‘Space’ Archives
HD 209458b: A Comet-like Tail
The exoplanet HD 209458b is the subject of such intense scrutiny that the discovery of a comet-like ‘tail’ is almost anti-climactic. After all, this transiting ‘hot Jupiter’ has given us plentiful information about its atmosphere (including the presence of a massive storm), and its tight orbit around its primary, orbiting [...]
Jupiter Looms in Mission Plans
We learned in May that Jupiter’s South Equatorial Belt (SEB) had disappeared, an event that still has skywatchers puzzled, though it’s not without precedent. In fact, the SEB fades out every now and then, with recent fadings in 1989, 1993 and 2010, and we can expect an outburst of storms and vortices when the enigmatic belt returns, [...]
The Enduring Legacy of the Voyagers
by Larry Klaes The Faces from Earth project, run so energetically by Tibor Pacher, is planning its next ‘E.T. Are You Out There?’ campaign, following a successful campaign in May that introduced interstellar concepts to school children in five countries. In this piece, journalist Larry Klaes looks back at the Voyager spacecraft, which [...]
WASP-3c: Implications for Finding Earthlike Planets
Learning about planets through inference is a necessary procedure, given the state of our technology. We do have a few direct images of exoplanets now, but when relying on radial velocity data or transits, we’re looking at the effects planets cause upon our measurements of their stars. With CoRoT and Kepler now yielding high-quality transit [...]
SETI: Stiff Odds Against Eavesdropping
Take a look at the frequency range of our SETI searches and you’ll see that we are probing into new territory. Project Phoenix, which ran from 1995 to 2004, used radio telescopes at Arecibo, Parkes (NSW, Australia) and Green Bank (WV, USA), working in a frequency range of 1.2 to 3 GHz. The BETA project used a 26-meter radio telescope to [...]
TrES-2b: Pushing Exomoon Limits
The planet known as TrES-2b is an interesting and useful place. Just over Jupiter mass, it orbits a solar mass star some 717 light years from Earth, a ‘hot Jupiter’ in a tight 2.47-day orbit. It’s also a transiting planet, discovered by the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey, which uses small, automated equipment and off-the-shelf [...]
Lutetia Encounter Approaches
Asteroids are much in the news these days, with Japanese and European missions returning outstanding photos and information about them. While we await testing on what may be fragments of the asteroid Itokawa from the Hayabusa team, we now prepare for another asteroid flyby on the part of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, which [...]
Early Multicellular Life and Its Implications
We often speak in these pages about extinction events, and cite such examples as the Cretaceous-Tertiary event some 65.5 million years ago, when the mass extinction of dinosaurs and numerous animal and plant species occurred. Whether caused by an incoming asteroid or comet or through a series of catastrophes including volcanic eruptions (the [...]
Dark Energy: Standard Candles Reliable
Getting a handle on dark energy is one of the great goals of modern physics. But understanding what it is that seems to be accelerating the expansion of the universe depends upon the accuracy of our measurements. We can study this acceleration by looking at the behavior of Type Ia supernovae, which can be used as ‘standard candles’ [...]
Costs of an Interstellar Probe
When does it make sense to build a starship? Back in the late 1960s, Freeman Dyson went to work on the question of how much an interstellar probe might cost. Extrapolating from nuclear pulse propulsion and the state of the art in spacecraft design as then understood, Dyson arrived at an estimate of $100 billion to build the craft, which translates [...]
