Deep Astronomy

Clarke Exobelts, appropriately named after Arthur C. Clarke, are belts of satellites around and exoplanet that are in a geosynchronous orbit around it. These belts have distinct characteristics that can show up in space telescope transit surveys looking for planets around other stars.

Did you know there is a commercial effort to design robotic spacecraft to go into orbit and repair/replace/remove old, broken and damaged satellites? The future is very bright in space exploration, especially if you're a robot!

This week we are talking with Alex Teachey from Columbia University whose recent paper using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope revealed that there might be an exomoon around Kepler-1625b, an exoplanet that itself is rather interesting.

HabEx is one of four concept missions being considered for the next generation of space telescopes. HabEx will search for rocky worlds like Earth in orbit around other stars and it will have unique capabilities to detect atmospheres and even the components of those atmospheres. The idea is to look for biosignatures on planets for signs of life!

Lots of people are expressing disappointment that TESS won't be looking at the sectors of the sky long enough to see anything. I disagree. Please use the Discord server to let me know what you think!

https://discord.gg/nqGpvtK

Super energetic neutrinos can be formed in exotic places, for example the accelerators in the core of galactic supermassive black holes. The IceCube neutrino detector array was built and deployed at the South Pole. The detectors are designed and positioned to find specific particles in a background of myriad charged particles bombarding the Earth. A particular event called IceCube-170922 was detected with an energy of 300 trillion electron volts and pointed back to a specific point in the sky.

Join Tony Darnell and Carol Christian during Afternoon Astronomy Coffee on Thursday, 9 August 2018 at 3:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time (19:00 UTC) as they discuss with the investigators, including Erik Blaufussi (University of Maryland), how IceCube works, what the researchers hope to find, and the detection of IceCube-10922.

What would the planet Vulcan be like? It might be like the "super-Earth" planet orbiting a nearby star (16 light years) called HD 26965. The planet is only 2 times the size of Earth and the parent star is much like the sun. The planet orbits the star in a mere 42 days - but it is just inside the habitable zone where life might form. The star is a little smaller and cooler and has other attributes similar to the Sun. The object was found with the Dharma Endowment Foundation Telescope (DEFT), a 50-inch telescope located atop Mt. Lemmon in southern Arizona near Tucson. The astronomers think the planet just might be suitable for life and even an advanced civilization. Several publications about Star Trek actually referred to this planetary system as the home of Mr. Spock known by its other name, 40 Eridani.

Visuals used in Hangout available here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1EjfC0gSDtsmadHrRL3OQQB7WOFL4nYvh

This is the second is a series of discussions surrounding the next crop of space telescope concepts being considered by the National Academy of Sciences to follow in the footsteps of WFIRST. This episode features Lynx, a large, x-ray telescope designed to being the same field of view as Chandra, but with a higher resolution.

Click here to get access to the visuals from today's podcast:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1E8WAxeRmkIDZzdxTCDVuwJ8Sw0U3IMDL

The ORIGINS Space Telescope is one of four concept missions designed to compete as the follow-up mission to WFIRST, which launches after JWST. These missions are a look forward and present promising results to some of the biggest questions in astronomy. Today we talk with members of the ORIGINS Space Telescope Team to learn about what this mission is designed to do.

Astronomers are getting as bad as the press these days with making statements that are designed to garner attention than anything else. In this episode, let's talk about exoplanet hysteria.