A space-age search engine

eZipSkyWant to know what time the moon will rise in your neck of the woods, which planet is in which constellation tonight, or when the Internation Space Station will next be overhead? There is not much stargazing going in England at the moment, too much H20 falling from the sky, but eZipSky’s free service for amateur astronomers in the US, is a kind of search engine for heavenly bodies.

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 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!

Martian volcanoes hit home plate

Mars home plateA plateau on the planet Mars called Home Plate looks like it had a volcanic past, according to the latest data from NASA’s rover Spirit. The data also support earlier hints at that water once existed at or beneath the planet’s surface.

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).

Local fluff is no gas

Local fluffSending astronauts up to our nearest star to reignite the Sun, the premise of sci-fi movie Sunshine, is truly the least of our problems when we are currently faced with global climate change, global terrorism, and global economic collapse. Nevertheless, astronomers are concerned about recent findings regarding the hot gas surrounding our star and its stellar neighbours. Put simply they cannot find them.

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.

Welcome to Earth 2.0 (beta)

Earth 2.0No, before you switch off, this is not a Second Life clone, or anything to do with global wikis and blogs. This is the first astronomical post on Sciencebase for quite some time, but because it is not your usual run of the mill supernova announcement, or dark energy revelations, we thought it worthy of a slot. Okay, so what’s all the fuss?

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.

Fault finding and interplanetary rubble

Fault findingThe latest issue of Intute Spotlight from David Bradley and the physical sciences portal is now online:

Fault finding [earth]

Almost half a million US dollars, about £250k, was earmarked by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a project to map California’s San Andreas Fault, …

Science comes in from the cold [physics]

Research into the phenomenon formerly known as cold fusion is heating up again. Despite an initial chilly reception to anything related to this once-maverick science, it seems that studies of what are now called …

Interplanetary rubble [astronomy]

It’s not the most romantic image of heavenly bodies, but the latest observations of a pair of asteroids suggest that the pair is essentially two piles of rubble dancing an eternal pas de deux. The description emerges from a collation of observations from the world’s largest telescopes as well as the small instrument of a backyard amateur …

Pluto is a planet

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.

Starry, starry night

Starry, starry scienceDetermining the chemical composition of 2000 stars in four of our neighboring dwarf galaxies, is a task even the biggest parallel analytical lab would probably baulk at taking on, although of course the referral fees would be stupendous. Nevertheless, a chemical survey of just such inter-galactic proportions has been carried out.

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.

Giant planet makes metallic water

Can planetary giants make metallic water? That’s a question answered theoretically by US scientists in this week’s Alchemist, we also learn why mussels are not as happy as clams thanks to Prozac, what makes organic semiconductors light up and the possibility of powering your mp3 player with your beach umbrella. Also in this week’s news distillate, uranium-munching bacteria have the mettle to construct nanoscopic platinum particles. Finally, digestion on a grand scale could be releasing five times as much methane into the atmosphere above Siberian lakes.

The latest chemistry news from ChemWeb.

Dark side of matter

“There really is dark matter out there,” says Dennis Zaritsky of the University of Arizona talking of the first evidence for this elusive cosmological substance, “Now we just need to figure out what it is.”

It was side-on views of two merging galaxy clusters made with state-of-the-art optical and X-ray telescopes that allowed Zaritsky and his colleagues to make this startling discovery. Dark matter is matter that does not emit or reflect enough electromagnetic radiation to be observed directly. Astronomers have assumed since the 1930s that most of the Universe must be composed of dark matter because of the way galaxies move through space. Our present understanding of gravity implies that the Universe must contain five times as much dark matter as normal matter.

Read the full story in my Spotlight physical sciences column on Intute.

Resurrecting Pluto

As Sciencebase reported recently, a session of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), meeting in Prague, during August passed a resolution re-defining the nature of the planets of our solar system. Apparently, only about 428 of the IAU’s almost 10000 membership was involved in the voting. The original proposal would have led to an expansion of our solar system from the familiar nine planets to 12, for now. But, as we now know things turned out very differently.

This proposal was modified at the conference, with the aim being to exclude from the definition of planet all but the eight largest planets, which meant Pluton was dwarved. The vote leaned towards this definition, much to the chagrin of the wider IAU community, which believes neither definition was subject to critical review by the broader planetary
science community prior to the conference, despite simple means to do so.

A grass roots petition stating: “We, as planetary scientists and astronomers, do not agree with the IAU’s
definition of a planet, nor will we use it. A better definition is needed” has now emerged – http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/planetprotest

According to a press release from the Planetary Science Institute, in less than five days more than 300
professional planetary scientists and astronomers had signed the petition. “The list of signatories includes researchers who have studied every kind of planet in the solar system, as well as asteroids, comets, the Kuiper Belt, and planet interactions with space environment. They have been involved in the robotic exploration of the solar system from some of the earliest missions to Cassini/Huygens, the missions to Mars, ongoing missions to the innermost and outermost reaches of our solar system, and are leading missions preparing to be launched,” says the release.

The list also includes prominent experts in the field of planet formation and evolution, planetary atmospheres,
planetary surfaces and interiors, and includes international prize-winning researchers.

“This petition gives substantial weight to argument that the IAU definition of planet does not meet fundamental scientific standards and should be set aside,” states petition organizer Dr. Mark Sykes, Director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. “A more open process, involving a broader cross section of the community engaged in
planetary studies of our own solar system and others should be undertaken.”

So, as we predicted, Pluto’s status could be changed yet again. Meanwhile the guy on the Clapham omnibus will probably stick with the idea that Pluto is a planet regardless of the outcome of this debate.