Space and astronomy news
If you go out hiking this weekend and somehow find yourself hopelessly lost in the wilderness, but suddenly remember you have a compass with you, you can use it to find north because the needle always points towards the Earth’s geographic north pole, which never changes… right?
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. And this video from MinutePhysics explains why.
(But still bring a compass with you. They do come in handy.)
Another kind of commercial spacecraft is almost ready to take flight, its backers say.
Sierra Nevada Corp.’s Dream Chaser recently finished four low- and high-speed ground tests at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., the same spot where the shuttle was put through its paces in early tests of its program. Several shuttle flights also landed at Dryden.
The Dream Chaser tow-and-release tests, which took place at speeds ranging from 10 to 60 miles per hour (16 to 96 kilometers per hour), examined items such as the flight computer, how the guidance performed, steering parameters and the flight surfaces.
“Watching Dream Chaser undergo tow testing on the same runway where we landed several space shuttle orbiters brings a great amount of pride to our Dream Chaser team,” stated Steve Lindsey, SNC’s Space Systems senior director of programs, who is also a former NASA astronaut.
“We are another step closer to restoring America’s capability to return U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station.”
The next step will be an approach and landing test, which should take place sometime in the third quarter of 2013.
SNC is one of three companies receiving money from NASA under the agency’s commercial crew program, whose goal is to move astronaut launches back to American soil in the next few years. The other competitors are SpaceX and Boeing. You can read a more in-depth look at their proposals here.
Source: Sierra Nevada Corp.
The Universe is sizzling with undiscovered phenomena. Only last month astronomers heard four unexpected bumps in the night. These Fast Radio Bursts released torrents of energy, each occurred only once, and lasted a few thousandths of a second. Their origin has since mystified astronomers.
Dismissing my first guess, which includes a feverish Jodie Foster verifying the existence of extraterrestrial life, astronomers have found a more likely answer. Two neutron stars collide, but before doing so produce a quick burst of radio emission, which we later observe as a Fast Radio Burst.
Our first hint? These Fast Radio Bursts are extra-galactic in origin. The exact distance is quantifiable from a “dispersion measure – the frequency dependent time delay of the radio signal,” Dr. Tomonori Totani, lead author on the paper, told Universe Today. “This is proportional to the number of electrons along the line of sight.”
For all bursts, the short-wavelength component arrived at the telescope a fraction of a second before the longer wavelengths. This is due to an effect known as interstellar dispersion: through any medium, longer-wavelength light moves slightly slower than short-wavelength light.
Light from extra-galactic objects will have to travel through intergalactic space, which is teeming with electrons in clouds of cold plasma. The farther the light travels, the more electrons it will have to travel through, and the greater the time delay between arriving wavelength components. By the time light reaches the Earth, it has been dispersed, and the amount of dispersion is directly correlated with distance.
These Fast Radio Bursts are likely to have originated anywhere from 5 to 10 billion light years away.
While the exact source of these Fast Radio Bursts has been highly debated, a recent hypothesis concludes that they are the result of merging neutron stars in the distant Universe.
In the final milliseconds before merging, the rotation periods of the two neutron stars synchronize – they become tidally locked to one another as the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth. At this point their magnetic fields also synchronize. Energetic charged particles spiral along the strong magnetic field lines and emit a beam of radio synchrotron emission.
Known neutron star magnetic field strengths are consistent with the radio flux observed in these Fast Radio Bursts. The emission then ceases in a few milliseconds when the two neutron stars have collided, which explains the short duration of these Fast Radio Bursts.
Not only does this mechanism describe both the high energy and the time duration of these bursts, but they’re inferred occurrence rate as well. It’s likely that 100,000 Fast Radio Bursts occur each day. This matches the likely neutron star merger rate.
Merging neutrons stars will also create gravitational waves – ripples in the curvature of spacetime that propagate away from the event. Dr. Totani emphasized that the next step will be to perform a correlated search of gravitational waves and Fast Radio Bursts. Such a fast rate estimate is certainly good news for scientists hoping to detect gravitational waves in the nearby future.
The Universe is bursting with energy – literally – every 10 seconds, and until recently we simply had no idea. This recently discovered phenomenon is likely to be the center of a new active area of research. And I have no doubt that it will lead to exciting discoveries that just may break trends and burst into new territories.
The discovery paper may be found here, while the paper analyzing neutron stars as a likely source may be found here.
During the stationary recovery test of Orion at Norfolk Naval Base on Aug. 15, 2013, US Navy divers attached tow lines and led the test capsule to a flooded well deck on the USS Arlington. Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com.
Story updated with additional test Video and images[/caption]
NAVAL STATION NORFOLK,VA – When American astronauts again venture into deep space sometime in the next decade, their return trip to Mother Earth will end with the splashdown of their Orion capsule in the Pacific Ocean – much like the Apollo lunar landing crews of four decades ago.
But before that can happen, Orion must first pass through a myriad of milestones to insure the safe return of our human crews.
A NASA and U.S. Navy test successfully demonstrated the water recovery of the Orion crew module today (Aug. 15) at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia – and Universe Today witnessed the entire operation.
“Today’s test was terrific,” Scott Wilson, NASA’s Orion Manager of Production Operations, told Universe Today in a post test interview at Naval Station Norfolk.
“We got all the data we needed and the test was very successful. This was exactly what we wanted to do and we don’t like surprises.”
Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com
Today’s ‘Orion Stationary Recovery Test’ was conducted to support the upcoming first flight of Orion on the EFT-1 mission due to blastoff in September 2014 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
“We completed all of our primary and secondary test objectives,” Wilson stated.
Teams of US Navy divers in a flotilla of amphibious boats launched from the USS Arlington approached a test version of the Orion capsule known as the boilerplate test article (BTA). The Arlington was docked against its pier during the test in a benign, controlled environment.
Divers attached several tow lines to the capsule, in a coordinated operation with the Arlington, and led the capsule into the ship’s flooded well deck.
The Orion capsule was carefully towed inside the well deck and positioned over the recovery cradle. The sea water was drained and the capsule was attached to the recovery cradle.
“During the test there is constant radio communications between the ship and the divers teams in the boats.”
“The operation within the well deck areas are also being controlled as well as the rope and winch handlers on the boat,” Wilson told me.
At the conclusion of the test, myself and the NASA social media participants boarded the USS Arlington and toured the Orion capsule for a thrilling up close look.
“Today marks a significant milestone in the Navy’s partnership with NASA and the Orion Human Space Flight Program,” said Navy Commander Brett Moyes, Future Plans Branch chief, U.S. Fleet in a statement.
“The Navy is excited to support NASA’s continuing mission of space exploration. Our unique capabilities make us an ideal partner for NASA in the recovery of astronauts in the 21st century — just as we did nearly a half century ago in support of America’s quest to put a man on the moon.”
The ocean recovery of Orion will be far different from the Apollo era where the crew’s were first hoisted out of the floating capsule and the capsule then hoisted on deck of a US Navy aircraft carrier.
The next Orion water recovery test will be conducted in the open waters of the Pacific Ocean in January 2014.
NASA’s Langley Research Center in nearby Hampton, VA is conducting an extensive drop test program in support of the Orion project.
“The Orion capsule tested today has the same mold line and dimensions as the Orion EFT-1 capsule.”
“The Orion hardware and the Delta IV Heavy booster for the EFT-1 launch are on target for launch in 2014,” Wilson told me.
Watch this NASA Video of the Orion test:
During the unmanned Orion EFT-1 mission, the capsule will fly on a two orbit test flight to an altitude of 3,600 miles above Earth’s surface, farther than any human spacecraft has gone in 40 years.
The EFT-1 mission will provide engineers with critical data about Orion’s heat shield, flight systems and capabilities to validate designs of the spacecraft before it begins carrying humans to new destinations in the solar system, including an asteroid and Mars.
It will return to Earth at a speed of approximately 20,000 mph for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
Right now its T Minus 1 Year and counting to liftoff of Orion EFT-1.
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Learn more about Orion, Cygnus, Antares, LADEE, MAVEN, Mars rovers and more at Ken’s upcoming presentations
Sep 5/6/16/17: LADEE Lunar & Antares/Cygnus ISS Rocket Launches from Virginia”; Rodeway Inn, Chincoteague, VA, 8 PM
Oct 3: “Curiosity, MAVEN and the Search for Life on Mars – (3-D)”, STAR Astronomy Club, Brookdale Community College & Monmouth Museum, Lincroft, NJ, 8 PM
Nearly 18.7 billion kilometers from Earth — about 17 light-hours away — NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is just about on the verge of entering interstellar space, a wild and unexplored territory of high-energy cosmic particles into which no human-made object has ever ventured. Launched in September 1977, Voyager 1 will soon become the first spacecraft to officially leave the Solar System.
Or has it already left?
I won’t pretend I haven’t heard it before: Voyager 1 has left the Solar System! Usually followed soon after by: um, no it hasn’t. And while it might all seem like an awful lot of flip-flopping by supposedly-respectable scientists, the reality is there’s not a clear boundary that defines the outer limits of our Solar System. It’s not as simple as Voyager rolling over a certain mileage, cruising past a planetary orbit, or breaking through some kind of discernible forcefield with a satisfying “pop.” (Although that would be cool.)
Rather, scientists look at Voyager’s data for evidence of a shift in the type of particles detected. Within the transitionary zone that the spacecraft has most recently been traveling through, low-energy particles from the Sun are outnumbered by higher-energy particles zipping through interstellar space, also called the local interstellar medium (LISM). Voyager’s instruments have been detecting dramatic shifts in the concentrations of each for over a year now, unmistakably trending toward the high-energy end — or at least showing a severe drop-off in solar particles — and researchers from the University of Maryland are claiming that this, along with their model of a porous solar magnetic field, indicates Voyager has broken on through to the other side.
Read more: Voyagers Find Giant Jacuzzi-like Bubbles at Edge of Solar System
“It’s a somewhat controversial view, but we think Voyager has finally left the Solar System, and is truly beginning its travels through the Milky Way,” said Marc Swisdak, UMD research scientist and lead author of a new paper published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
According to Swisdak, fellow UMD plasma physicist James F. Drake, and Merav Opher of Boston University, their model of the outer edge of the Solar System fits recent Voyager 1 observations — both expected and unexpected. In fact, the UMD-led team says that Voyager passed the outer boundary of the Sun’s magnetic influence, aka the heliopause… last year.
Read more: Winds of Change at the Edge of the Solar System
But, like some of last year’s claims, these conclusions aren’t shared by mission scientists at NASA.
“Details of a new model have just been published that lead the scientists who created the model to argue that NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft data can be consistent with entering interstellar space in 2012,” said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at Caltech, in a press release issued today. “In describing on a fine scale how magnetic field lines from the sun and magnetic field lines from interstellar space can connect to each other, they conclude Voyager 1 has been detecting the interstellar magnetic field since July 27, 2012. Their model would mean that the interstellar magnetic field direction is the same as that which originates from our sun.
“Other models envision the interstellar magnetic field draped around our solar bubble and predict that the direction of the interstellar magnetic field is different from the solar magnetic field inside. By that interpretation, Voyager 1 would still be inside our solar bubble.”
Stone says that further discussion and investigation will be needed to “reconcile what may be happening on a fine scale with what happens on a larger scale.”
Whether still within the Solar System — however it’s defined — or outside of it, the bottom line is that the venerable Voyager spacecraft are still conducting groundbreaking research of our cosmic neighborhood, 36 years after their respective launches and long after their last views of the planets. And that’s something nobody can argue about.
“The Voyager 1 spacecraft is exploring a region no spacecraft has ever been to before. We will continue to look for any further developments over the coming months and years as Voyager explores an uncharted frontier.”
– Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist
Built by JPL and launched in 1977, both Voyagers are still capable of returning scientific data from a full range of instruments, with adequate power and propellant to remain operating until 2020.
Read the full UMD news release here, and find out more about the Voyager mission on the NASA/JPL website here.
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Note: The definition of “Solar System” used in this article is in reference to the Sun’s magnetic influence, the heliosphere, and all that falls within its outermost boundary, the heliopause (wherever that is.) Objects farther out are still gravitationally held by the Sun, such as distant KBOs and Oort Cloud comets, but orbit within the interstellar medium.
Personally, I’ve never seen anything like this, and photographer and digital artist Michael K. Chung said he couldn’t believe what he saw when he was processing images he took for a timelapse of the Perseid meteor shower. It appears he captured a meteor explosion and the resulting expansion of a shock wave or debris ring.
“It was taken early in the morning on August 12, 2013 from my backyard in Victorville, CA,” Michael told Universe Today via email. “The fade to white is NOT an edit- it is overexposure due to the sun coming up. From what I can tell, the timelapse sequence of the explosion and expanding debris span an actual time of approximately 20 minutes.”
Michael said because he shoots at much higher resolution than 720p, he’s able to provide two different sequences in this video: one is with the full frame of each capture scaled/reduced and then cropped down to 1280×720, and the other is with the full frame kept at resolution with just the region around the explosion cropped to 1280×720. “I included each sequence twice – once at 24 frames per second and the other at around 12 fps.”
Amazing!
Since I’ve never seen anything like this, I decided to have one of our observing experts provide his opinion. UT writer David Dickinson said this is definitely legitimate.
“What cinches it for me is that the meteor was moving in the right direction for a Perseid,” Dave told me. “I see Perseus rising to the right, the plane of the Milky Way and Andromeda just above center.”
Dave said he has seen several meteors that leave lingering smoke trains. “I usually carry binoculars to examine these,” he said, “and saw several examples of this during the 1998 Leonid meteor storm from the desert in Kuwait, one of the most awesome things I’ve seen. Ever.”
Dave concurs, great catch by Michael Chung!
Update: Daniel Fischer provided a link to some imagery and information of the 1998 Leonid observations, showing persistent trains and more. Daniel also provided a more accurate description of what Michael Chung captured: “a persistent train after a Perseids fireball, being torn apart by upper atmosphere wind shear.”
Second update:
We heard from a few more people who also witnessed and captured similar Perseids with persistent trains.
Steve Knight from the UK also captured some explody-Perseids this year. Take a look at his video below, and at :15 and :19 there are fireballs followed by expanding cloud of debris — to see it better expand the video and look at the top right part of the screen. Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is visible drifting in from the left.
And Steve also provided animated gifs of the explosions:
Also, Randy Halverson from Dakotalapse, whose work we feature frequently on UT sent a couple of images of persistent trains from meteors, like this one:
…and this one of the cloud of debris left from a persistent train:
Watch his timelapse here, with the explosion taking place at about :53 into the film:
… with an interesting story that he set up his equipment to do a timelapse in the same place two years in a row and captured persistent trains both years. To find out more about that, as well as get more info on persistent trains, Phil Plait wrote this article about it.
There’s also an animated gif of an exploding Perseid from astromel on Flickr here.
2013 Perseids Meteor Shower: Meteor Explosion from Michael Chung on Vimeo.
Sol 351 for the Curiosity rover on Mars was a marvelous night for a moon dance. The Mars Science Laboratory rover caught sight of Mars’ two moons, Phobos and Deimos together in the sky. And not just one image was captured: the rover’s Mast Camera captured a series of 41 images to allow the MSL team to create this timelapse movie of the dance, where the smaller moon Diemos is occulted by Phobos.
To our knowledge, this the first time the two moons have been seen together in any image from the surface of Mars, let alone a sequence of images. The Mars Express spacecraft took images of the moons together in 2009 from orbit.
The movie from MSL takes just a few seconds to watch, but the team said the real time it took to shoot the 41 images was 55 seconds.
Sol 351 equates to August 1, 2013 here on Earth.
See a raw still shot below:
Update: JPL has now put out a press release about the movie, confirming that no previous images from missions on the surface has caught one moon eclipsing the other.
They also said there was a slight delay in getting these images from the rover, as there were higher-priority images in the queue that were to be used for planning the rover’s drives.
Scientists know that the orbit of Phobos is very slowly getting closer to Mars, while the orbit of Deimos may be slowly getting farther from the planet. These observations of Phobos and Deimos help researchers make knowledge of the moons’ orbits even more precise.
“The ultimate goal is to improve orbit knowledge enough that we can improve the measurement of the tides Phobos raises on the Martian solid surface, giving knowledge of the Martian interior,” said Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University, College Station, a co-investigator for use of Curiosity’s Mastcam. “We may also get data good enough to detect density variations within Phobos and to determine if Deimos’ orbit is systematically changing.”
There’s also this nice graphic comparing our Moon to Phobos and Deimos:
Although Phobos has a diameter less than one percent the diameter of Earth’s Moon, Phobos also orbits much closer to Mars than our moon’s distance from Earth. As seen from the surface of Mars, Phobos looks about half as wide as what Earth’s moon looks like to viewers on Earth.
Nice work Curiosity and team!
It’s unclear how the Kepler space telescope’s science operations will continue, if at all, as NASA weighs what to do with the crippled spacecraft. But the agency says not to count Kepler out yet.
What’s known for sure is NASA cannot recover the two failed reaction wheels that stopped Kepler from doing its primary science mission, which was searching for exoplanets (with a focus on Earth-sized exoplanets) in a small area in the constellation Cygnus.
“We do not believe we can recover three-wheel operation or Kepler’s original science mission,” said Paul Hertz, NASA astrophysics division director, in a telephone press conference with reporters Thursday (Aug. 15).
But the spacecraft, which is already working years past when its prime mission ceased in 2010, is still in great shape otherwise, added Charles Sobeck, Kepler’s deputy project manager.
As such, NASA is now considering other science missions, which could be anything from searching for asteroids to a technique called microlensing, which could show Jupiter-sized planets around other stars with the spacecraft’s more limited pointed ability. More information should be available in the fall on these points, once Kepler’s team reviews some white papers with science proposals.
There are limiting factors. The first is the health of the spacecraft, but it is so far listed as good (except for the two damaged reaction wheels). While radiation can degrade components over time, and a stray micrometeorid could (as a small chance) cause damage on the spacecraft, right now Kepler is able to work on something new, Sobeck said.
“We have it in a point rest state right now,” Sobeck said, referring to a state where the spacecraft uses as little fuel as possible. This will extend the fuel “budget” for years, although Sobeck was unable to say just how many years yet.
Another concern is NASA’s limited budget, which (like other government departments) has undergone sequestration and other measures as the U.S. government grapples with its debt. Kepler has an estimated $18 million budget in fiscal 2013, agency officials said, adding they would need to weigh any future science mission against those of other projects being done by the agency.
The public drama began on May 15, when NASA announced that a second of Kepler’s four reaction wheels — devices that keep the telescope pointed in the right direction — had failed.
“We need three wheels in service to give us the pointing precision to enable us to find planets,” said Bill Borucki, Kepler principal investigator, during a press briefing that day. “Without three wheels, it is unclear whether we could continue to do anything on that order.”
Around the same time, Scott Hubbard — a consulting professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford’s School of Engineering — wrote an online Q&A about Kepler’s recovery process. He emphasized the potential loss, although sad, is not devastating to the science.
“The science returns of the Kepler mission have been staggering and have changed our view of the universe, in that we now think there are planets just about everywhere,” he wrote.
“It will be very sad if it can’t go on any longer, but the taxpayers did get their money’s worth. Kepler has, so far, detected more than 2,700 candidate exoplanets orbiting distant stars, including many Earth-size planets that are within their star’s habitable zone, where water could exist in liquid form.” (You can read about some of Kepler’s more unusual finds here.)
NASA made several attempts to resurrect the wheels. On July 18, team members tested reaction wheel four, which spun in a counterclockwise direction but would not budge in the clockwise direction. Four days later, a test with reaction wheel two showed it moving well to the test commands in both directions.
“Over the next two weeks, engineers will review the data from these tests and consider what steps to take next,” mission manager Roger Hunter said. “Although both wheels have shown motion, the friction levels will be critical in future considerations. The details of the wheel friction are under analysis.”
Mission managers successfully spun reaction wheel 4 in both directions on July 25, an Aug. 2 update said. While warning that friction could affect the usability of the wheels in the long term, the team expressed optimism as more tests continued.
“With the demonstration that both wheels will still move, and the measurement of their friction levels, the functional testing of the reaction wheels is now complete,” Hunter wrote in the update, the last one to go out before Thursday’s press conference.”The next step will be a system-level performance test to see if the wheels can adequately control spacecraft pointing.”
That was expected to begin Aug. 8. You can read more technical details of the tests here. Those tests, however, showed that the friction built up beyond what the spacecraft could handle. Kepler entered safe mode, it was recovered, and it is now essentially in standby awaiting more instructions.
Meanwhile, probing the data Kepler produced thus far is still revealing new planetary candidates. The current count is now 3,548 — an increase from the approximately 2,700 quoted in May — even though Kepler was sidelined in the intervening time.
There’s also a follow-up spacecraft planned: the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which is expected to start around 2017 or 2018. It will look for alien planets in the brightest and closest stars in the entire sky, in locations that are (in relative terms) close to Earth.
What we’re gonna’ do here is go back. Way back into time. Back to when the only thing that existed was… galaxies? When astronomers employed the power of Hubble’s CANDELS survey to observe different galaxy types from the distant past, they expected to see a variety of spiral, elliptical, lenticular and peculiar structures, but what they didn’t expect was that things were a whole lot more “peculiar” a long time ago!
Known as the Hubble Sequence, astronomers use this classified system for listing galaxy sizes, shapes and colors. It also arranges galaxies according to their morphology and star-forming activity. Up to the present, the Hubble Sequence covered about 80% of the Universe’s history, but the latest information shows that the sequence was valid as much as 11 billion years ago! Out of what we currently know, there are two dominant galaxy types – spiral and elliptical – with the lenticular structure as a median. Of course, this is constrained to the regions of space which we can readily observe, but how true did the sequence hold back when the Universe theoretically began?
“This is a key question: when and over what timescale did the Hubble Sequence form?” says BoMee Lee of the University of Massachusetts, USA, lead author of a new paper exploring the sequence. “To do this you need to peer at distant galaxies and compare them to their closer relatives, to see if they too can be described in the same way.”
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers took on the sequence challenge to peer back 11 billion years in time to study galaxy structure. Up until now, researchers could confirm the sequence was valid as long ago as 8 billion years, but these new studies pushed CANDELS, the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey, to the outer limits. It is simply the largest project ever, and soaked up 902 assigned orbits of observing time. Using the WFC3 and ACS cameras, the team examined structures that existed less than one billion years after the Big Bang. While earlier studies had aimed for lower-mass galaxies in this era, no study had really taken on serious observation of mature structures – ones similar to our own galaxy. Now the new CANDELS observations show us that all galaxies, regardless of size, fit into a totally different classification!
“This is the only comprehensive study to date of the visual appearance of the large, massive galaxies that existed so far back in time,” says co-author Arjen van der Wel of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. “The galaxies look remarkably mature, which is not predicted by galaxy formation models to be the case that early on in the history of the Universe.”
Just what did this study see that’s so different? Just the power of two. Galaxies were either complex, with blue star forming regions and irregular structures, or they were like our nearby neighbors: massive red galaxies that exhibit no new star-formation. In the early Universe, galaxies like the Milky Way were uncommon. With so little to study, it was nearly impossible to get a large enough sample to sufficiently catalog their characteristics. Early research could only peer back in visible light, a format which emphasized star formation and revealed the red-shifted ultraviolet emission of the galaxies. This information was inconclusive because galaxy structure appeared disrupted and unlike the formations we see near to us. Through the use of infra-red, astronomers could observe the now red-shifted massive galaxies in their visible rest frame. Thanks to CANDELS lighting the way, astronomers were able to thoroughly sample a significantly larger amount of mature galaxies in detail.
“The huge CANDELS dataset was a great resource for us to use in order to consistently study ancient galaxies in the early Universe,” concludes Lee. “And the resolution and sensitivity of Hubble’s WFC3 is second to none in the infrared wavelengths needed to carry out this study. The Hubble Sequence underpins a lot of what we know about how galaxies form and evolve — finding it to be in place this far back is a significant discovery.”
Original Story Source: ” Hubble Explores the Origins of Modern Galaxies” – Hubble News Release.
The International Astronomical Union issued a statement on August 14, 2013 that they have changed their official stance on two things: 1. assigning popular names to the numerous extrasolar planets being discovered, and 2. allowing the public to be involved in that naming process.
“It is therefore in line with a long-established global tradition and experience that the IAU fully supports the involvement of the general public, whether directly or through an independent organised vote, in the naming of planetary satellites, newly discovered planets and their host stars,” the online statement said.
This new stance came as a surprise to many.
“I was surprised by the IAU statement encouraging the general public input on naming astronomical objects,” said Professor Abel Mendez, director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico, in an email to Universe Today. “This is certainly something good. …So there is now a public naming procedure that includes the IAU validation but this does not exclude any other non-IAU public naming campaigns.”
As recently as late March, 2013, the IAU’s official word on naming exoplanets was, “the IAU sees no need and has no plan to assign names to these objects at the present stage of our knowledge.”
Their rationale was since there is seemingly going to be so many exoplanets, it will be difficult to name them all.
But then, on about March 24, the IAU added this to their website:
“…the IAU greatly appreciates and wishes to acknowledge the increasing interest from the general public in being more closely involved in the discovery and understanding of our Universe. As a result in 2013 the IAU Commission 53 Extrasolar Planets and other IAU members will be consulted on the topic of having popular names for exoplanets, and the results will be made public on the IAU website.”
This new decision follows a line of events earlier this year where the SETI Institute and the space company Uwingu organized their own campaigns/contests for creating popular names of objects in space instead of the rather clinical, scientific names currently assigned to planets, such as HD 41004 Ab. Both events were wildly popular with the general public, but generated discussion about how “official” the names would be. The IAU issued a statement regarding the contests saying that while they welcomed the public’s interest in being involved in recent discoveries, as far as they are concerned, the IAU has the last word. Additionally, they were against “selling” names (Uwingu charged a fee to suggest a name and to vote as a fundraiser for space research.)
“In the light of recent events, where the possibility of buying the rights to name exoplanets has been advertised, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) wishes to inform the public that such schemes have no bearing on the official naming process. The IAU… would like to strongly stress the importance of having a unified naming procedure,” said the April 12, 2013 statement issued by the IAU.
The IAU’s new rules allow for individuals to suggest names of exoplanets and planetary satellites (moons) via email to the IAU (Click here for email address).
Public naming campaigns are also “sanctioned” given they follow a set of rules:
1. Prior to any public naming initiative, often a vote (hereafter “the process”), the IAU should be contacted from the start by Letter of Intent sent to the IAU General Secretary;
2. The process should be submitted in the form of a proposal to the IAU by an organization. Scientists or science communicators may be involved in the process;
3. The organization should list its legal or official representatives and its goals, and explain the reasons for initiating the process for naming a particular object or set of objects;
4. The process cannot request nor make reference to any revenues, for whatever purpose;
5. The process must guarantee a wide international participation;
6. The public names proposed (whether by individuals or in a naming campaign)should follow the naming rules and restrictions adopted for Minor Bodies of the Solar System, by the IAU and by the Minor Planet Center (see here and here
for more details.
Among other rules are that proposed names should be 16 characters or less in length, pronounceable in as many languages as possible, non-offensive in any language or culture, and that names of individuals, places or events principally known for political or military activities are unsuitable.
Also, the names must have the formal agreement of the discoverers.
The new statement also has its critics. People joked on Twitter this morning whether the name of our neighboring planet Mars, named for the god of war, will have to be changed due to the new restrictions on military nomenclature.
Astronomer Alan Stern, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and CEO of Uwingu said he was actually not surprised at the IAU’s new statement.
“Fundamentally it’s still about the public being subservient to IAU committees that pass on recommendations,” he said via an email response to Universe Today. “Old school. Why should the IAU be a traffic cop?”
Stern also said the new statement has several contradictions from the statement the IUA put out on April 12 of this year, such as that “these [naming]campaigns have no bearing on the official naming process — they will not lead to an officially-recognised exoplanet name, despite the price paid or the number of votes accrued.” It now would appear that contests that follow the IAU’s rules are OK.
Stern said he has received letters and emails of support from other astronomers, particularly on the “no revenue” provision, noting how astronomy publications and planetariums charge money for their magazines and sky shows.
“If they can do it, why can’t Uwingu — especially since Uwingu’s revenue is used (at least in part) to further the IAU’s own goals, namely, to advance the science of astronomy, and the public’s understanding of it, worldwide?,” Stern quoted one email he received.
Also, the April statement from the IAU said they were the single arbiter of the naming process of celestial objects, while the new August statement says, “The IAU does not consider itself as having a monopoly on the naming of celestial objects— anyone can in theory adopt names the way they choose.”
The statement goes on, “However, given the publicity and emotional investment associated with these discoveries, worldwide recognition is important and the IAU offers its unique experience for the benefit of a successful public naming process (which must remain distinct, as in the past, from the scientific designation issues).”
Since this is a public debate about the public’s involvement in providing popular names for astronomical objects, please add your thoughts in the comments.