Dwarf star has 86% chance of crashing our solar system

But we have a little time to make arrangements. The collision is expected in the next 1.5 million years.

From the link:

A new set of star velocity data indicates that Gliese 710 has an 86 percent chance of ploughing into the Solar System within the next 1.5 million years.

And:

Today, Vadim Bobylev at the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St Petersburg gives us the answer. He’s combined the Hipparcos data with several new databases and found an additional nine stars that have either had a close encounter with the Sun or are going to.

But he’s also made a spectacular prediction. The original Hipparcos data showed that an orange dwarf star called Gliese 710 is heading our way and will arrive sometime within the next 1.5 million years.

Of course, trajectories are difficult to calculate when the data is poor so nobody has really been sure about what’s going to happen.

What the new data has allowed Bobylev to do is calculate the probability of Gliese 710 smashing into the Solar System. What he’s found is a shock.

He says there is 86 percent chance that Gliese 710 will plough through the Oort Cloud of frozen stuff that extends some 0.5 parsecs into space.

That may sound like a graze but it is likely to have serious consequences. Such an approach would send an almighty shower of comets into the Solar System which will force us to keep our heads down for a while. And a probability of 86 percent is about as close to certainty as this kind of data can get.

IBEX finds solar system surprise

This release is from Friday and I’ve read this news a few different places and caught several releases, but this one is pretty comprehensive and contains a multitude of citations and external links.

Surprises in any scientific research are interesting, and often they are pretty cool.

The release:

Satellite reveals surprising cosmic ‘weather’ at edge of solar system

		IMAGE: Priscilla Frisch, Senior Scientist in Astronomy & Astrophysics, and member of the science team, Interstellar Boundary Explorer. Collaborating with former UChicago astronomer Thomas F. Adams, she made the first spectrum… Click here for more information.

The first solar system energetic particle maps show an unexpected landmark occurring at the outer edge of the solar wind bubble surrounding the solar system. Scientists published these maps, based mostly on data collected from NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer satellite, in the Oct. 15 issue of Science Express, the advance online version of the journal Science.

“Nature is full of surprises, and IBEX has been lucky to discover one of those surprises,” said Priscilla Frisch, a senior scientist in astronomy & astrophysics at the University of Chicago. “The sky maps are dominated by a giant ribbon of energetic neutral atoms extending throughout the sky in an arc that is 300 degrees long.” Energetic neutral atoms form when hot solar wind ions (charged particles) steal electrons from cool interstellar neutral atoms.

IBEX was launched Oct. 19, 2008, to produce the first all-sky maps of the heliosphere, which reaches far beyond the solar system’s most distant planets. Extending more than 100 times farther than the distance from Earth to the sun, the heliosphere marks the region of outer space subjected to the sun’s particle emissions.

The new maps show how high-speed cosmic particle streams collide and mix at the edge of the heliosphere, said Frisch, who co-authored three of a set of IBEX articles appearing in this week’s Science Express. The outgoing solar wind blows at 900,000 miles an hour, crashing into a 60,000-mile-an-hour “breeze” of incoming interstellar gas.

Revealed in the IBEX data, but not predicted in the theoretical heliosphere simulations of three different research groups, was the ribbon itself, formed where the direction of the interstellar magnetic field draping over the heliosphere is perpendicular to the viewpoint of the sun.

		IMAGE: Image from one of the IBEX papers published in the Oct. 16, 2009, issue of Science showing a map of the ribbon of energetic neutral atoms (in green and yellow)… Click here for more information.

Energetic protons create forces as they move through the magnetic field, and when the protons are bathed in interstellar neutrals, they produce energetic neutral atoms. “We’re still trying to understand this unexpected structure, and we believe that the interstellar magnetic forces are associated with the enhanced ENA production at the ribbon,” Frisch said.

IBEX shows that energetic neutral atoms are produced toward the north pole of the ecliptic (the plane traced by the orbit of the planets around the sun), as well as toward the heliosphere tail pointed toward the constellations of Taurus and Orion. “The particle energies change between the poles and tail, but surprisingly not in the ribbon compared to adjacent locations,” Frisch said.

###

BEX is the latest in NASA’s series of low-cost, rapidly developed Small Explorers space missions. Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, leads and developed the mission with a team of national and international partners. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the Explorers Program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Citations: N. A. Schwadron, M. Bzowski, G. B. Crew, M. Gruntman, H. Fahr, H. Fichtner, P. C. Frisch, H. O. Funsten, S. Fuselier, J. Heerikhuisen, V. Izmodenov, H. Kucharek, M. Lee, G. Livadiotis, D. J. McComas, E. Moebius, T. Moore, J. Mukherjee, N.V. Pogorelov, C. Prested, D. Reisenfeld, E. Roelof, G.P. Zank, “Comparison of Interstellar Boundary Explorer Observations with 3-D Global Heliospheric Models,” ScienceExpress, Oct. 15, 2009.

H.O. Funsten, F. Allegrini, G.B. Crew, R. DeMajistre, P.C. Frisch, S.A. Fuselier, M. Gruntman, P. Janzen, D.J. McComas, E. Möbius, B. Randol, D.B. Reisenfeld, E.C. Roelof, N.A. Schwadron, “Structures and Spectral Variations of the Outer Heliosphere in IBEX Energetic Neutral Atom Maps,”Science Express, Oct. 15, 2009.

D.J. McComas, F. Allegrini1, P. Bochsler, M. Bzowski, E.R. Christian, G.B.Crew, R. DeMajistre, H. Fahr, H. Fichtner, P.C. Frisch, H.O. Funsten, S. A. Fuselier, G. Gloeckler, M. Gruntman, J. Heerikhuisen, V. Izmodenov, P.J anzen, P. Knappenberger, S. Krimigis, H. Kucharek, M. Lee, G. Livadiotis, S. Livi, R.J. MacDowall, D. Mitchell, E. Möbius, T. Moore, N.V. Pogorelov, D. Reisenfeld, E. Roelof, L. Saul, N.A. Schwadron, P.W. Valek, R. Vanderspek, P. Wurz, G.P. Zank, “Global Observations of the Interstellar Interaction from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer-IBEX”, ScienceExpress, Oct. 15, 2009.

Related links:

Animation shows how energetic neutral atoms are made in the heliosheath when hot solar wind protons grab an electron from a cold interstellar gas atom. The ENAs can then easily travel back into the solar system, where some are collected by IBEX. Credit: NASA/GSFChttp://www.swri.org/temp/ibexscience/DM/SP_draft1.mov

Solar Journey: The Significant of Our Galactic Environment for the Heliosphere and Earth, Priscilla C. Frisch, editor.http://www.springer.com/astronomy/practical+astronomy/book/978-1-4020-4397-0

IBEX Web page at Southwest Research Institute http://ibex.swri.edu/

NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer mission http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ibex/index.html

To view a video related to this research, please visit http://astro.uchicago.edu/%7Efrisch/soljourn/Hanson/AstroBioScene7Sound.mov

If you’re dying for more on the topic, here’s another press release.

Dark comets …

… sound damn scary.

From KurzweilAI.net —

‘Dark’ comets may pose threat to Earth

New Scientist Space, Feb. 11, 2009 Dark comets may be prowling the solar system, posing a deadly threat to Earth. They are formed when reflective water ice has evaporated away, leaving behind an organic crust that only reflects a small fraction of light.   Read Original Article>>

First images of new multi-planet solar system

The release:

Astronomers capture first images of
newly-discovered solar system

LIVERMORE, Calif. — Astronomers for the first time have taken snapshots of a multi-planet solar system, much like ours, orbiting another star.

The new solar system orbits a dusty young star named HR8799, which is 140 light years away and about 1.5 times the size of our sun. Three planets, roughly 10, 10 and 7 times the mass of Jupiter, orbit the star. The size of the planets decreases with distance from the parent star, much like the giant planets do in our system.

And there may be more planets out there, but scientists say they just haven’t seen them yet.

“Every extrasolar planet detected so far has been a wobble on a graph. These are the first pictures of an entire system,” said Bruce Macintosh, an astrophysicist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and one of the key authors of a paper appearing in the Nov. 13 issue of Science Express. “We’ve been trying image planets for eight years with no luck and now we have pictures of three planets at once.”

Using high-contrast, near-infrared adaptive optics observations with the Keck and Gemini telescopes, the team of researchers from Livermore, the NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Canada, Lowell Observatory, University of California Los Angeles, and several other institutions were able to see three orbiting planetary companions to HR8799.

Astronomers have known for a decade through indirect techniques that the sun was not the only star with orbiting planets.

“But we finally have an actual image of an entire system,” Macintosh said. “This is a milestone in the search and characterization of planetary systems around stars.”

During the past 10 years, various planet detection techniques have been used to find more than 200 exoplanets. But these methods all have limitations. Most infer the existence of a planet through its influence on the star that it orbits, but don’t actually tell scientists anything about the planet other than its mass and orbit. Second, the techniques are all limited to small to moderate planet-star separation, usually less than about 5 astronomical units (one AU is the average distance from the sun to Earth).

In the new findings, the planets are 24, 37 and 67 times the Earth-sun separation from the host star. The furthest planet in the new system orbits just inside a disk of dusty debris, similar to that produced by the comets of the Kuiper belt of our solar system (just beyond the orbit of Neptune at 30 times Earth-sun distance).

“HR8799’s dust disk stands out as one of the most massive in orbit around any star within 300 light years of Earth” said UCLA’s Ben Zuckerman.

In some ways, this planetary system seems to be a scaled-up version of our solar system orbiting a larger and brighter star, Macintosch said.

The host star is known as a bright, blue A-type star. These types of stars are usually ignored in ground and space-based direct imaging surveys since they offer a less favorable contrast between a bright star and a faint planet. But they do have an advantage over our sun: Early in their life, they can retain heavy disks of planet-making material and therefore form more massive planets at wider separations that are easier to detect. In the recent study, the star also is young – less than 100 million years old – which means its planets are still glowing with heat from their formation.

“Seeing these planets directly – separating their light from the star – lets us study them as individuals, and use spectroscopy to study their properties, like temperature or composition,” Macintosh said.

“Detailed comparison with theoretical model atmospheres confirms that all three planets possess complex atmospheres with dusty clouds partially trapping and re-radiating the escaping heat” said Lowell Observatory astronomer Travis Barman.

The planets have been extensively studied using adaptive optics on the giant Keck and Gemini telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Adaptive optics enables astronomers to minimize the blurring effects of the Earth’s atmosphere, producing images with unprecedented detail and resolution. LLNL helped build the original adaptive optics system for Keck, the world’s largest optical telescope. Christian Marois, a former LLNL postdoctoral researcher and the primary author of the paper who now works at NRC, developed an advanced computer processing technique that helps to extract the planets from the vastly brighter light of the star.

A team led by Macintosh is constructing a much more advanced adaptive optics system designed from the beginning to block the light of bright stars and reveal even fainter planets. Known as the Gemini Planet Imager (http://gpi.berkeley.edu), this new system will be up to 100 times more sensitive than current instruments and able to image planets similar to our own Jupiter around nearby stars.

“I think there’s a very high probability that there are more planets in the system that we can’t detect yet,” Macintosh said. “One of the things that distinguishes this system from most of the extrasolar planets that are already known is that HR8799 has its giant planets in the outer parts – like our solar system does – and so has ‘room’ for smaller terrestrial planets – far beyond our current ability to see – in the inner parts.”

Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a national security laboratory, with a mission to ensure national security and apply science and technology to the important issues of our time. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

Near-infrared false-color image taken with the W.M. Keck II telescope and adaptive optics. The three planets are labelled b, c, and d. The colored speckles in the center are the remains of the bright light from their parent star after image processing.

NASA and the weakening solar bubble

Here’s a discussion on an odd and a little unsettling topic. Probabaly just part of usual long-term fluctuations, but we may feel some effects in the meantime. I’ve blogged on the IBEX project before here.

The release:

NASA to Discuss Mission to Study Sun’s Weakening Protective Bubble

GREENBELT, Md., Oct. 15 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — NASA will hold a media teleconference on Friday, Oct. 17, at 1 p.m. EDT, to preview the Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, mission. The spacecraft may confirm if the sun’s protective bubble surrounding our solar system, called the heliosphere, is about to shrink and weaken. IBEX also will be the first spacecraft to image and map the dynamic interactions taking place where the hot solar wind slams into the cold expanse of space.

(LOGO:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO )

The heliosphere acts as a shield for our solar system, warding off most of the galactic cosmic rays. Recent data indicate the solar wind’s global pressure is the lowest seen since the beginning of the space age.

IBEX is set to launch Oct. 19 from the Kwajalein Atoll, a part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.

Panelists will be:

– David McComas, IBEX principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio

– Nathan Schwadron, co-investigator and IBEX Science Operations Center lead at Boston University

– Stephen Fuselier, co-investigator and IBEX-Lo Sensor lead at Lockheed-Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, Calif.

– Eric Christian, program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington

Photo:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO
AP Archive:  http://photoarchive.ap.org/
PRN Photo Desk photodesk@prnewswire.com
Source: NASA
   
Web Site:  http://www.nasa.gov/

Professor to Speak on NASA’s Exploration of Moon and Planets

Press release from today. Sounds like a cool talk.

Professor to Speak on NASA’s Exploration of Moon and Planets

HAMPTON, Va., Oct. 9 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The launch of Sputnik energized NASA’s exploration of the solar system, including the moon and all eight planets. According to Dr. James Head, a distinguished professor of Geological Sciences at Brown University, it was NASA’s exploration that “provided a new understanding of how the Earth and other planetary bodies formed and evolved.”

(LOGO:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO )

Head will speak on what he calls the “missing chapters of Earth history” in a colloquium lecture called “The Exploration of the Moon and Planets: A New Perspective on Earth” on Tuesday, Oct. 14, at 2 p.m. in the Reid Conference Center at NASA Langley. The talk is part of a series celebrating NASA’s 50th anniversary.

He will present the same lecture for the general public on Tuesday evening at 7:30 p.m. at the Virginia Air & Space Center on Settlers Landing Road in Hampton. The evening talk is free and no reservations are required.

Head is currently researching the processes that form and modify planetary surfaces. He also studies comparative planetology and the themes of planetary evolution, and looks for application of these to the study of early Earth history. He has conducted field studies on active volcanoes in Hawaii and at Mount St. Helens and on volcanic deposits on the seafloor with two deep-sea submersible dives.

Before his time at Brown University, Head worked with the NASA Apollo Lunar Exploration Program, where he helped select potential landing sites and train the Apollo astronauts. He also worked in mission operations and analyzed the returned lunar samples.

For more information on NASA Langley’s Colloquium and Sigma Series lectures, visit:

http://shemesh.larc.nasa.gov/Lectures/colloq/colloqsigma.htm

Photo:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO
AP Archive:  http://photoarchive.ap.org/
PRN Photo Desk photodesk@prnewswire.com
Source: NASA
   
Web Site:  http://www.nasa.gov/

Our solar system may be more special than we realize

From KurzweilAI.net — the solar system looks to be quite unique.

New Study Shows Solar System is Unique

The Future of Things, Sep. 1, 2008 Research conducted by a team of North American scientists shows our solar system is special, with very specific conditions needed for a proto-stellar disk to evolve into a solar system-like planetary system — contrary to the accepted theory that ours is an average planetary system.   Read Original Article>>