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
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
About the Club p. 12
Club News & Calendar.
Club Calendar
Club Meeting Schedule:
4 February
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AEA Astronomy
Club Meeting
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A1/1735
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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...
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.Image Credit: Cmglee (Own work) CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL, via Wikimedia Commons
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.Image Credit: ESA / NASA / JPL-Caltech / STScI
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),Image Credit & Copyright: Jeff Dai
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.Image Credit & Copyright: Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, Univ. Arizona
Astronomy
News:
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, 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
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AEA Astronomy
Club Meeting
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A1/1735
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5 Feb
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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
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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
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)
Click here to watch the event live on Ustream (or archived after the event)
Locations:
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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 |
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Webcast:
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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. |
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None in Feb?
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LAAS
LAAS General Meeting.
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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/.
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9 Feb
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LAAS
Private dark sky Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm
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3, 10, 17, 24 Feb
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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
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16 Feb
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LAAS
Public Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm
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27 Feb
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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/
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Internet
Links:
Telescope, Binocular & Accessory Buying
Guides
General
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/.
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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