hello space fans and welcome to my site this is a very exciting week in astronomy it's exciting because the American Astronomical Society is holding one of its two meetings that it has each year this week these they usually have one in early January and another one in early June and it's exciting because this is generally a time when we hear a lot about new research new discoveries new science that's being done and this is also a time when a lot of the major space missions announce either progress reports or new discoveries or new you know reports on how they're operating and things like that so I set this up with the hope that I could make videos with a really quick turnaround to kind of discuss some of these some of these two announcements with you and then I would go back after the meeting and pick some of the more interesting ones and maybe make more in-depth videos about them like I generally do this allows me a much more quick turnaround so what I was what I'd like to start with is the announcement made this morning by the Kepler mission that is discovered its first rocky planet orbiting another star now for those of you who don't know Kepler is a spacecraft that is designed to look for planets around other stars called exoplanets and but but more specifically it's designed to look for earth most of our planets we've discovered so far around other stars are very large they're Jupiter sized or even more planets orbiting the stars what we're really interested in in astronomy now and especially in the search for life elsewhere is for smaller worlds because we have because that is where it is believed that if we can find life it would be probably something a lot like what evolved here on earth so we look for we try to look for planets that are as similar as we can to the earth and so it looks basically the Kepler spacecraft looks in this one spot of the sky and it measures tiny variations in brightness and position of over 100,000 stars so one of the great things about what Kepler does and what an all NASA missions do is they make these cool little animations so let me show you one this is an animation showing where Kepler looked and where Kepler 10b is actually located so as so as you can see it's looking in the constellation of Cygnus and this coming up this is where Kepler looks this is the field of view of Kepler you can see that it's got all of this is the C cds that are on the focal plane there are 42 of them and there's over 93 million pixels here that it looks at okay and so this is where this is where Kepler is looking all the time so as it zooms in you get a sense of just what it looks like to see 100,000 stars as it zooms in look at that all of those are stars every single one and the Kepler 10b says or the Kepler 10 system is in the upper part of the CCD look at all those stars and there it is that's the star that around which Kepler 10b orbits so what's Kepler 10b like well it's a small planet it's roughly the size of the earth about 1.4 times the size of the earth they made this nice little cool data data data sheet but they did even more than that they also made a really nice animation so let me pull that up right here too so here we have the data on the planet here is an animation showing what the planet is like so this is the start Kepler 10 there's Kepler 10b in orbit around it it's got an orbital period of only 0.8 days now this planet is 20 times closer to its star than mercury is to the Sun so it's really whipping around the the star very quickly it's also as you can see here very hot and molten it's not inside a habitable zone that's that region where water can possibly exist this is way too close as you can see so I don't think this is a good candidate for trying to find life elsewhere but nonetheless it's an interesting planet it orbits every point 8 days if we scroll down just a little bit we can see that it's got it's got at the mass of it it's got about 4 and 1/2 times heavier than the earth it's got the density of iron I think the press release described it as an iron dumbbell so it's very dense and eight point eight grams per cubic centimeter it's got see it's got a surface temperature at equilibrium temperature of 1800 degrees Fahrenheit so it's not a very pleasant place to hang out so this is some of the characteristics of the planet itself and with this nice little animation you can kind of see for yourself and sort of get easier help visualizing what it would look like so I think this was a pretty important discovery I hope you like this format if you do please give me some feedback in some way that lets me know that this is actually something you find helpful and useful I'm going to make some more here there's a couple of other announcements that came out today I don't know that I'll have a chance to make videos on all of them but at least for now this one was an extremely exciting one and I look forward to showing you some more well I guess that's it for now keep looking up
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