Red Moon, Red Mars. Top - Dec 21, 2010 Lunar Eclipse photos of the Red Moon taken near Princeton, NJ on an exquisitely clear night with a 250 mm lens and 1 sec exposure. Credit: Ken Kremer. Bottom Left: Red Mars from the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA. Right: Red Mars through a telescope in 2010 from The Plantation in Florida (not to scale). Credit: Ernie Rossi
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In this season of Christmas tidings, many of us were blessed to witness the eerie Red Moon of the total lunar eclipse a few nights ago on Dec. 21. Here in “bonechilling” New Jersey, it was miraculously crystal clear the entire night from the beginning around 1:30 a.m. EST to the end – about three and one half hours later at around 5 a.m.
UPDATE: Check out more readers “Red Moon, Red Planet” astropix contributions below !
The eclipse occurred as the moon passed through the Earth’s inner dark shadow, or umbra and changed dramatically to varying shades of red, orange and brown.
Lunar Eclipse 12-21-2010 from The Plantation in Florida. Credit: Ernie RossiDuring totality – when the moon was completely immersed in the umbral shadow for about 72 minutes – the red moon changed from a faint red glow to a brilliant crimson red. At times it appeared to be blood red and as though the surface was stirring and oozing droplets of warm and viscous blood. It was surreal and looked to me as though it had been magically and majestically painted up into the night sky.
Well all this redness hanging in the sky during totality caused me to ponder Mars – the Red Planet – especially with the avalanche of good news streaming back lately.
And the wispy white light at near total eclipse harkened to the Martian polar ice caps.
Mars at Opposition in 2003 from New Jersey. 3.5 in Questar 0.1 seconds. Credit: Robert Vanderbei
Bright red Mars at Opposition in 2003 - The year that Spirit and Opportunity launched.
So please send your telescopic shots and descriptions of the Red Planet and/or the Red Moon and I’ll post them here. Email kremerken at yahoo dot com or post as comments to add here.
Lunar Eclipse from New Jersey 12-21-2010. Credit: Robert Vanderbei
Despite the shadow the moon does not completely disappear. The red moon’s glow was caused by sunlight refracted through the earth’s atmosphere and cast upon the lunar surface. The hue varies depending on a variety of atmospheric conditions and can be intensified by floating clouds of volcanic ash and dust. The recent volcanic eruptions at Mount Merapi in Indonesia in October and at Mount Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland last April sent massive plumes of particles skyward which may have influenced the thrilling event.
Red Moon, Red Planet. One day we’ll journey there and back again.
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Send me your astropix of Red Moon and/or Red Mars to post here:
Check out these gorgeous views of Mars in January 2010 from Efrain Morales Rivera at the Jaicoa Observatory in Aquadilla, Puerto Rico Efrain writes; On this session (01/21/10) on Mars of this years apparition many details could be seen for its size. Image at left at closest to Earth and at the limb (L) Mount Olympus largest volcano in our system, Image at right (01/27/10) closest to the Sun. Credit: Efrain Morales Rivera, Jaicoa Observatory, Aquadilla, Puerto Rico
From Robert Vanderbei of Amateur Astronomers Association Of Princeton in New Jersey; A Lunar Eclipse Montage ! Just ahead of the monster blizzard which struck the northeast Corridor of the US on Dec 26.
Dec. 21, 2010 Lunar Eclipse Montage as imaged from New Jersey. Credit: Robert Vanderbei
Some pictures of the eclipse put together as a composite from beginning to totality by Russell King of Willingboro Astronomical Society, New Jersey.
All pictures were taken with my Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi from my home in Neptune, New Jersey. I used my Canon 75 to 300MM lens and shot all exposures at 300MM. Camera was set on a fixed photo tripod. The pictures range from 1/2500 second at full moon to 1 second during totality. Images were processed in Photoshop 2 and Ulead. Credit: Russell King. http://www.rddnj.com
Many classes of stars are named for an early, distinguished member of a certain type of stars. For example, Cepheid variables take their namesake from the periodic variable Delta Cephei, first recognized by John Goodricke, although Eta Aquillae, another Cepheid, was recognized as a periodic variable with the same period just before Delta Cephei. Since the time of Goodricke’s discovery, many more classes of objects have been discovered from T Tauri, to W Ursa Majoris, to Delta Scorpii.
But sometimes, stars must wait before more members of their class are discovered. Tau Scorpiiis a massive B0 star and one of the rare high mass stars for which magnetic fields have been measured. To distinguish it even further, studies have shown that its magnetic field is unusually complex, being much more tangled than most stars and not showing distinct dipoles. Additionally, this unusual star has been shown to have weaker stellar winds (and consequently, mass loss rates) than most B0 type stars, as well as spectral features that are simultaneously characteristic of stars on the main sequence and young giants. Meanwhile, the star is believed to be only a few million years old. A first step towards characterizing such odd objects is to find more. Fortunately, astronomers have discovered two more stars similar to Tau Scorpii.
The two new stars, HD 66665 and HD 63425, were first recognized as unusual from their spectra, taken by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. Using these spectra, the team, led by Véronique Petit at West Chester University, recognized that these stars had the same peculiar winds as Tau Scorpii. While Petit’s group could not completely constrain the mass loss rates, they did place an upper limit on both, establishing that they too shared the “weak wind problem” in which the expected mass loss rate for such stars was roughly 20 times higher. This prompted the team to investigate each star for magnetic fields.
Although the team wasn’t able to fully analyze the magnetic fields during their observing run to determine just how unusual they were, the team did establish both stars did have magnetic fields present and that they were similar in strength to that of Tau Scorpii. These two pieces of information has led the team to conclude that HD 66665 and HD 63425, along with Tau Scorpii, constitute a new class of stars. Additional confirmation could come from similar conclusions on the age of the analogues.
Petit’s team doesn’t speculate as to the nature of this emerging class in this paper. However, an earlier work of which Petit was a co-author, examined Tau Scorpii specifically. In it, the team examined whether the unusual field was a “frozen in” fossil from formation, or actively produced by an unusual dynamo inside the star. Fields produced by dynamos require large portions of the interior of the star undergoing convection. Models of massive stars predict that convection is likely to be limited in such stars. Another key component is rotation. Tau Scorpii is an extremely slow rotator, so the team concluded that a dynamo is unlikely in this case. As such, the fossil-field theory was more likely. Further investigation of HD 66665 and HD 63425 will certainly be necessary to further compare these stars to Tau Scorpii.
Looking like a holiday card, this view of the lunar eclipse was taken by Stu Atkinson in the UK
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For the first time in almost four centuries a total lunar eclipse coincided with the solstice – mid-winter for northern hemisphere skywatchers and mid-summer for the southern hemisphere. For those with a clear view of the sky (I was not that lucky!), the entire event was visible from North America, Greenland and Iceland, while western Europe saw the beginning stages before moonset and western Asia got the later stages after moonrise. Australia also saw the late stages of the eclipse.
People with clear skies in the northern hemisphere saw the Moon transformed into a “coppery orb,” as Tony Hoffman from Queens, New York called it (see his image below.) The Moon didn’t disappear completely, as the residual light from its surface is refracted by our atmosphere, resulting in the Moon turning a coppery, red or brown color. The eclipse lasted for about three and a half hours. See some images and videos from around the world, below. Clicking on each image will bring you to the original source.
The Washington Monument is seen as the full moon is shadowed by the Earth during a total lunar eclipse on the arrival of the winter solstice, Tuesday, December 21, 2010 in Washington. From beginning to end, the eclipse lasted about three hours and twenty-eight minutes. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)A 'Coppery Orb' as seen by Tony Hoffman in Queens, NY. 'Well worth braving the cold and wind to catch,' Tony said, 'Relatively bright totality with Moon beautifully situated by the horns of Taurus.''Even with high cloud, a 7 second exposure brought out the beauty of the eclipsed Moon,' said Mark Zaugg from Calgary, Alberta, Canada.The ruddy totally eclipsed Moon as seen by Nick Bramhill in Aberdeen, UK.The Earth's shadow starts to creep across the Moon in this image by Stu Atkinson near Kendal in the UK
Astronomer Amanda Bauer took this image of the eclipsed Moon from the Harbour Bridge in Sydney, Australia.Efrain Morales from the Jaicoa Observatory in Puerto Rico took this sequence of images. 'The weather was not under under optimum conditions,' he wrote, 'but managed to take this sequence thru the cloud gaps until it finally covered it up.This view of the red Moon was taken by Pete Riesett in Baltmore, Maryland.An animation made from 60 images taken by an all-sky telescope in New MexicoThis image was taken by Jen Scheer (aka @flyingjenny on Twitter) from Merritt Island in Florida.
Former space shuttle technician Jen Scheer (@flyingjenny on Twitter) got up earlier than usual (she takes a daily sunrise picture from around Kennedy Space Center each morning) to capture some great shots of the eclipse. You can see more of her images at her Flickr page.
A total lunar eclipse begins as the full moon is shadowed by the Earth on the arrival of the winter solstice, Tuesday, December 21, 2010 in Arlington, VA. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)This was taken by Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, in Boulder Colorado. 'Deep into totality,' Phil said.
Here’s a video taken from Savannah, Georgia in the US:
And another video from UT frequenter, Brent (aka Hellobozos) from Orlando Florida. He took 6 second avi’s every 5 minutes for 6 hours, from 12:30am to 6am EST:
And one more from Carl Hamilton from Bowie, Maryland:
Lunar eclipse from Fair Lawn. NJ. 'Wish I had a more powerful lens but it was well worth waiting up for,' said Universe Today reader Mary Durante Youtt. Here's one from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. 'We had to dodge clouds, cold, and wind that jiggled the tripod,' said Beth Katz.The eclipse as seen by photographer John O'Connor near Kennedy Space Center.
This image was taken by photographer John O’Connor, who normally takes images of rockets and spacecraft (see his website NASATech, for amazing virtual tours of spacecraft, launchpads and more). He was up in the middle of the night to take images of space shuttle Discovery’s intended rollback from the launchpad to the Vehicle Assembly Building, but the rollback was delayed because of a technical problem.
“I intended to take a couple of quick shots of totality before heading out but ended up spending 45 minutes shooting the moon, as they say,” John wrote me. “This is my first attempt at astrophotography. I shot it with a 300 mm fixed focal length lens with a doubler on it. With the 1.5 multiplier factor on the 2/3 size sensor, it was about 900 mm focal length. It was 4 second shot at 100 ISO with an f4.5 aperture, as wide as the lens would let me go. Note the smudged stars. Even at a 4 second exposure the Earth’s rotation is evident, blurring, ever-so-slightly, the lunar disk.”
The primary method by which astronomers can measure magnetic field strength on stars is the Zeeman effect. This effect is the splitting of spectral lines into two due to the magnetic field’s effect on the quantum structure of the orbitals. For massive O-class stars, their spectra are largely featureless in the visual portion of the spectra due to an insufficient number of atoms with electrons in the necessary orbitals to undergo transitions which can produce visual spectral lines. Thus, determining whether or not these stars have magnetic fields has been a unique challenge. A new paper from researchers at the University of Amsterdam, led by Roald Schnerr, looks for evidence of these fields in the form of synchrotron radiation.
Synchrotron radiation is a form of light produced when relativistic, charged particles move through a magnetic field. The light emitted can be generated in any portion of the spectra from radio to gamma rays, depending on the strength of the field. Astronomically, this was first detected in 1956 by Geoffrey Burbidge in the jets of M87 and has since been used to explain emission in planetary magnetospheres, supernovae, near black holes, and around pulsars.
This form of energy distinguishes itself from other forms of light in two main fashions. The first is that it is highly polarized. This property is generated by the electric and magnetic components always being in the same planes and can be studied with filters that only allow light with its fields in appropriate planes to pass. The second is that the radiation created is “non-thermal”. In other words, it doesn’t match the distribution of wavelengths generated by a blackbody.
Models of massive, O-class stars suggest they should contain magnetic fields. Some evidence has seemed to confirm this. Previous studies have also shown that the stellar winds from some of these stars varies with timescales similar to the rotation rates of the stars which could be interpreted as winds being slowed on some faces by the magnetic field as it swept by.
Schnerr’s team attempted to bolster the evidence for magnetic fields by detecting the non-thermal radiation from these stars. The team selected 5 stars which have been shown to have strongly variable winds, some with cyclic variations and used the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, in the Netherlands to search for non-blackbody signals. The radio range was selected due to the predicted magnetic field strength.
Ultimately, only three of the five selected targets could be observed with the chosen telescope and only one of those, ξ Persei, showed evidence of a non-thermal spectrum. But while this strengthens the case for magnetic fields on the star, it raises another question: From where do the relativistic particles originate? Although O-class stars have strong stellar winds, their speeds are well studied and well below the necessary velocity.
One clue could come from the fact that ξ Persei is a “runaway star”. These stars have velocities and plunge through the interstellar medium at 30-200 km/sec. The team suggests that a bow shock created by this motion could result in sufficiently high velocities. Whether or not ξ Per has such a bow shock is something that could be determined with additional observations.
While this research provides some interesting clues to the nature of these magnetic fields on these stars, it still relies on a small sample. This technique can certainly be expanded to a larger number of stars in the future and may help astronomers better constrain their models of stellar workings.
Often times, objects that are unremarkable in one portion of the spectra, can often be vivid in others. In M33, the Triangulum Galaxy, a star that’s barely visible in the optical, stands out as the second brightest source (and single brightest single star) in the mid-infrared. This unusual star has been the target of a recent study, led by Rubab Khan at the Ohio State University and may help astronomers to understand an unusual supernova from 2008.
The supernova 2008S occurred February first in NGC 6946, the Fireworks Galaxy. Since it happened in a galaxy that is relatively nearby, astronomers seized the opportunity to explore the progenitor star in archival images. Yet images from the Large Binocular Telescope and other optical observatories could not find a star that could be identified as a parent. Instead, the detection of the star responsible came from Spitzer, an infrared observatory. Observations from this instrument indicated that the star responsible may have been unexpectedly low mass for such a powerful explosion leading other astronomers to question whether or not SN 2008S was a true supernova, or merely an impostor in the form of an eruption of a Luminous Blue Variable (LBV), which tend to be more massive stars and would be in stark contradiction to the Spitzer findings.
Yet, regardless of the nature of the nature of SN 2008S, teams all seemed to agree that the progenitor had only been detected in the infrared because it was veiled by a thick curtain of dust. So to help better understand this class of dusty stars, astronomers have been working to uncover more of them, against which they can test their hypotheses.
To find these objects, astronomers have been searching the infrared portion of the spectrum for objects that are exceptionally bright yet lack optical counterparts. The brightest of the stellar sources in M33 features faint star in the red portion of the optical spectrum from the Local Group Galaxies Survey published in 2007, but no star at all in archival records with similar limiting magnitudes from 1949 and 1991. The authors of the new study have dubbed this odd source, Object-X.
The team rules out the possibility that the object could be a young stellar object (YSO), blocked by a thick dust disc along the line of sight, noting that models of even the thickest dust discs still predict more light to be scattered back along the line of sight. Instead, the team concludes that Object-X must be a self-obscured star that has undergone relatively recent mass loss which has cooled to form either graphite or silicate dust. Depending on which type of dust is predominant, the team was able to fit the data to two wildly different temperatures for the star: either 5000 K for graphite, or 20,000 K for the silicate. In all cases, the predicted mass for the central star was always greater than 30 solar masses.
In general, there are two mechanisms by which a star can eject material to form such a curtain. The first is through stellar winds, which increase as the star enters the red giant phase, swelling up and lowering the force of gravity near the surface. The second is “impulsive mass ejections” in which stars shudder and throw mass off that way. A classical example of this is Eta Carinae. The team predicts from the features they found, that Object-X is most likely a cool hypergiant. The fact that the star was completely obscured until very recently hints that the mass loss is not constant (as stellar wind), but patchy, coming from frequent eruptions. As the shell of dust expands, the star should reemerge in the optical, becoming visible again in the next few decades.
The vast majority of the known exoplanets have been discovered by the radial velocity method. This method employs the effects of a planet’s gentle tug on its parent star which is perceived as a “wobble” in the star’s motion. A new study, conducted by Morais and Correia, looks at whether this effect can be mimicked by another, distinctly non-planetary, source: Binary stars.
Conceptually, the idea is rather straightforward. A star of interest lies in a triple star system. It is the third member and in a larger orbit around a tight binary system. As the tight binary system orbits, there will be periods in which they line up with the star of interest giving a minutely greater pull before relaxing the pull later in their orbit. This remote tug would show a distinctly periodic effect very similar to the effects expected from an inferred planet.
The obvious question was how astronomers could miss the presence of binary stars, close enough to have a notable effect. The authors of the paper suggest that if the binary pair orbited sufficiently close, it would be unlikely that they could be resolved as a binary. Additionally, if one member were sufficiently faint (an M dwarf), it may not appear readily either. Both of these instances are plausible given that some three fourths of nearby main sequence stars are M class, and about half of all stars are in binary system.
Next, the team asked how important these effects may be. They considered the case of HD 18875, a binary system in which a distant star (A) has a 25.7 year period around a tight binary (Ba + Bb) that orbit each other with a period of 155 days. This system was noteworthy because a hot Jupiter planet was announced around the A star in 2005, but challenged in 2007 when another team could not repeat the observations.
The new study attempted to use their understanding and modeling of three body systems to see if the binary interaction could have produced the spurious signal. Using their model, they determined that the effects of the system itself would have produced effects similar to those of a planet of 4 Earth masses located at 0.38 AU. A planet of such mass is well below the limit of a hot Jupiter and the distance is somewhat larger than usual as well. Thus, the nearby B-binary could not have been responsible. Furthermore, such minute effects of this type are generally interpreted as “super-Earths” and have only become prevalent in observations in the past few years.
Thus, while the unconfirmed planet around HD 18875 A might not have been caused by the nearby binary, the work in this new paper has shown that effects of nearby binaries will become increasingly important as we start detecting radial velocities indicative of less and less massive planets.
Astronomers have found the first conclusive evidence for a dramatic surge in star birth in a newly discovered population of massive galaxies in the early Universe. Their measurements confirm the idea that stars formed most rapidly about 11 billion years ago, or about three billion years after the Big Bang, and that the rate of star formation is much faster than was thought.
The scientists used the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory, an infrared telescope with a mirror 3.5 m in diameter, launched in 2009. They studied the distant objects in detail with the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE) camera, obtaining solid evidence that the galaxies are forming stars at a tremendous rate and have large reservoirs of gas that will power the star formation for hundreds of millions of years.
Dr. Scott Chapman, from the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, has presented the new results in a paper in a special edition of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society focusing on results from Herschel.
Scott comments “These Herschel-SPIRE measurements have revealed the new population of galaxies to be hotter than expected, due to stars forming far much more rapidly than we previously believed.”
The galaxies are so distant that the light we detect from them has been traveling for more than 11 billion years. This means that we see them as they were about three billion years after the Big Bang. The key to the new results is the recent discovery of a new type of extremely luminous galaxy in the early Universe. These galaxies are very faint in visible light, as the newly-formed stars are still cocooned in the clouds of gas and dust within which they were born. This cosmic dust, which has a temperature of around -240oC, is much brighter at the longer, far infrared wavelengths observed by the Herschel satellite.
The Herschel-SPIRE image, where 3 examples of the new 'hot starbursts' glowing blue are circled. They appear faint because they are very distant, seen only 3 billion years after the Big Bang (credit: ESA/SPIRE/HerMES).
A related type of galaxy was first found in 1997 (but not well understood until 2003) using the “SCUBA” camera attached to the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Hawaii, which detects radiation emitted at even longer sub-millimeter wavelengths. But these distant “sub-millimeter galaxies” were thought to only represent half the picture of star formation in the early Universe. Since SCUBA preferentially detects colder objects, it was suggested that similar galaxies with slightly warmer temperatures could exist but have gone largely unnoticed.
Dr. Chapman and others measured their distances using the Keck optical telescope on Hawaii and the Plateau de Bure sub-millimeter observatory in France, but were unable to show that they were in the throes of rapid star formation.
Herschel is the first telescope with the capability to detect these galaxies at the peak of their output, so Dr. Chapman joined forces with the “HerMES” team, led by Professor Seb Oliver of the University of Sussex and Dr Jamie Bock in Caltech who were undertaking the largest survey of galaxies with Herschel.
With the Herschel observations, focused on around 70 galaxies in the constellation of Ursa Major, the scientists acquired the missing piece of evidence to confirm that these galaxies represent a crucial episode in the build up of large galaxies around us today, such as our own Milky Way.
The orignal Herschel-SPIRE image. Credit: ESA/SPIRE/HerMES.
Team member Professor Rob Ivison from the University of Edinburgh explains the significance of the new results. “With the data we had before, we couldn’t tell exactly where the infrared light from these galaxies comes from. But using SPIRE we can see that this is the signature of star formation”.
The new galaxies have prodigious rates of star formation, far higher than anything seen in the present day Universe. They probably developed through violent encounters between hitherto undisturbed galaxies, after the first stars and galaxy fragments had already formed. None the less, studying these new objects gives astronomers an insight into the earliest epochs of star formation after the Big Bang.
Team colleague Dr Isaac Roseboom from the University of Sussex sums up the work. “It was amazing and surprising to see the Herschel-SPIRE observations uncover such a dramatic population of previously unseen galaxies”. Professor Seb Oliver, also from Sussex, adds: “We are really blown away by the tremendous capability of Herschel to probe the distant universe. This work by Scott Chapman gives us a real handle on how the cosmos looked early in its life.”
With the new discovery, the UK-led astronomers have provided a much more accurate census of some of the most extreme galaxies in the Universe at the peak of their activity. Future observations will investigate the details of the galaxies’ power source and try to establish how they will develop once their intense bursts of activity come to an end.
An aerial photograph shows the Onsala LOFAR station site. Credit: Onsala Space Observatory/Västkustflyg
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Robert Cumming from the Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden sent us this image, letting us know that construction has officially begun for the Swedish station of the new LOFAR radio telescope. The LOw Frequency ARray is a multi-purpose sensor array, with its main purpose to search the sky at low frequencies (10-250 MHz) which will enable astronomers to see the fog of hydrogen gas that filled the universe during its first two hundred million years. It will also be able to image the regions around supermassive black holes in the centres of nearby galaxies. The headquarters are in the Netherlands, but eight stations will be spread over Europe.
This aerial photograph shows the Onsala LOFAR station site at the lower right. Behind, the white radome of the observatory’s 20-metre telescope and the dish of the 25-meter telescope by the Kattegat shore.
The two circular areas where the LOFAR station’s high-band (snow-covered) and low-band antennas will be placed are already flattened. The cold weather has delayed the next stage in the work, deploying the fibre cables, but the Onsala station should still be fully operational by mid-2011.
Onsala is LOFAR’s northernmost station and will help give the array a close to circular beam. It will also contribute some of the array’s longest baselines.
“Each LOFAR station collects and handles up to 32 terabytes of data every day,” said John Conway, professor of observational radio astronomy at Chalmers University of Technology and Vice-Director of Onsala Space Observatory. “ At Chalmers we’re working together with our European colleagues to develop new kinds of software so that we can analyse radio signals from distant sources.”
Onsala’s LOFAR station will consist of 192 small antennas which together collect radio waves from space. The signals which are registered are then transferred by fiber link to the Netherlands to be combined with data from the other stations.
Today, we take it for granted that the Sun produces energy via nuclear fusion. However, this realization only came about in the early 1900’s and wasn’t confirmed until several decades later (see the Solar Neutrino Problem). Prior to that, several other methods of energy production had been proposed. These ranged from burning coal to a constant bombardment of comets and meteors to slow contraction. Each of these methods seemed initially plausible, but when astronomers of the time worked out how long each one could sustain such a brightness, they came up against an unlikely opponent: Charles Darwin.
In a “Catholic Magazine and Review” from 1889, known as The Month, there is a good record of the development of the problem faced in an article titled “The Age of the Sun and Darwinism”. It begins with a review of the recently discovered Law of Conservation of Energy in which they establish that a method of generation must be established and that this question is necessarily entangled with the age of the Sun and also, life on Earth. Without a constant generation of energy, the Sun would quickly cool and this was known to be unlikely due to archaeological evidences which hinted that the Sun’s output had been constant for at least 4,000 years.
While burning coal seemed a good candidate since coal power was just coming into fashion at the time, scientists had calculated that even burning in pure oxygen, the Sun could only last ~6,000 years. The article feared that this may signal “the end of supplies of heat and light to our globe would be very near indeed” since religious scholars held the age of the Earth to be some “4000 years of chronological time before the Christian era, and 1800 since”.
The bombardment hypothesis was also examined explaining that the transference of kinetic energy can increase temperatures citing examples of bullets striking metal surfaces or hammers heating anvils. But again, calculations hinted that this too was wrong. The rate with which the Sun would have to accumulate mass was extremely high. So much so that it would lead to the “derangement of the whole mechanism of the heavens.” The result would be that the period of the year over the past ~6,000 years would have shortened by six weeks and that the Earth too would be constantly bombarded by meteors (although some especially strong meteor showers at that time lent some credence to this).
The only strong candidate left was that of gravitational contraction proposed by Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and Hermann von Helmholtz in a series of papers they began publishing in 1854. But in 1859, Darwin published the Origin of Species in which he required an age of at least two billion years. Thomson’s and Helmholtz’s hypothesis could only support an age of some tens of millions of years. Thus astronomy and biology were brought head to head. Darwin was fully aware of this problem. In a letter to a friend, he wrote that, “Thomson’s views of the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles”.
To back the astronomers was the developing field of spectroscopy in which they determined that the sun and other stars bared a strong similarity to that of nebulae. These nebulae could contract under their own gravity and as such, provided a natural establishment for the formation of stars, leading gracefully into the contraction hypothesis. Although not mentioned in the article, Darwin did have some support from geologists like Charles Lyell who studied the formation of mountain ranges and also posited an older Earth.
Some astronomers attempted to add other methods in addition to gravitational contraction (such as tidal friction) to extend the age of the solar system, but none could reach the age required by Darwin. Similarly, some biologists worked to speed up evolutionary processes by positing separate events of abiogenesis to shave off some of the required time for diversification of various kingdoms. But these too could not rectify the problem.
Ultimately, the article throws its weight in the camp of the doomed astronomers. Interestingly, much of the same rhetoric in use by anti-evolutionists today can be found in the article. They state, “it is not surprising to find men of science, who not only have not the slightest doubt about the truth of their own pet theories, but are ready to lay down the law in the realms of philosophy and theology, in science which with, to judge from their immoderate assertions, their acquaintance is of the most remote? Such language is to be expected from the camp-followers in the army of science, who assurance is generally inversely proportional to their knowledge, for many of those in a word who affect to popularize the doctrine of Natural Selection.”
In time, Darwin would win the battle as astronomers would realize that gravitational contraction was just the match that lit the fuse of fusion. However, we must ask whether scientists would have been as quickly able to accept the proposition of stellar fusion had Darwin not pointed out the fundamental contradiction in ages?
When listing the major scientific powers, the tiny nation of Qatar is not one that generally comes to mind. However, a Qatar astronomer, partnered with teams from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) as well as other institutions has just discovered a new exoplanet, dubbed Qatar-1b.
The planet itself, is another in the class of hot Jupiters which are massive, gassy planets that orbit their stars extremely closely. It has an orbital period of 1.4 days and is expected to be tidally locked with its parent star, a K type star.
It was discovered by a set of wide angle cameras located in New Mexico which are capable of surveying a large number of stars at a single time. The goal was to find planets that eclipsed the parent star and would thus show regular variations in their light curve. Images taken from this system were then sent to teams working at Universities in St. Andrews, Leicester, and Qatar. These teams processed the images and narrowed the stars down to a list of a few hundred candidates to be studied further.
From there Dr. Khalid Al Subai as well as the Harvard CfA team used the Smithsonian’s Whipple 48-inch telescope to more accurately measure the transits as well as as their 60-inch telescope to make spectroscopic observations to weed out binary star systems. These observations confirmed the existence of the planet.
“The discovery of Qatar-1b is a great achievement — one that further demonstrates Qatar’s commitment to becoming a leader in innovative science and research,” said Al Subai. Indeed, in the past 15 years, Qatar has undergone a large revolution towards science and education. Many universities have begun to open remote campuses, including Carnegie Mellon and Texas A&M. A more comprehensive list of science initiatives can be found here.
“The discovery of Qatar-1b is a wonderful example of how science and modern communications can erase international borders and time zones. No one owns the stars. We can all be inspired by the discovery of distant worlds,” said CfA team member David Latham.
