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)

Monday, June 10, 2019

2019 June


AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter June 2019

Contents

AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 1
Astronomy News p. 6
General Calendar p. 12
    Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 12
    Observing p. 16
Useful Links p. 17
About the Club p. 18

Club News & Calendar.

Club Calendar

Club Meeting Schedule: -- note the change of date in July due to July 4 holiday

6 June
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
Great Courses Astronomy Lecture
(A1/1735)





11 July
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
Quarterly Pizza Party & TBD Presentation
(A1/1735)


AEA Astronomy Club meetings are now on 1st  Thursdays at 11:45 am.  For 2018:  Jan. 4 in A1/1029 A/B, Feb. 1 & March 1 in A1/2906 and for the rest of 2018 (April-Dec), the meeting room is A1/1735. 

Club News:  


We need volunteers to help with: 

·         Populating our club Sharepoint site with material & links to the club’s Aerowiki & Aerolink materials
·         Arranging future club programs
·         Managing club equipment & library

Astronomy Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month
(generally from Astronomy Picture of the Day, APOD: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html)
VIDEO:  Planets of the Solar System: Tilts and Spins https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190520.html
Video Credit: NASA, Animation: James O'Donoghue (JAXA)
Explanation: How does your favorite planet spin? Does it spin rapidly around a nearly vertical axis, or horizontally, or backwards? The featured video animates NASA images of all eight planets in our Solar System to show them spinning side-by-sidefor an easy comparison. In the time-lapse video, a day on Earth -- one Earth rotation -- takes just a few seconds. Jupiter rotates the fastest, while Venus spins not only the slowest (can you see it?), but backwards. The inner rocky planets, across the top, most certainly underwent dramatic spin-altering collisions during the early days of the Solar System. The reasons why planets spin and tilt as they do remains a topic of research with much insight gained from modern computer modeling and the recent discovery and analysis of hundreds of exoplanets: planets orbiting other stars.


VIDEO: A Solar Prominence Eruption from SDO https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190526.html
Image Credit & Copyright: NASA/Goddard/SDO AIA Team
Explanation: One of the most spectacular solar sights is an erupting prominence. In 2011, NASA's Sun-orbiting Solar Dynamic Observatory spacecraft imaged an impressively large prominence erupting from the surface. The dramatic explosion was captured in ultraviolet light in the featured time lapse video covering 90 minutes, where a new frame was taken every 24 seconds. The scale of the prominence is huge -- the entire Earth would easily fit under the flowing curtain of hot gas. A solar prominence is channeled and sometimes held above the Sun's surface by the Sun's magnetic field. A quiescent prominence typically lasts about a month, and may erupt in a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) expelling hot gas into the Solar System. The energy mechanism that creates a solar prominence is still a topic of research. After our Sun passes the current Solar Minimum, solar activity like eruptive prominences are expected to become more common over the next few years.

Boulders on Bennu 
Image Credit: NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, University of Arizona
Explanation: An abundance of boulders litters the surface asteroid 101955 Bennu in this dramatic close-up from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Taken on March 28 from a distance of just 3.4 kilometers (2.1 miles) the field of view is about 50 meters across while the light colored boulder at top right is 4.8 meters tall. Likely a loose conglomerate rubble pile asteroid, Bennu itself spans less than 500 meters. That's about the height of the Empire State Building. Mapping the near Earth asteroid since the spacecraft's arrival in December of 2018, the OSIRIS-REx mission plans a TAG (Touch-and-Go) maneuver for July 2020 to sample Bennu's rugged surface, returning the sample to planet Earth in September 2023. Citizen scientists have been invited to help choose the sample collection site.



Atlas, Daphnis, and Pan 
Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA
Explanation: Atlas, Daphnis, and Pan are small, inner, ring moons of Saturn. They are shown at the same scale in this montage of images by the Cassini spacecraft that made its grand final orbit of the ringed planet in September 2017. In fact, Daphnis was discovered in Cassini images from 2005. Atlas and Pan were first sighted in images from the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. Flying saucer-shaped Atlas orbits near the outer edge of Saturn's bright A Ring while Daphnis orbits inside the A Ring's narrow Keeler Gap and Pan within the A Ring's larger Encke Gap. The curious equatorial ridges of the small ring moons could be built up by the accumulation of ring material over time. Even diminutive Daphnis makes waves in the ring material as it glides along the edge of the Keeler Gap.

RS Puppis
Image Credit & Copyright: Image Data: NASA, ESA, Hubble Legacy Archive;
Processing & Copyright: Rogelio Bernal Andreo (DeepSkyColors.com)
Explanation: Pulsating RS Puppis, the brightest star in the image center, is some ten times more massive than our Sun and on average 15,000 times more luminous. In fact, RS Pup is a Cepheid variable star, a class of stars whose brightness is used to estimate distances to nearby galaxies as one of the first steps in establishing the cosmic distance scale. As RS Pup pulsates over a period of about 40 days, its regular changes in brightness are also seen along its surrounding nebula delayed in time, effectively a light echo. Using measurements of the time delay and angular size of the nebula, the known speed of light allows astronomers to geometrically determine the distance to RS Pup to be 6,500 light-years, with a remarkably small error of plus or minus 90 light-years. An impressive achievement for stellar astronomy, the echo-measured distance also more accurately establishes the true brightness of RS Pup, and by extension other Cepheid stars, improving the knowledge of distances to galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

Milky Way, Launch, and Landing 
Image Credit & Copyright: Devin Boggs
Explanation: The Milky Way doesn't look quite this colorful and bright to the eye, but a rocket launch does. So a separate deep exposure with a sensitive digital camera was used in this composite skyscape to bring out our galaxy's central crowded starfields and cosmic dust clouds. In the scene from Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, a nine minute long exposure begun about 20 minutes after the Miky Way image recorded a rocket launch and landing. The Falcon 9 rocket, named for the Millennium Falcon of Star Wars fame, appropriately launched a Dragon resupply ship to the International Space Station in the early morning hours of May the 4th. The plume and flare at the peak of the launch arc mark the rocket's first stage boost back burn. Two shorter diagonal streaks are the rocket engines bringing the Falcon 9 stage back to an offshore landing on autonomous drone ship Of course I Still Love You.


Manicouagan Impact Crater from Space 
Image Credit: NASA, International Space Station Expedition 59
Explanation: Orbiting 400 kilometers above Quebec, Canada, planet Earth, the International Space Station Expedition 59 crew captured this snapshot of the broad St. Lawrence River and curiously circular Lake Manicouagan on April 11. Right of center, the ring-shaped lake is a modern reservoir within the eroded remnant of an ancient 100 kilometer diameter impact crater. The ancient crater is very conspicuous from orbit, a visible reminder that Earth is vulnerable to rocks from space. Over 200 million years old, the Manicouagan crater was likely caused by the impact of a rocky body about 5 kilometers in diameter. Currently, there is no known asteroid with a significant probability of impacting Earth in the next century. But a fictional scenario to help practice for an asteroid impact is on going at the 2019 IAA Planetary Defense Conference.

Astronomy News:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/accretion-disk-milky-way-galaxy-black-hole

The accretion disk around our galaxy’s black hole has been spotted at last

The finding confirms that gases are orbiting the Milky Way’s gravitational behemoth

BY 
LISA GROSSMAN 
1:02PM, JUNE 5, 2019


ORGANIZED CHAOS  The black hole in the center of the Milky Way has a chaotic entourage of stars and gas, shown here in X-ray light. But new observations with the ALMA telescope array show a relatively neat disk of glowing gas rotating around the black hole.
F. BAGANOFF ET AL, MIT, CXC/NASA
Some supermassive black holes announce their presence with screaming hot disks of orbiting gases. But the behemoth at the center of the Milky Way has been shy and demure. Now, astronomers have finally spotted the black hole’s faintly glowing accretion disk of infalling material, long suspected but never before seen.

 “I was very surprised that we actually saw it,” says astrophysicist Elena Murchikova at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. The disk was observed using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in northern Chile, the researchers report in the June 6 Nature.

 The Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, named Sagittarius A*, is a behemoth at 4 million solar masses. But while some black holes gobble the gas and dust around them, Sgr A* picks daintily. Such “underfed” black holes “don’t have enough food supply” for their surrounding gases to glow brightly, Murchikova says.


LIKE A RECORD This image made from ALMA data shows that some of the gas orbiting the Milky Way’s black hole is moving toward Earth (colored blue), and some is moving away (red). That finding means that the disk is spinning. The plus sign indicates the position of the black hole.

E.M. MURCHIKOVA, S. DAGNELLO, ALMA, ESO, NAOJ, NRAO, AUI, NSF
The disk’s diminished glow helps explain why scientists with the Event Horizon Telescope were able to capture a picture of the central black holein the more distant galaxy M87, but not yet Sgr A* (SN: 4/27/19, p. 6).

Previously, scientists had seen a cloud of hot gas (around 10 million kelvins) emitting high-energy X-rays around Sgr A*, as well as stars and gas clouds circling the black hole. But those gas sources didn’t seem to be organized into a neat, orbiting disk. Murchikova and colleagues focused their search on cooler gases, about 10,000 kelvins, located within about 280 billion kilometers of Sgr A*. Looking at only the hot gas, she explains, is like trying to study Earth’s climate by focusing on summers in the desert. “Gas of both types should be falling into the black hole,” Murchikova says. “You need a full picture.”

 ALMA measured the cooler gases by observing particles of light in a particular wavelength. Those photons are emitted when electrons and protons in the gases combine to form hydrogen atoms. When Murchikova and colleagues looked at the photon distribution around the black hole, they saw an oblong disk with a gap in the middle where the black hole sits.

 On one side of the disk, the light wavelength was stretched, or redshifted. On the other side, the light was squished, or blueshifted. That finding means that one side of the disk is moving toward Earth, and the other is moving away — a clear sign that the disk is rotating.
“I never thought I would actually be able to see such an organized rotation,” Murchikova says.

 The team also estimated the disk’s mass — between 0.00001 and 0.0001 times the mass of the sun, depending on how thick the disk might be. And the researchers estimated how much material is falling into the black hole, which they say is about 2.7x10-10 solar masses per year, or roughly about half the mass of the dwarf planet Ceres.

 “I think it’s very exciting,” says astrophysicist Anna Ciurlo of UCLA, who was not involved in the new work. Her team has used the Keck telescope in Hawaii to look for signs of the disk in infrared wavelengths, but found nothing.

 If the disk’s activity can be picked up by ALMA, but not Keck, that “makes us think there’s some more peculiar process going on that is not totally understood yet,” Ciurlo says. More observations with ALMA and with the Event Horizon Telescope could help resolve the mystery.
Citations

E. Murchikova et al. A cool accretion disk around the Galactic Centre black hole. Nature. Vol. 570, June 6, 2019, p. 83. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1242-z.

It’s time to start taking the search for E.T. seriously, astronomers say

Some scientists are pushing for NASA to make looking for alien technology an official goal

BY 
LISA GROSSMAN 
6:00AM, JANUARY 28, 2019


WE’RE LISTENING  A radio telescope in Green Bank, W.Va., was the first to listen for signals from intelligent aliens in 1960. Now scientists are using another instrument, the Green Bank Telescope (shown), to search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
JOHN M. CHASE/SHUTTERSTOCK
Magazine issue: Vol. 195, No. 6, March 30, 2019, p. 4

Long an underfunded, fringe field of science, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence may be ready to go mainstream.

 Astronomer Jason Wright is determined to see that happen. At a meeting in Seattle of the American Astronomical Society in January, Wright convened “a little ragtag group in a tiny room” to plot a course for putting the scientific field, known as SETI, on NASA’s agenda.

 The group is writing a series of papers arguing that scientists should be searching the universe for “technosignatures” — any sign of alien technology, from radio signals to waste heat. The hope is that those papers will go into a report to Congress at the end of 2020 detailing the astronomical 
community’s priorities. That report, Astro 2020: Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics, will determine which telescopes fly and which studies receive federal funding through the next decade.
“The stakes are high,” says Wright, of Penn State University. “If the decadal survey says, ‘SETI is a national science priority, and NSF and NASA need to fund it,’ they will do it.”

 SETI searches date back to 1960, when astronomer Frank Drake used a radio telescope in Green Bank, W.Va., to listen for signals from an intelligent civilization (SN Online: 11/1/09). But NASA didn’t start a formal SETI program until 1992, only to see it canceled within a year by a skeptical Congress.
Private organizations picked up the baton, including the SETI Institute, founded in Mountain View, Calif., in 1985 by astronomer Jill Tarter — the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in the movie Contact (SN Online: 5/29/12). Then in 2015, Russian billionaires Yuri and Julia Milner launched the Breakthrough Initiatives to join the hunt for E.T. But the search for technosignatures still hasn’t become a more serious, self-sustaining scientific discipline, Wright says.

 “If NASA were to declare technosignatures a scientific priority, then we would be able to apply for money to work on it. We would be able to train students to do it,” Wright says. “Then we could catch up” to more mature fields of astronomy, he says.

 Wright himself is a relative newcomer to SETI, entering the field in 2014 with a study on searching for heat from alien technology. He was also one of a group to suggest that the oddly flickering “Tabby’s star” could be surrounded by an alien megastructure — and then to debunk that idea with more data (SN: 9/30/17, p. 11).

THE SETI VANGUARD Astronomer Jason Wright (third from the left, wearing sunglasses) and his students visited the Green Bank Telescope as part of the first SETI graduate course at Penn State University.

CHRISTIAN GILBERTSON
In the last five years, scientists’ attitudes toward the search for intelligent alien life have been changing, Wright says. SETI used to have a “giggle factor,” raising images of little green men, he says. And talking about SETI work as an astronomer was considered taboo, if not academic suicide. Now, not so much. “I have the pop sociology theory that the ascension of geek culture has something to do with it,” Wright says. “Now it’s like all the top movies are comic books and science fiction.”

 When NASA requested a report in 2018 on what technosignatures are and how to look for them, SETI researchers thought hopefully that the space agency might be ready to get back into the SETI game. Colleagues tapped Wright to organize a meeting to prepare the technosignatures report, posted online December 20 at arXiv.org.

 But Wright didn’t stop there. He convened the new workshop group with the goal of dividing up the work of writing at least nine papers on specific SETI opportunities for the decadal survey. By contrast, there was only one submission on SETI research, written by Tarter, in the 2010 decadal survey.

 The SETI situation has also evolved since the 2009 launch of the Kepler space telescope, which discovered thousands of exoplanets before its mission ended in 2018 (SN Online: 10/30/18). Some of those planets outside our solar system are similar in size and temperature to Earth, raising hopes that they may also host life. Old arguments that planets like Earth are rare “don’t hold much water any longer,” Wright says.

 The exoplanet rush has sparked a surge in research about biosignatures, signs of microbial life on other planets. NASA’s next big space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, is planning to search directly for signs of alien life in exoplanet atmospheres (SN: 4/30/16, p. 32). So far, though, no one has found any biosignatures, let alone technosignatures. But the focus on searching for the one makes the case for ignoring the other seem all the weaker, Wright says.

 “Astrobiology and the search for life has become such a big part of what NASA does,” he says. “The fact that it won’t look for intelligent life has become ever more incongruous with its other activities.”
Editor's note: This story was updated on January 28, 2019, to correct the instrument that Frank Drake used to look for alien intelligence. It was a previous radio telescope in Green Bank, W.Va., not the current Green Bank Telescope.
Citations
NASA Technosignatures Workshop Participants. NASA and the search for technosignatures. arXiv:1812.08681. Posted December 20, 2018.


 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 2019 Astronomy Lecture Series

Each year the Observatories organizes a series of public lectures on current astronomical topics.  These lectures are given by astronomers from the Carnegie Observatories as well as other research institutions.  The lectures are geared to the general public and are free.
– only 4 per year in the Spring www.obs.carnegiescience.edu.  For more information about the Carnegie Observatories or this lecture series, please contact Reed Haynie.  . Click here for more information.
6 June
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
Great Courses Astronomy Lecture
(A1/1735)
6 June



7 June
Friday Night 7:30PM SBAS  Monthly General Meeting
in the Planetarium at El Camino College (16007 Crenshaw Bl. In Torrance)
Topic: “Cosmic Butterflies: The Planetary Nebulae,” Dr. Steven Morris

7 June Friday, 8 PM CalTech Astro: Stargazing and Lecture Series “We Were the Discoverers: Witnessing the Exoplanet Revolution” a lecture by Arpita Roy. For directions, weather updates, and more information, please visit: http://outreach.astro.caltech.edu





June 9, 2019

UCLA Meteorite Gallery Events

DR. DAVID MITTLEFEHLDT

THE HISTORY OF ASTEROIDS, WRITTEN IN STONE

Location: Slichter Room 3853
Time: 2:30PM
Our next Gallery Lecture will be presented by Dr. David (“Duck”) Mittlefehldt from the Johnson Spacecraft Center in Houston. Duck is our former student. Achondrites – a subset of stony meteorites – were formed by processes familiar to any terrestrial geologist: melting to form magmas, separation from their sources, and crystallization upon cooling. There are a number of achondrite groups; each from a different asteroid; each with its own story to tell of the geology of its parent asteroid. In this talk, he will discuss the mineralogy, texture, and chemistry of several achondrite groups, and describe how they inform us of the earliest phases of the geologic history of asteroids.

10 June
LAAS General Mtg. 7:30pm Griffith Observatory

11 July
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
Quarterly Pizza Party & TBD Presentation
(A1/1735)

June 20 & 21 The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2019

Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On: Designing Tomorrow’s Space Missions Today

Walk through the lifecycle of a mission from its start as a crazy idea, to concept, to development, construction, testing and launch.
Host:
Brian White
Speaker:
Dr. Randii Wessen
JPL Systems Engineer, A-Team Lead Study Architect JPL Innovation Foundry

Location:
Thursday, June 20, 2019, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA
› Directions 

Friday, June 21, 2019, 7pm
Caltech’s Ramo Auditorium
1200 E California Blvd.
Pasadena, CA
› Directions 

› Click here to watch the event live on Ustream 
* Only the Thursday lectures are streamed live.
* Only the Thursday lectures are streamed live.



Observing:

The following data are from the 2019 Observer’s Handbook, and Sky & Telescope’s 2019 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 June:

  

Moon: June 3 new, June 9 1st quarter, June 17 Full, June 24 last quarter              

Planets: Venus visible at dawn all month.  Mars visible at dusk through the 29th.  Mercury visible at dusk all month.  Saturn rises before midnight, visible until dawn. Jupiter rises very early evening, visible until dawn.
Other Events:

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

1 June
LAAS Private dark sky  Star Party

5 June Mars 1.6 deg N of Moon

5,12,19,26 June
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


8 June
LAAS Public  Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm See http://www.griffithobservatory.org/programs/publictelescopes.html#starparties  for more information.

10 June Jupiter at Opposition

19 June Saturn 0.4 deg N of Moon

21 June Summer Solstice

23 June Mercury at Greatest Eastern Elongation

30 June Asteroid Day  For more information see: https://asteroidday.org/

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, Walt Sturrock, 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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