year” is just 13 days and it is 14 times closer to the red dwarf than Earth is to the Sun. But, the exoplanet lies, nevertheless, in the life support zone in which water could be liquid.

“We have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid,” explains Stéphane Udry, from the Geneva Observatory, “Moreover, its radius should be only 1.5 times the Earth’s radius, and models predict that the planet should be either rocky – like our Earth – or covered with oceans,” he says.

Team member Xavier Delfosse from Grenoble University, France, has already marked this planet on his treasure map of the Universe, with an X. Of course, any pioneers hoping to boot up a new human race on exoplanet X, will have rather a long upload time, the host red dwarf, Gliese 581, is close to the Earth, lying at 20.5 light years in the constellation Libra. So, it will be a very long time before we have even the vaguest opportunity to get a closer look at Earth 2.0.

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Welcome to Earth 2.0 (beta)

Well, no, it is, and it isn’t. It all depends on your perspective and what you feel about there being more than 20 planets in the Solar System rather than the more usually seen 9.

David Weintraub takes us on a cosmic tour through the history books from Aristotle’s logical fallacies of aether and perfect spheres moving in perfect circles to the discovery of dozens upon dozens of shapely and shapeless objects littering the once perfect heavens.

On 24th August 2006, as reported on Sciencebase (and everywhere else, admittedly), the International Astronomical Union decreed that Pluto should be demoted to the status of dwarf planet. After all, it’s discovery was a pure accident, it shouldn’t really have been spotted where it was in the 1930s at all, and it’s just so small, and really just the biggest of what we now refer to as the Kuiper Belt Objects.

However, there is no scientific reason to label Pluto as “not a planet”.

In one sense, Weintraub’s argument hinges on the fact that we cannot define what is and what is not a planet on the basis of a mnemonic taught to science students - My Very Earthly Mother Just Served Us Nasty Pizza.

Space is far more messy than that. Between Mars and Jupiter, where earlier astronomers hoped to find a planet that fit the now debunked Titius-Bode rule (which never quite became law), we find some startlingly large asteroids instead, among them Ceres. Then there is Eris (formerly known as UB313 and colloquially as Xena), and a myriad swarm of Kuiper belt objects, trans-Neptunian object, Oort cloud objects…

The list goes on. But, in the final reckoning is it for us to draw lines and say such and such an icy rock whirling around the sun billions of miles from earth is any more planet than the next chunk of ice and rock.

Pluto looks like a planet, moves like a planet, and quacks like a planet. Obviously that last one isn’t quite right. But, it’s not a planet like the inner planets, it’s not a gas giant, and it’s not like an asteroid, which would have been much more appropriately named planetoids rather than being labelled literally as “star-like”.

Weintraub anticipates that there will be no problem for the young, upcoming astronomers to simply add qualifiers to all the different kinds of planet we find. Nothing will be less alien than terms such as giant, terrestrial, icy, pulsar, belt-embedded prefixing the word planet and allowing is to create a sophisticated taxonomy that allows us to understand the nature of the universe around us.

It will make for an unwieldy mnemonic with our Earthly Mother having to add all kinds of toppings to that Nasty Pizza to make it stick. But then planets are intrinsically unwieldy.

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Pluto is a planet

The chemical survey was made possible by the imaginatively named European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. This a bigger than normal telescope operated by Europe’s Southern Observatory, in case you couldn’t get.

The results from this survey are now shedding star light on our Galaxy’s ancient ancestry and revealing it to be very different from that of several of our near neighbors. Indeed, the findings have already cast some doubt on the theory that diminutive neighbours like these were the building blocks for our own Milky Way Galaxy.

You can find out more in the latest issue of Reactive Reports.

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Starry, starry night