The Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image (see description on the right, below)

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image
(10,000 galaxies in an area 1% of the apparent size of the moon -- see description on the right, below)

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

2016 February

AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter February  2016

Contents
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 2
Astronomy News p. 7
General Calendar p. 8
    Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 8
    Observing p. 10
Useful Links p. 11
About the Club p. 12

Club News & Calendar.

Club Calendar

Club Meeting Schedule:

4 February
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting

 Hubble Operations, Morgan Bracken, GSFC
A1/1735


AEA Astronomy Club meetings are now on 1st  Thursdays at 11:45am.  For all of 2016, the meeting room is A1/1735. 


Club News:  

Suggestions for how to best spend our AEA budget allotment are welcome, especially in preparation for the 2017 total solar eclipse.

Again, we will shortly be doing a company-wide survey of interest in the 2017 total eclipse, to coordinate expedition(s).


Jim Edwards Report: 
Grrrr...

Steady high winds in excess of 35 mph (and frequently gusting to 41 mph!) has destroyed my rooftop observatory early this afternoon.  Fortunately, there was no damage to club equipment and seemingly only minimal damage to my own personal equipment--- the shelter, however, is likely toast.  My son (Joshua) and I were able to bring the equipment downstairs to safety before any further damage could be done.  Grrrr...
This miserable El Nino winter season has repeatedly offered the highest winds I've ever seen in my many decades in this location, but surprisingly very little rain.  Combined with the crazy heat of late summer (high 90's! (some 10 degrees higher than anything previously recorded)), this has been a crazy weather year in Redondo.
I have not been able to do any observing for at least 2 months now, its been really something unbelievable and frustrating.    :-(




Astronomy Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month
(from Astronomy Picture of the Day, APOD: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html)


Where Your Elements Came From 
Image Credit: Cmglee (Own work) CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL, via Wikimedia Commons
Explanation: The hydrogen in your body, present in every molecule of water, came from the Big Bang. There are no other appreciable sources of hydrogen in the universe. The carbon in your body was made by nuclear fusion in the interior of stars, as was the oxygen. Much of the iron in your body was made during supernovas of stars that occurred long ago and far away. The gold in your jewelry was likely made from neutron stars during collisions that may have been visible as short-duration gamma-ray bursts. Elements like phosphorus and copper are present in our bodies in only small amounts but are essential to the functioning of all known life. The featured periodic table is color coded to indicate humanity's best guess as to the nuclear origin of all known elements. The sites of nuclear creation of some elements, such as copper, are not really well known and are continuing topics of observational and computational research.
Infrared Portrait of the Large Magellanic Cloud 
Image Credit: ESA / NASA / JPL-Caltech / STScI
Explanation: Cosmic dust clouds ripple across this infrared portrait of our Milky Way's satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. In fact, the remarkable composite image from the Herschel Space Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope show that dust clouds fill this neighboring dwarf galaxy, much like dust along the plane of the Milky Way itself. The dust temperatures tend to trace star forming activity. Spitzer data in blue hues indicate warm dust heated by young stars. Herschel's instruments contributed the image data shown in red and green, revealing dust emission from cooler and intermediate regions where star formation is just beginning or has stopped. Dominated by dust emission, the Large Magellanic Cloud's infrared appearance is different from views in optical images. But this galaxy's well-known Tarantula Nebula still stands out, easily seen here as the brightest region to the left of center. A mere 160,000 light-years distant, the Large Cloud of Magellan is about 30,000 light-years across.
A Colorful Solar Corona over the Himalayas 
Image Credit & Copyright: Jeff Dai
Explanation: What are those colorful rings around the Sun? A corona visible only to Earth observers in the right place at the right time. Rings like this will sometimes appear when the Sun or Moon is seen through thin clouds. The effect is created by the quantum mechanical diffraction of light around individual, similarly-sized water droplets in an intervening but mostly-transparent cloud. Since light of different colors has different wavelengths, each color diffracts differently. Solar Coronae are one of the few quantum color effects that can be easily seen with the unaided eye. This type ofsolar corona is a visual effect due to water in Earth's atmosphere and is altogether different from the solar corona that exists continually around the Sun -- and stands out during a total solar eclipse. In the foreground is the famous Himalayan mountain peak Ama Dablam (Mother's Necklace),

A Dark Sand Dune on Mars 
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Explanation: What is that dark sand dune doing on Mars? NASA's robotic rover Curiosity has been studying it to find out, making this the first-ever up-close investigation of an active sand dune on another world. Named Namib Dune, the dark sand mound stands about 4 meters tall and, along with the other Bagnold Dunes, is located on the northwestern flank of Mount Sharp. The featured imagewas taken last month and horizontally compressed here for comprehensibility. Wind is causing the dune to advance about one meter a year across the light bedrock underneath, and wind-blown sand is visible on the left. Part of the Curiosity rover itself is visible on the lower right. Just in the past few days, Curiosity scooped up some of the dark sand for a detailed analysis. After further exploration of the Bagnold Dunes, Curiosity is scheduled to continue its trek up the 5-kilometer tall Mount Sharp, the central peak in the large crater where the car-sized rover landed.
Reflections on the 1970s 
Image Credit & Copyright: Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, Univ. Arizona
Explanation: The 1970s are sometimes ignored by astronomers, like this beautiful grouping of reflection nebulae in Orion - NGC 1977, NGC 1975, and NGC 1973 - usually overlooked in favor of the substantial glow from the nearby stellar nursery better known as the Orion Nebula. Found along Orion's sword just north of the bright Orion Nebula complex, these reflection nebulae are also associated with Orion's giant molecular cloud about 1,500 light-years away, but are dominated by the characteristic blue color of interstellar dust reflecting light from hot young stars. In this sharp color image a portion of the Orion Nebula appears along the bottom border with the cluster of reflection nebulae at picture center. NGC 1977 stretches across the field just below center, separated from NGC 1973 (above right) and NGC 1975 (above left) by dark regions laced with faint red emission from hydrogen atoms. Taken together, the dark regions suggest to many the shape of a running man.


Astronomy News:
(from http://esciencenews.com/topics/astronomy.space)

 

New theory of secondary inflation expands options for avoiding an excess of dark matter

 

Science Daily January 14, 2016 - Physicists suggest a smaller secondary inflationary period in the moments after the Big Bang could account for the abundance of the mysterious matter.

 

Standard cosmology -- that is, the Big Bang Theory with its early period of exponential growth known as inflation -- is the prevailing scientific model for our universe, in which the entirety of space and time ballooned out from a very hot, very dense point into a homogeneous and ever-expanding vastness. This theory accounts for many of the physical phenomena we observe. But what if that's not all there was to it?

 

A new theory from physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and Stony Brook University, which will publish online on January 18 in Physical Review Letters, suggests a shorter secondary inflationary period that could account for the amount of dark matter estimated to exist throughout the cosmos.

 

 "In general, a fundamental theory of nature can explain certain phenomena, but it may not always end up giving you the right amount of dark matter," said Hooman Davoudiasl, group leader in the High-Energy Theory Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory and an author on the paper. "If you come up with too little dark matter, you can suggest another source, but having too much is a problem."

 

Measuring the amount of dark matter in the universe is no easy task. It is dark after all, so it doesn't interact in any significant way with ordinary matter. Nonetheless, gravitational effects of dark matter give scientists a good idea of how much of it is out there. The best estimates indicate that it makes up about a quarter of the mass-energy budget of the universe, while ordinary matter -- which makes up the stars, our planet, and us -- comprises just 5 percent. Dark matter is the dominant form of substance in the universe, which leads physicists to devise theories and experiments to explore its properties and understand how it originated. 

 

Some theories that elegantly explain perplexing oddities in physics -- for example, the inordinate weakness of gravity compared to other fundamental interactions such as the electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces -- cannot be fully accepted because they predict more dark matter than empirical observations can support.

 

This new theory solves that problem. Davoudiasl and his colleagues add a step to the commonly accepted events at the inception of space and time.

 

In standard cosmology, the exponential expansion of the universe called cosmic inflation began perhaps as early as 10-35 seconds after the beginning of time -- that's a decimal point followed by 34 zeros before a 1. This explosive expansion of the entirety of space lasted mere fractions of a fraction of a second, eventually leading to a hot universe, followed by a cooling period that has continued until the present day. Then, when the universe was just seconds to minutes old -- that is, cool enough -- the formation of the lighter elements began. Between those milestones, there may have been other inflationary interludes, said Davoudiasl.

 

"They wouldn't have been as grand or as violent as the initial one, but they could account for a dilution of dark matter," he said.

 

In the beginning, when temperatures soared past billions of degrees in a relatively small volume of space, dark matter particles could run into each other and annihilate upon contact, transferring their energy into standard constituents of matter-particles like electrons and quarks. But as the universe continued to expand and cool, dark matter particles encountered one another far less often, and the annihilation rate couldn't keep up with the expansion rate.

 

"At this point, the abundance of dark matter is now baked in the cake," said Davoudiasl. "Remember, dark matter interacts very weakly. So, a significant annihilation rate cannot persist at lower temperatures. Selfannihilation of dark matter becomes inefficient quite early, and the amount of dark matter particles is frozen."

 

However, the weaker the dark matter interactions, that is, the less efficient the annihilation, the higher the final abundance of dark matter particles would be. As experiments place ever more stringent constraints on the strength of dark matter interactions, there are some current theories that end up overestimating the quantity of dark matter in the universe. To bring theory into alignment with observations, Davoudiasl and his colleagues suggest that another inflationary period took place, powered by interactions in a "hidden sector" of physics. This second, milder, period of inflation, characterized by a rapid increase in volume, would dilute primordial particle abundances, potentially leaving the universe with the density of dark matter we observe today.

 

"It's definitely not the standard cosmology, but you have to accept that the universe may not be governed by things in the standard way that we thought," he said. "But we didn't need to construct something complicated. We show how a simple model can achieve this short amount of inflation in the early universe and account for the amount of dark matter we believe is out there."

 

Proving the theory is another thing entirely. Davoudiasl said there may be a way to look for at least the very feeblest of interactions between the hidden sector and ordinary matter.

 

"If this secondary inflationary period happened, it could be characterized by energies within the reach of experiments at accelerators such as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider," he said. Only time will tell if signs of a hidden sector show up in collisions within these colliders, or in other experimental facilities.


General Calendar:

Colloquia, Lectures, Seminars, Meetings, Open Houses & Tours:
Colloquia:  Carnegie (Tues. 4pm), UCLA, Caltech (Wed. 4pm), IPAC (Wed. 12:15pm) & other Pasadena (daily 12-4pm):  http://obs.carnegiescience.edu/seminars/ 
Carnegie astronomy lectures – only 4 per year in the Spring www.obs.carnegiescience.edu.  Visit www.huntington.org for directions.  For more information about the Carnegie Observatories or this lecture series, please contact Reed Haynie.  . Click here for more information.
4 February
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting

 Hubble Operations, Morgan Bracken, GSFC
A1/1735










5 Feb
Friday Night 7:30PM SBAS  Monthly General Meeting
in the Planetarium at El Camino College (16007 Crenshaw Bl. In Torrance)
Friday Night 7:30PM Monthly General Meeting
Topic:   TBA
Speaker: TBA
February 11th & 12th The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2016

The Europa Mission

After many years of study, NASA has approved a new start for a spaceflight mission to investigate the mysteries of Jupiter's moon Europa. Galileo spacecraft data suggest that an ocean most likely exists beneath Europa’s icy surface and that the "ingredients" necessary for life (liquid water, chemistry, and energy) could be present within this ocean today, implying that Europa may be a habitable world. Future exploration of Europa has been deemed an extremely high priority for planetary science, given the potential for revolutionizing our understanding of habitats for life. Over the past several years, JPL has led the effort to mature a mission concept that makes multiple flybys of Europa to investigate its habitability, and recently NASA selected a suite of highly capable remote sensing and in situ instruments for the Europa mission. The mission design enables globally distributed regional coverage of the moon’s surface, with 40+ close flybys at altitudes from 25 to 100 km. The Europa multiple flyby mission provides a cost-efficient means to explore Europa and investigate its habitability through understanding the satellite’s ice shell and ocean, composition, and geology. The mission would also investigate current activity, such as plumes, and would provide the high-resolution surface characterization necessary to enable future Europa landers.
Speaker:
Barry Goldstein, Europa Mission Project Manager
Dr. Bob Pappalardo, Europa Mission Project Scientist

Webcast:
Click here to watch the event live on Ustream (or archived after the event)
Locations:
Thursday, Feb. 11, 2016, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA
› Directions

Friday, Feb. 12, 2016, 7pm
The Vosloh Forum at Pasadena City College
1570 East Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena, CA
› Directions
Webcast:
 We offer two options to view the live streaming of our webcast on Thursday:
› 1) Ustream with real-time web chat to take public questions.
› 2) Flash Player with open captioning
If you don't have Flash Player, you can download for free here.


None in Feb?
LAAS LAAS General Meeting.
Griffith Observatory
Event Horizon Theater
8:00 PM to 10:00 PM


Observing:

The following data are from the 2015 Observer’s Handbook, and Sky & Telescope’s 2015 Skygazer’s Almanac & monthly Sky at a Glance.

Current sun & moon rise/set/phase data for L.A.:  http://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/usa/los-angeles

Sun, Moon & Planets for February:



Moon: Feb 1 last quarter, Feb 8 new, Feb 15 1st quarter, Feb 22 full                    
Planets: Saturn rises about 3 am.  Jupiter rises about 8 pm.  Venus rises just before sunrise.  Mars rises just after midnight. Mercury is visible just before sunrise through Feb. 18.
Other Events:


6 Feb
SBAS out-of-town Dark Sky observing – contact Greg Benecke to coordinate a location. http://www.sbastro.net/.  

9 Feb
LAAS Private dark sky  Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm


3, 10, 17, 24 Feb
LAAS The Garvey Ranch Observatory is open to the public every Wednesday evening from 7:30 PM to 10 PM. Go into the dome to use the 8 Inch Refractor or observe through one of our telescopes on the lawn. Visit our workshop to learn how you can build your own telescope, grind your own mirror, or sign up for our free seasonal astronomy classes.

Call 213-673-7355 for further information.
Time: 7:30 PM - 10:00 PM
Location: Garvey Ranch Obs. , 781 Orange Ave., Monterey Park, CA 91755

16 Feb
LAAS Public  Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm

 
27 Feb
SBAS Saturday Night In Town Dark Sky Observing Session at Ridgecrest Middle School– 28915 North Bay Rd. RPV, Weather Permitting: Please contact Greg Benecke to confirm that the gate will be opened! http://www.sbastro.net/

Internet Links:

Telescope, Binocular & Accessory Buying Guides


General


Regional (Southern California, Washington, D.C. & Colorado)
Southern California & Beyond Amateur Astronomy Organizations, Observatories & Planetaria
Mt. Wilson Observatory description, history, visiting


About the Club

Club Websites:  Internal (Aerospace): https://aeropedia.aero.org/aeropedia/index.php/Astronomy_Club  It is updated to reflect this newsletter, in addition to a listing of past club mtg. presentations, astronomy news, photos & events from prior newsletters, club equipment, membership & constitution.  We have linked some presentation materials from past mtgs.  Our club newsletters are also being posted to an external blog, “An Astronomical View” http://astronomicalview.blogspot.com/. 

 
Membership.  For information, current dues & application, contact Alan Olson, or see the club website (or Aerolink folder) where a form is also available (go to the membership link/folder & look at the bottom).  Benefits will include use of club telescope(s) & library/software, membership in The Astronomical League, discounts on Sky & Telescope magazine and Observer’s Handbook, field trips, great programs, having a say in club activities, acquisitions & elections, etc.

Committee Suggestions & Volunteers.  Feel free to contact:  Mark Clayson, President & Program Committee Chairman (& acting club VP), TBD Activities Committee Chairman (& club Secretary), or Alan Olson, Resource Committee Chairman (over equipment & library, and club Treasurer).

Mark Clayson,
AEA Astronomy Club President 
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