OK, let’s take this from the beginning…

In august 2006 the International Astronomical Union decided that Pluto was not worthy of it’s title as a planet because of the discovery of several Pluto-like objects outside the orbit of Pluto, and the fright that we would soon be teaching our kids a list of 50 planets. So they decided that Pluto should henceforth be known as a dwarf planet.

Alright… it may take some getting used to, but we’ll accept it.

But just as we’d all gotten used to the new definition, what could be a better idea then renaming the whole class again? Surely the IAU has nothing better to do? I guess not. Last week the IAU decided that Pluto and Pluto-like objects should now be called “plutoids”, giving Pluto back a lot of seemingly lost credit. I mean who wouldn’t want a whole class of objects named after them? So the official definition of a plutoid is:

“Plutoids are celestial bodies in orbit around the sun at a distance greater than that of Neptune that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (near-spherical) shape, and that have not cleared the neighborhood around their orbit.”

Alright, this is all getting a bit confusing to be honest, i mean it’s all semantics after all, there is no real meaning behind these things, it’s just us humans that like to label things. So fair enough, dwarf planets will now be named after the biggest dwarf planet known, Pluto. But hey, what happens then if we discover another large plutoid? As an astronomer in the above linked article points out:

“The only fly in the ointment that I can envision is if a plutoid larger, than, say, Mars is detected,” Laughlin points out. “In that case, I think we’d see a big flare-up of the what-is-a-planet debate.”

So here we are, just waiting for the next big thing in solar system object renaming (exciting, isn’t it?). Meantime a Japanese team of astronomers propose a theory that there may exist exactly such a large object anywhere from 100 to 200 AU from the Sun (one AU is the distance from the sun to earth). This would explain some of the odd things we see in the Kupier Belt, a large belt of icy objects (like plutoids) outside the orbit of Neptune. Seriously, I can’t wait for them to find this. Not only will the discussion be fun to watch, but a whole lot of actually interesting astronomy could be learned from such an object. Like if it has a hot core, there’s the possibility of an under-surface ocean, making it possible for life as we know it to evolve. Especially if the building blocks of life are floating around in space.

In between all those games to watch at the Euro 2008, I just wanted to give a quick post on some cool astronomy news that has been popping up all over the place the last few days.

There is no reason for me to try to explain something that is explained perfectly well in the ESO press release, but as the title suggests, ESO astronomers have detected 3 super-Earths (planets with masses from 1-14 Earth masses) in a nearby solar system. Now don’t get your hopes to high, as these planets are all too close to their star to be a nice place for life as we know it, but as they also point out in the article, this is a really good indication that there are a lot of rocky planets out there, and with every new telescope or detector, we get one step closer to being able to detect even smaller planets in even better orbits.

But once again, go read the announcement.
Among more mainstream news sites, the Bad Astronomer has of course also covered this.

Citizens of a small solar system in the Ursa Major constellation are being spammed grossly by inferior earthlings representing a particular earthy food company called Doritos, trying to increase sales of their flag ship product, the tortilla chips. In a 6 hour broadcast from an array of high power subspace radars on the Norwegian island of Svalbard on Earth, an MPEG file containing the ad piece was repeated over and over again, to make sure the Ursa Majorians would identify the message as intelligent.

The event has later been deemed pretty unintelligent as the inhabitants of the only habitable planet in the aforementioned solar system looks exactly like giant tortilla chips. They took the ad piece as a declaration of war, and have announced a soonish preemptive strike on Earth, probably causing the demise of the human race. As a fine example of same human race would have put it: “Doh!”

Milky Way Times is monitoring the situation and we’ll of course bring you any update as fast as possible. And don’t forget to vote on the top 5 human things you won’t miss.

*Snapping out of what seems to be an unending stream of science fiction thoughts induced by this news piece over at New Scientist.*

Now back to work on that subspace device… and maybe that runaway thoughts controller too.

NASA have recently released a truly unique view of our home galaxy, well at least the part we can see being in it ourselves. The uniqueness lies in the resolution and hence the size of the Spitzer infrared image composed of more than 800,000 frames, making the resolution around 400,000 by 13,000 pixels or 5 gigapixels (5,000 megapixels that is)… just a bit more than your average digicam is capable of.

On the official Spitzer site you can download a lower resolution poster version or any of the 16 24752×13520 pixel pictures that makes up the large image and read more about the features in it. I really recommend you to use 2 minutes to read this, as it is really good and precise, and you will be able to go discover all the amazing things yourself.

You probably don’t want to download all these enormous images unless you have a monster computer and want to see how it handles it, but then you’re lucky that Alien Earths has, for the less masochistic of you, made an interactive version where you can zoom and pan around the whole thing very easily. They even placed some bookmarks with well known sights, so you can find your way around.

I have a warning though. If you’re anything like me this will consume a lot of your time, so don’t look at the links unless you have the time or a nice boss. It is truly amazing to be able to get this kind of overview of our home galaxy, and get to know it a bit better. It’s a very common thing to look so far ahead that you forget about all the amazing things that are so close.

They also covered this on slashdot, with the usual lively discussion.

So first post in a month or so from me due to traveling, but luckily Kári has done a nice job in the meantime. This will also be the reason why I am writing about some pretty old news once i a while, but hey, nobody said this is a news site, right?

Well enough with the excuses. One thing that caught my eye from the last month of scientific news is this press release about how the extinction of the dinosaurs might have been indirectly caused by the our movement in the Galaxy. You see we are actually not just making our way around the Galaxy every 220 million years in the normal circular way, but we are also bouncing up and down through the galactic plane every 36 million years. With the increased density in the galactic plane, the Solar System is subject to more gravitational disturbances when passing through it, and comets and asteroids from the outer parts of the Solar System might be thrown towards new orbits passing through the inner part where Earth goes about it’s day. Of course, Earth is then more likely to be hit, and it just so happens that we were probably passing right through the galactic plane about 65 million years ago when a large comet hit Earth, causing what is called the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event that killed off large parts of life on Earth.

So no, passing through the galactic plane didn’t finish off the dinosaurs, but it might have increased the probability of the asteroid collision that did.

On a quick but interesting note in the last part of the piece, the scientists behind the theory also mentions that large collisions like this one might be able to send micro-organisms hurling into space, seeding the Universe with life from Earth… or maybe that is how life on Earth first started? In that case the green aliens might not be so green and alien after all!

Not a whole lot to say about this video, it’s just incredibly cool. It shows in an animated/CGI way how magnetic field lines act (for example on the sun). It’s not your normal boring/dry NASA material, it’s incredibly cool and mesmerizing.

This youtube video is a quick 1.5 minute clip from the movie, check out the full movie (~5min) here. The movie was made by NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory, and they provide the commentary as well.

Thanks to Zac for tipping me and letting me know about this! Originally saw this at Gizmodo.

I know this is kind of last minute, but i wanted to let everyone know that if you want to (and i hope you do), you can watch the phoenix spacecraft land on Mars LIVE over at NASA TV.

Touchdown of the phoenix mars lander is expected to happen just before 8:00PM Eastern time (little more then two hours from writing this), but the live broadcast will actually start at 6:30PM (see the full schedule here). You will be getting all the images at the exact same time as everyone over at NASA, so you can follow it live as it goes through what they are calling 7 minutes of hell in it’s entry into the Marsian atmosphere.

Due to time difference and school early tomorrow i’m afraid i won’t be able to stay up and follow the events, but i can highly recommend heading over to Phil Plaits Bad Astronomy Blog, i’m sure he’ll be covering the entire event with style.

Well it turns out that big announcement that NASA had today (if you haven’t been following it, there’s been a lot of speculation about it), was not aliens or admittance of fake moon landings, but the youngest supernova ever found in the milky way.

This may seem kind of dull, as there are plenty of supernovas out there to look at, but what makes this interesting is the fact that judging by the rate we see supernovas (outside our galaxy), we should be seeing more young supernovas around us. Based on calculations made, there should be around 10 supernovas in the milky way, that are younger then the (now previously) youngest supernova, Cassiopeia-A, which occured in 1680. This is exactly what they have now observed, a 140 year old supernova called G1.9+0.3 (catchy isn’t it?), observed with the cleverly named “Very Large Array” and the in-orbit x-ray telescope Chandra.

They actually observed the supernova originally over 20 years ago, and it was assumed to be 400-1000 years old. Recently though, they took a second look at it, and saw that it had expanded much more rapidly then they had expected. This lead to them to have a closer look and conclude that it was a lot younger. Check out the picture (courtesy of NASA) for a look at the actual supernova where you can see the remains of the sun expanding. The inner white ring that is superimposed on it, is to show how big it was when it was first observed.

Official NASA press release.

Scientists from the University of Konstanz and the National Institute of Standards (NIST) have succeeded in producing a very powerful laser that also produces short pulses at very high speeds (press release here). While this may sound like something that doesn’t really concern us a whole lot (aren’t lasers for DVD players?) it turns out that this could actually have a big impact on finding earth-like planets in orbit of other stars.

To start with let me wow you with some numbers, the laser can produce 40 billion pulses per second and each one of those lasts only 40 femtoseconds, with the average power being 650milliWatts. Those may all be very impressive numbers (and trust me, they are), but let me tell you why this is something to be excited about aside from being the equivalent of porn for engineers. Well it turns out that lasers with these properties, can be used as so-called frequency comb’s, which is more or-less a measuring stick of sorts for light. You can think of this one as having a lot more notches on it and can therefore differentiate between much finer frequencies than it’s predecessors. For a great article on frequency combs, check out an article on NIST’s website, although long, it is not riddled with math and tries to explain it in a way so everyone can follow.

Now i said before that this could help with finding planets, and if you are a regular reader of ReducedMass.com, this may not surprise you. One of the most successful methods of finding exo-planets (planets orbiting other suns) is to detect a slight wobble in the light of a sun that is caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet (Henrik wrote a great article about it a few weeks ago). Obviously, a bigger planet has a stronger pull, causing more severe wobbles that are easier to detect, but small planets, like ours, would make very small pulls on the sun, and therefore require a very precise measurement of light in order to detect it. Current technology does not allow for this, but they claim that this laser just might do the trick.

One thing that made me pause a bit though is the claim that it will improve the accuracy of detection 100-fold, which certainly seems like a tall order. I’m not really basing that on anything scientific (and the fact that the press-release comes from NIST probably means that my concerns are unfounded), but an improvement by two orders of magnitude is not something seen every-day.

Well this has been pretty much all over the Internet for the last week, but I wanted to wait and see how it was received before writing about it. A team of Italian scientists have recently released a paper on their experiment to detect dark matter directly, and I must say they present some very promising results. Before presenting the results, let me just explain the idea behind the experiment…

One (and the most widely accepted) theory of what dark matter may be, is the WIMP theory. That is, dark matter consisting of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles and we “just” have to figure out which particle that might be. Another quite certain thing we know about dark matter is that it encloses the Galaxy in a halo that extends far longer than the galaxy itself. The galaxy is like the meat ball in the bowl of dark matter soup. The important part of the WIMP acronym is the weakly interacting part. Even though it is extremely rare that a dark matter particle interacts with another (bright? Ok, you can hit me) matter particle, releasing detectable light, it CAN happen. The problem is that it would be almost impossible to detect these events because they would easily drown in the sea of other unrelated interaction events, so we need a clever, and as it turns out, quite simple idea to overcome it.

As the Sun and the rest of the Solar System moves around the center of the Galaxy, we are dragged through the soup of dark matter particles. So when the Earth revolves around the Sun, we will in half the time be traveling in the direction of the galactic rotation, and in the other half in the opposite direction, which essentially just means that we move just a little faster and slower around the Galaxy every 6 months. If we then assume that the dark matter particles are not moving with the galaxy (which there would be no reason to think they are), we should be hitting more dark matter particles in some 6 months than in the other. Just like you feel less wind when you’re riding your bike slowly. Now if we are able to detect events that vary with this annual cycle, dark matter WIMPs would be very likely to be the reason for it. We simply know of nothing else that would cause this effect.

As you’ve of course guessed by now, this is exactly what the Italian scientists have measured, and to a very high precision as well. There simply is no doubt that there is something changing with our velocity around the Galaxy, and thus the seasons of the year, but it’s very important to note that it is by no means certain that it is actually dark matter. But lets just say the results are interesting in all cases. If it’s not dark matter, it must be something else we don’t know about, which is interesting by definition. If it turns out to be dark matter particles though, we’ve just come one step closer at solving one of the greatest mysteries of modern science.