Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Want to Name an Exoplanet? Uwingu Has a Plan

Screenshot from the Uwingu exoplanet naming website.

Astronomers have now discovered nearly 1,000 planets orbiting other stars, and right now these exoplanets all have boring, license-plate-like names, such as HD85512 and GJ 436 instead of endearing, “real” planet names that might offer hints of what that world could be like. And recall the recent extrapolation of how many habitable planets might be in the Milky Way? A team using the ESO’s HARP’s spectrograph determined there might be upwards of 160 billion worlds out there for us to find, and perhaps eventually name. How might we come up with that many names?

Uwingu, a startup company that is hoping to use innovative ways to fund space and astronomy research, has an idea of how to do that. Their first commercial project is to challenge people to create a ‘baby book of planet names’ for all these planets, as suggestions for future names for other worlds.

“The many, many planets discovered across the galaxy in past 20 years are a tribute to our natural human desire to explore beyond the horizon,” said noted planet hunter Dr. Geoff Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley, who is also an advisor for Uwingu. “Now people all over the world can participate in these discoveries in a new way, giving identities and even personality to billions of planets in our galaxy for the first time.”

How does this raise money for space science? Submitting suggestions for names cost $.99 each, and Uwingu will use proceeds from this project and future ones to create funds for grants that space researchers, space educators, and project teams can apply to use.

Uwingu’s first project is technically now in “beta testing,” and in a press release, the organization said the public can participate immediately, helping to generate a new source of funds for space exploration, research, and education.

But it doesn’t end with just suggestions. People can vote on the top names (each vote also costs $.99), and as Uwingu CEO and founder Alan Stern told Universe Today, they are hoping the voting goes viral among the social media savvy.

“This is a way for people everywhere to connect with space,” he said. “You can suggest a name and tell all your friends to vote, and the top names will be the first to be used. If you nominate the name of someone famous, hopefully they’ll get in on the excitement and ask their fans to vote, too.”

The Uwingu team suggests nominating planet names for your favorite town, state, or country, your favorite sports team, music artist, or hero, your favorite author or book, your school, your company, for your loved ones and friends, or even for yourself.

The names won’t be officially approved by the International Astronomical Union, but Stern said they will be are similar to the names given to features on Mars by the mission science teams (such as the “Jake Matijevic” rock recently analyzed by the Curiosity rover) that everyone ends up using. This also solves the problem of how to come up with names, a task that the IAU has yet to discuss.

Initial reactions to the planet naming project – and to Uwingu itself — have been mixed. During their Indigogo fundraising, the Uwingu team didn’t disclose what types of things they would be selling or doing to raise funds, which was a concern to some in the space and astronomy community who normally support almost any space-related initiative. In a previous interview with UT, Stern said being secretive was a way to generate interest and likened it to how Apple announces a new product.

While there seems to be excitement about the opportunity to suggest names for exoplanets (as of this writing 74 names had been nominated, with numerous votes for each name), some early reactions have been that this might be similar to the ‘name a star’ registries that are unofficial and quite expensive.

IAU’s stance on naming exoplanets has been that since it appears there are going to be so many of them, naming them will be difficult. However, in an email reply, the former president of the IAU Planetary Systems Science body, Karen Meech said that at the IAU meeting in Beijing this summer there was discussion about the need to set up a group to look into the issue of exoplanet names.

And Meech did confirm that since the IAU is the only scientifically recognized arbiter of astronomical names, any contests for names from the public will not be officially recognized by the scientific community.

But if the problem is in the amount of names that will be required, that’s where Uwingu’s crowd sourcing idea seems to fit the need.

And for those who are critical of Uwingu’s methods, Uwingu is so far the only group or organization to step forward with innovative, out-of-the-box ways to try and solve what seems to be a continuous, perennial problem: how to fund creative space and astronomy projects and move beyond the old tried and not always true methods of relying on government grants and subsidies or angel donors.

Uwingu is at least trying something different, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Stern said earlier that Uwingu’s projects would appeal to the general public, not just the space and astronomy community, to provide a bigger marketplace for their projects. He indicated Uwingu will be coming out with another project in a few months.

We humans love to name things: we name our cars, spacecraft and rocks, craters and hills on other planets. NASA has had contests to name missions, rovers, and modules on the ISS, all of which has generated excitement among the public. Science and science fiction fans have expressed disappointment at the names given to exoplanets so far (they certainly aren’t as intriguing as names we’ve come to love like Tatooine, Pandora, Vulcan or Hoth.) Uwingu is using that innate need/love of naming things to try and move space science and astronomy into a new era.

Posted on by Elizabeth Howell

Kansas Cosmosphere Vote Passes on Election Night

The Apollo 13 Odyssey spacecraft at the Kansas Cosmosphere. (Elizabeth Howell)

As an update to our story yesterday, more than 70 per cent of residents in Hutchinson, KS voted to keep tax money flowing into the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. The museum is located in the community, which is about an hour north of Wichita.

Museum officials were closely watching the vote Tuesday night, which took place at the same time as the U.S. general election for convenience’s sake.

The Cosmosphere gets 18% of its revenues from the city sales tax, which puts 33% of a quarter-cent aside for the Cosmosphere. Additional sales tax funds go to a nearby salt museum, as well as other city initiatives.

The tax vote takes place every five years, and this is the fifth time the measure has been approved, the museum noted. The votes tallied showed 8,935 people in favour and 3,635 opposed.

“The community’s response to the Cosmosphere’s request for continued commitment to the quarter-cent sales tax is greatly appreciated,” said Becky Christner, the Cosmosphere’s marketing and sales manager, in an e-mail to Universe Today.

“We look forward to continuing to serve the community as we work daily to succeed at our mission of honoring the past and inspiring the future of space exploration.”

The Cosmosphere is looking to expand its restoration, exhibition and fabrication customers in the coming years to bring in more revenue to the museum.

Past projects the Cosmosphere is known for:

– Rebuilding the Apollo 13 Odyssey spacecraft, which was torn apart for an accident investigation following a near-fatal explosion;

– Restoring the Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft, which sank at the end of its mission in space, and spent decades in a shallow part of the Atlantic Ocean;

– Film and television productions such as Apollo 13, From the Earth to the Moon and Magnificent Desolation.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

The Milky Way’s Black Hole Shoots Out Brightest Flare Ever

This false-color image shows the central region of our Milky Way Galaxy as seen by Chandra. The bright, point-like source at the center of the image was produced by a huge X-ray flare that occurred in the vicinity of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.
Image: NASA/MIT/F. Baganoff et al.

For some unknown reason, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy shoots out an X-ray flare about once a day. These flares last a few hours with the brightness ranging from a few times to nearly one hundred times that of the black hole’s regular output. But back in February 2012, astronomers using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory detected the brightest flare ever observed from the central black hole, also known as Sagittarius A*. The flare, recorded 26,000 light years away, was 150 times brighter than the black hole’s normal luminosity.

What causes these outbursts? Scientists aren’t sure. But Sagittarius A* doesn’t seem to be slowing down, even though as black holes age they should show a decrease in activity.

Mysterious X-ray flares caught by Chandra may be asteroids falling into the Milky Way's giant black hole. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/F. Baganoff et al.; Illustrations: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

Earlier this year, a group of researchers said that the outbursts may come from asteroids or even wandering planets that come too close to the black hole and they get consumed. Basically, the black hole is eating asteroids and then belching out X-ray gas.

Astronomers involved in this new observation seem to concur with that line of thinking.

“Suddenly, for whatever reason, Sagittarius A* is eating a lot more,” said Michael Nowak, a research scientist at MIT Kavli and co-author of a new paper in the Astrophysical Journal. “One theory is that every so often, an asteroid gets close to the black hole, the black hole stretches and rips it to pieces, and eats the material and turns it into radiation, so you see these big flares.”

Astronomers detect black holes by the light energy given off as they swallow nearby matter. The centers of newborn galaxies and quasars can appear extremely bright, giving off massive amounts of energy as they devour their surroundings. As black holes age, they tend to slow down, consuming less and appearing fainter in the sky.

“Everyone has this picture of black holes as vacuum sweepers, that they suck up absolutely everything,” says Frederick K. Baganoff, another co-author from MIT. “But in this really low-accretion-rate state, they’re really finicky eaters, and for some reason they actually blow away most of the energy.”

While such events like this big blast appear to be relatively rare, Nowak suspects that flare-ups may occur more frequently than scientists expect. The team has reserved more than a month of time on the Chandra Observatory to study Sagittarius A* in hopes of identifying more flares, and possibly what’s causing them.

“These bright flares give information on the flaring process that isn’t available with the weaker ones, such as how they fluctuate in time during the flare, how the spectrum changes, and how fast they rise and fall,” said Mark Morris from UCLA. “The greatest importance of this bright flare may be that it builds up the statistics on the characteristics of strong flares that can eventually be used to [identify] the cause of such flares.”

Even more intriguing to Baganoff is why the black hole emits so little energy. In 2003, he ran the very first observations with the then-new Chandra Observatory, and calculated that, given the amount of gas in its surroundings, Sagittarius A* should be about a million times brighter than it is — a finding that suggested the black hole throws away most of the matter it would otherwise consume.

The physics underlying such a phenomenon remain a puzzle that Baganoff and others hope to tease out with future observations.

“We’re really studying the great escape, because most of the gas escapes, and that’s not what we expect,” Baganoff says. “So we’re piecing out the history of the activity of the center of our galaxy.”

Paper: Chandra/HETGS Observations of the Brightest Flare seen from Sgr A*

See a movie of the flare here.

Source: MIT

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Phases of the Moon: Now on iPad

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve extended the functionality of our Phases of the Moon App so that it’s now working on Apple iPads (iPad 1-4 and the iPad Mini). To take advantage of the bigger screen real estate and higher resolution of the iPad, we’ve increased the resolution.

If you’ve already purchased our Phases of the Moon app on iPhone, you can just install the app on your other iDevices. If not, come on, it’s only $.99 and it’s super cool.

Click here to access Phases of the Moon in iTunes.

P.S. We just updated the Android version too. 🙂

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Carnival of Space #274

This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by our pal Ray Sanders at his Dear Astronomer website.

Click here to read Carnival of Space #274

And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to [email protected], and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, sign up to be a host. Send an email to the above address.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Podcast: Orbit

When an object is orbiting the Earth, it’s really falling. The trick, described in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. There are several different kinds of orbits, and they are good for different reasons. From suborbital jumps to geostationary orbit, time to learn everything there is to know about going around and around and around.

Click here to download the episode.

Or subscribe to: astronomycast.com/podcast.xml with your podcatching software.

“Orbit” on the Astronomy Cast website, with shownotes and transcript.

And the podcast is also available as a video, as Fraser and Pamela now record Astronomy Cast as part of a Google+ Hangout:

Posted on by Elizabeth Howell

How Today’s Election Could Affect the Kansas Cosmosphere

The Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. (Elizabeth Howell)

Hutchinson, KS — While the nation is polarized between choosing Barack Obama or Mitt Romney as the next American president, voters going to the polls in this city of 40,000 will have another matter to weigh during elections today.

Along with their ballot, residents will consider whether the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center will continue to receive funding from city coffers. Since it represents 18% of revenues for the science museum, Cosmosphere president Jim Remar says his colleagues have been paying close attention.

The city sales tax sets aside 33% of a quarter-cent for the Cosmosphere, and some additional funding for a nearby underground salt museum and other city initiatives. Money to the museum goes for general operations.

“I feel good that it’s going to pass, although we do have some nervous moments,” Remar says. Supporters of the tax have been spreading the word through radio, billboards, editorials in local newspapers and any other means possible to get out the word.

Museum president Jim Remar, inside the Cosmosphere’s restoration facility. (Elizabeth Howell)

Sales tax funding for the Cosmosphere renews every five years, with the current iteration set to expire in 2014. The city tries to get the vote out for the sales tax at the same time as the general election, for convenience and financial sake.

While 18% of the museum’s funding lie in the hands of voters, Remar is trying to increase the share of the remaining 82% under the Cosmosphere’s control.

Getting visitors out to the museum is always a challenge; it’s an hour from the nearest major center (Wichita), a city that itself is many hours’ drive from any city to speak of. Still, the museum brings in 120,000 people every year, an attendance figure that includes space camps, museum visits and other events.

For the city itself, though, the museum is a jewel: “I can’t think of any other town of 40,000 that has such a facility,” says Remar, speaking proudly of how he grew up in the area, left and then chose to come back to help lead the museum’s management. His focus now is on trying to bring in business connections to enhance the Cosmosphere’s power in the community.

One of the most promising aspects is the Cosmosphere’s restoration and fabrication facility. The museum is perhaps most famous for putting the pieces of the Apollo 13 Odyssey spacecraft back together around the same time the movie came out in 1995. This was no easy task, as Odyssey was disassembled and scattered during an investigation into a near-fatal explosion aboard the spacecraft in 1970.

The restored control panel in Apollo 13’s Odyssey spacecraft, which sits in the Cosmosphere. (Elizabeth Howell)

The Cosmosphere required the Smithsonian’s help as the museum hunted through NASA centers, contract facilities and other spots for months in search of missing pieces. More than 85% of the spacecraft, which is on display at the Cosmosphere, was retrieved. The rest of the components came from spares and other odd pieces the Cosmosphere could find.

Restoration capabilities came out of necessity, Remar says. In the mid-1980s, the museum had a need to put spacecraft on display and spiffy them up for visitors. As other museums had the same requirement, the Cosmosphere gradually built out capabilities in restoration.

“It’s not something where somebody can come in a day and do it. It is a lot of trial and error,” Remar says of the employees who work in the facility. The lead mechanic has been around for 14 years, though, and there are two other workers with him who have adapted well over the years.

Cosmosphere officials realized there are only so many spacecraft to restore, and added exhibitions, replication and fabrication to their capabilities. This positioned them well for a surge of Hollywood films and other productions in the 1990s, such as Apollo 13, HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon, a short-lived TV series in the ’90s called The Cape and (in the 2000s) the IMAX film Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D.

An individual project will cost anywhere from $10,000 to $2.5 million to build; overall revenues from this division are 15 to 20% of the museum’s coffers every year. And that could grow bigger very soon.

A tool box inside the Cosmosphere’s restoration facility. (Elizabeth Howell)

On Saturday, a “Science of Aliens” exhibit will open in Taipei at the National Taiwan Science Education Center. One major part is a UFO spacecraft – 19 feet wide by 7 feet tall – that the Cosmosphere built for the exhibit. It includes running lights and some alien-sounding noises.

Asia happens to be a hot economy these days compared with North America and Europe, where the Comosphere’s work historically went.

The Cosmosphere is in discussions with Taipei-based Universal Impression, a broker that negotiated the science museum work, to do more work in the future. Remar says he hopes the Cosmosphere’s presence there will serve as a calling card to other Asian clients.

“International work can explode here,” he says. “There’s a lot of potential.”

Posted on by Jason Major

Say Hello to Asteroid 2007 PA8

Radar images of asteroid 2007 PA8 acquired on October 28, 29 and 30. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Gemini)

Take a good look at asteroid 2007 PA8 — over the past week it was making its closest pass of Earth for the next 200 years… and NASA’s 230-foot (70-meter) -wide Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California snapped its picture as it went by.

All right, maybe no “pictures” were “snapped”… 2007 PA8 is a small, dark body that only came within four million miles (6.5 million kilometers) today, Nov. 5 (0.043 AU, or 17 times the distance from Earth to the Moon). But the radar capabilities of the Deep Space Network antenna in California’s Mojave Desert can bounce radar off even the darkest asteroids, obtaining data that can be used to create a detailed portrait.

In the image above, a composite of radar data acquired on October 28, 29 and 30, we can see the irregular shape of 2007 PA8 as it rotates slowly — only once every 3-4 days. The perspective is looking “down” at the 1-mile (1.6-km) -wide asteroid’s north pole, showing ridges and perhaps even some craters.

Although classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) by the IAU’s Minor Planet Center the trajectory of 2007 PA8 is well understood. It is not expected to pose any impact threat to Earth in the near or foreseeable future.

2007 PA8 was discovered by LINEAR on August 9, 2007.

Read more about asteroid radar imaging here, and find out more about asteroids at JPL’s Asteroid Watch site here.

Get more information on the known properties of 2007 PA8 here.

Source: NASA Solar System Exploration. Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Gemini

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Virtual Star Party – Nov. 4, 2012: The Blue Snowball Edition

Another fantastic Virtual Star Party, with 5 telescopes revealing an amazing view of the night sky. We saw several favorite objects, like Andromeda, the Elephant Trunk Nebula, the Heart and Soul Nebulae, the Double Cluster in Perseus, and the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules. Mighty Jupiter made an appearance right at the end, and we saw several new objects, including the Blue Snowball Nebula, and a collection of little star clusters.

I highly recommend you check out the Event page for this episode. There are dozens of great pictures posted from the event for your viewing enjoyment.

Astronomers: Gary Gonella, Bill McLaughlin, Roy Salisbury, Stuart Forman, and Chris Ridgway

Commentary: Dr. Thad Szabo

Host: Fraser Cain

Pinwheel Nebula by Gary Gonella


Jupiter by Chris Ridgway

Blue Snowball Nebula by Stuart Forman

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Spectacular 360-Degree 3-D Panorama from Apollo 16

Dealing with those who think the Apollo Moon landings never happened can be frustrating. Most of us just throw up our hands in exasperation, but Italian amateur astronomer Roberto Beltramini came up with a better idea: create a full 360-degree 3-D panorama of images from Apollo 16 to show “the true depth of the views taken by astronauts Apollo,” he said. “What better proof? This was the motivation that prompted me to start, but the spectacle and the interest in new ways of seeing the [Moon’s] wilderness, made me go farther.”

This panorama has now been put into a “Zoomify” making it fully interactive and lots of fun to explore. Grab your 3-D glasses, and you can find a rock and zoom in, follow the astronauts’ footprints and see one of the astronauts tinkering with the Lunar Rover. Click here and enjoy!

Beltramini’s initial plan was to create just a few 3-D anaglyghs, but once he got started, he just kept going. But of course, the Apollo 16 images taken by astronauts John Young and Charlie Duke as they walked, bounded and drove the lunar rover on the Moon’s surface were not originally taken with the intent to be made into 3-D view, making Beltramini’s job fairly difficult.

“The difficulty of making anaglyph, due to the shots not performed specifically for the purpose, may have dampened the attempts of other enthusiasts,” he writes on the website for amateur astronomy group in Viareggio, in the Tuscany region of Italy (Gruppo Astronomico Viareggio.) “To overcome this obstacle, I had to work adapting the pairs of pictures with graphics programs, cropping, resizing, by cleaning scratches and stains present because of the scans on the original story. Other marks are very annoying problem, that is, the black crosses placed at regular intervals in photographs taken during the Apollo missions that I had to delete one by one to avoid that interfere with 3D viewing.”

But over time he figured out how to make it work, “thanks to the phenomenon of rotation around a nodal point during the panning of the Apollo missions is possible, if there is plenty of overlap of the images, create a 3D 360 degree panorama,” he told Universe Today.

Apollo 16 was the fourth mission to land on the moon and launched on July 26, 1971, and the astronauts returned to Earth on August 7. Find out more about Apollo 16 here.