Messier 33 Messier 74 Messier 81
Wednesday, August 14, 2024
Monday, August 17, 2020
Gamma Doradus Variable Stars
These stars have a spectral type that ranges from A to F class stars. These stars are classified as variable stars showing variations in luminosity of approximately 0.1 with periods of roughly one day. These stars are relatively new as no discoveries happened before the 1990's
Location: Dorado γ Doradus
Light Curve From The Kepler Mission showing pulsations of a typical GDOR
Light Curve of TIC 461547908 a Gamma Doradus Star
Which is approximately 7559 Kelvins and lies in the Constellation of Polaris. Seems to be unlisted in VSX.
Light Curve of TIC 357719182 a Gamma Doradus Star
Which is approximately 7179 Kelvins and likely is an unlisted GDOR Binary. This star lies in the Lyra Constellation.
18:28:02.6 44:41:09.96 (J200)
Light Curve of TIC 323403590 a Gamma Doradus Star
This star is slightly larger and hotter at 9121 Kelvins and seems to have a companion shown by the dip in the light curve at day 15.
Interestingly enough this GDOR is neighbors with the CAVE reflection Nebula show below.
This image from the Keyhole Dataset shows the nebula reflecting the blue starlight of its neighbors.
Another Type of GDOR Variable KIC 468264641
Friday, August 7, 2020
TESS Takes First Look At Our Universe!
Endless Stars... Endless Planets... Endless Dreamers...
What do you see?
Sometimes if you just get a new looking glass a whole universe of new possibilities appears. That's what NASA, MIT, and SpaceX are making a reality by launching NASA's new TESS satellite into orbit with the goal of discovering many new worlds in our own Milky Way Galaxy. During the next two years TESS will scan the 200,000 or so nearest and brightest stars to Earth for the telltale light dimming sign that happens when an exoplanet crosses their host stars.
Would you like to know how many planets are in our own Galactic back yard?
I'm first on the list of people who are very excited to see the real results of NASA's new mission.
The goal for TESS is to characterize many newly found planets, star systems and the characteristics that make up a diverse new universe of possibilities. In particular atmospheric compositions and the break down of elemental abundances via light spectral analysis will give us clues that will reveal many details about each world's climate, history, and the possibility that life could exist.
The Kavli Foundation spoke with two scientists about the TESS mission to get an inside look at the development and about the goals of the project.
From the early results of the Kepler Mission we know that TESS is expected to discover many thousands of new worlds, there should be hundreds ranging in size from about one to two times Earth and many larger planets. Smaller rocky planets serve as prime targets, super earths tend to show up in multiples as well, discovering new diverse populations of planets will be the main objective of the mission. Detailed follow-up observations by other ground based telescopes such as the Keck Telescope in Hawaii will reveal atmospheric compositions of these worlds in new and in depth ways. There is nothing more exciting than being on the verge of making history and illuminating our understanding of the intimate details and workings of our universe.
By,
JLC
Hawaii's Keck Telescope Spectral Analysis of Keplers Habitable Zone Planets
Credit: NASA/JPL/KECK
Hawaii's Keck Telescope has recently performed a spectral analysis of the Kepler habitable zone planet line up. The results show0 the best possible scenario that scientists have been hoping for; on these newly discovered planets The Keck Team has identified many of the same atmospheric compositions that has shown to support life here on earth. Studying the starlight of these planetary systems shows that we live in a universe of complex planetary systems with all the componants needed to support life. These planetary systems were found to be elementally abundant with Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen, Carbon, and Iron.
Abundances of Carbon and Oxygen were found to be enriched in stars with planetary systems. These results show that many exotic worlds may be formed in carbon rich environments. We find that the elemental abundances in planetary systems align with that of their host stars. Data from the Kepler Space Observatory suggests that there may be more than two billion planets in our galaxy capable of supporting life. We estimate that 10% - 20% of planets can be potentially Earth-like. Our estimates and real findings are based upon the probability of a planet residing with-in the habitable zone of it's star, and that the temperature and pressure conditions will allow liquid water to exist.
The most recent results from the Kepler Mission and new information shows us that we live in a universe abundant with planetary systems alike to those in our own star system. We have also learned about a new class of planets ranging from earth to Neptune in size completely unlike anything seen in our solar system. New information tells us that planetary and star systems are not all alike, many planets have been found around binary and trinary star systems, adding to the complexity and diversity of our results.
Citizen Scientists are encouraged to volunteer at planethunters.org with the opportunity of learning how to classify planetary systems.
NASA's Kepler Mission and Planet Hunting Research
NASA Kepler and Fermie Research
NASA's search for new earthlike planets that may be able to support life makes history. This is a first time opportunity for citizens to work with NASA, Kepler and TESS mission survey data. Citizen scientists aid the search to find planets orbiting stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond. This opportunity offers volunteers too look in depth at light survey data from planet hunting survey missions.
Additional help is welcomed because of the overwhelming amount of survey data and the fact that people are very likely to discover planets that technology may sometimes overlook. Thousands of discoveries have already happened. Citizens scientists are welcomed to work with NASA and PlanetHunters.org
NASA's search for new earthlike planets that may be able to support life makes history. This is a first time opportunity for citizens to work with NASA, Kepler and TESS mission survey data. Citizen scientists aid the search to find planets orbiting stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond. This opportunity offers volunteers too look in depth at light survey data from planet hunting survey missions.
Additional help is welcomed because of the overwhelming amount of survey data and the fact that people are very likely to discover planets that technology may sometimes overlook. Thousands of discoveries have already happened. Citizens scientists are welcomed to work with NASA and PlanetHunters.org
Monday, July 27, 2020
Abell 2218
Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope this image below is of the galaxy cluster Abell 1063.
Located in the constellation of Grus, it lies about 4 billion light-years away from Earth.
Inside the cluster you can see many more galaxies and distant lights moving from the background. Those that are even very far away are visible because the enormous mass of the foreground galaxy cluster, it is so large that it is actually bending spacetime and light that is passing by. This high energy galaxy cluster creates a magnifying glass or something known as a gravitational lensing event that makes it possible for Hubble to see very faraway galaxies. An event foreseen by A. Einstein many years ago.
What Is Gravitational Lensing
Gravitational lensing is the bending of light from a distant source by a massive object like a Galaxy Cluster in front of it. The spacetime around massive objects is curved as predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Gravitational lenses can be used to see very far off and distant galaxies throughout space time.
What Is A Galaxy Cluster?
Credit: NASA/Hubble
A galaxy cluster is a group of sometimes up to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity & energy. Several galaxy clusters together can form a supercluster.
The StarGazer's Guide to the Milky Way and Beyond - Gaia
Credit: ESA
A Star Gazer's Guide to the Milky Way
Gaia Sky is a free and open source software package that can guide you through your travels in the stars.
Gaia Sky serves as a visualization tool you can use to explore our very own solar system, the milky way galaxy and beyond. Once you have downloaded and installed this software package you can move freely throughout the cosmos guided by many different star data sets. This software package also comes planetarium ready being capable of producing videos for full dome systems, it can also run in 360 mode with spherical, cylindrical and hammer projections. You can also observe the Gaia satellite while in orbit around earth to learn how it moves and it's altitude and positions in the sky.
Gaia sky contains a simulation of our own Solar System complete with all the planets, dwarf planets, some of the satellites, moons, asteroids, locations, trajectories and more. If has the capability to add levels of detail based views into different Gaia release data sets such as: Gaia DR2, Gaia Sky Catalogues and different sections dedicated to parallax relative errors, each data set ranges from millions to hundreds of millions of stars available and classified by Gaia. Included also is additional astronomical and cosmological data such as star clusters (MWSC), nearby galaxies (NGB), and distant galaxies and quasars (SDSS).
This wonderful edition to twenty first century computing Gaia Sky is designed for astronomy fans and professional enthusiasts, it was developed in 2014 directly into the framework of the data processing consortium of ESA's Gaia Cornerstone Astrometry Mission. The special focus of this project is to deliver visualization of the Gaia catalogue and to provide further support and aid of related outreach materials. Additionally, Gaia sky has a wide range of other scientific applications ranging from purely recreational to scientific exploration.
Completely flexible by design, you can navigate the galaxy with your own controllers and gamepads. It has 6 stereoscopic modes with which you can select Anaglyphic (red cam), VR Headset, 3DTV, Cross Eye and Parallel View. You can implement SAMP commands to interoperate with SAMP-ready software like Topcat and Aladdin. Gaia is also compatible if you want to upload your own data sets in TGAS, NGB, SDSS, MWSC, FITS, CSV and many other formats. Gaia is also scriptable and extendable because it is compatible with Python Scripting to specialize and extend performance capabilities built to suit.
Functioning as a visualization engine Gaia Sky represents the multi-dimensional nature of our universe and data collected with positions, parallaxes, proper motions of objects, tangential velocities projected throughout the sky, radial velocities if available, magnitudes of objects and even colors. the software package includes a stereoscopic mode with five 3D properties, a planetarium mode and a 360 panorama mode with three different projections. In this software package you will find a scripting engine that is built-in with a comprehensive API, a Gaia Sky VR spinoff is also in the works and is now in functional state.
Gaia Sky Software is available for Linux, macOS and Windows.
The minimum system requirements for version 2.0.0 are the following:
CPU: Intel core i5 3rd generation
GPU: Intel HD 4000, Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT, Radeon HD 5670 / 1 GB VRAM / OpenGL 3.0
RAM: 4+ GB RAM
Disk: 1 GB of free space
Credit: ESA
The September 2016 release
A new all sky star catalog of our very own favorite galaxy the Milky Way has been released by Gaia. This mission lead by ESA started its scientific work in July 2014. This first release is based on data collected during its first 14 months of scanning the sky. "Today's release gives us a first impression of the extraordinary data that awaits us and how that will revolutionize our understanding of how stars are distributed and move across our galaxy."
Will have information about positions (α, δ) and G magnitudes for all stars with acceptable formal standard errors on positions. Positions and individual uncertainties are computed using a generic prior and bayes' rule detailed in the "Gaia astrometry for stars with too few observations. A Bayesian approach" For this release approximately 90% of the sky will be covered.
"The beautiful map we are publishing today shows the density of stars measured by Gaia across the entire sky, and confirms that it collected superb data during its first year of operations” says Timo Prusti Gaia project scientist at ESA.
At the beginning of the routine phase a special scanning mode repeatedly covering the ecliptic poles on every spin was executed for calibration purposes. Photometric data of RR Lyrae and Cepheid Variable Stars including these high-cadence measurements will be released. The five parameter astrometric solution positions, parallaxes, and proper motions for stars in common between the Tycho 2 Catalog and Gaia will be released. The catalog is based on the Tycho Gaia Astrometric Solution.
Future releases may Include:
Five parameter astrometric solution of objects with single star behavior will be released under the assumption that at least 90% of the sky can be covered. Integrated BP/RP photometry, with appropriate standard errors for sources where basic astrophysical parameter estimation has been verified. Mean radial velocities for objects showing no radial velocity variation and for which an adequate synthetic template could be selected, under the assumption that this can be done for 90% of the bright stars on the sky.
Orbital solutions, together with the system radial velocity and five parameter astrometric solutions, for binary's having periods between 2 months and 75% of the observing time will be released. Object classification and astrophysical parameters, together with BP/RP spectra and/or RVS spectra they are based on will be released for spectroscopically and photometrically well behaved objects. Mean radial velocities will be released for those stars not showing variability and with available atmospheric parameter estimates.
Variable star classification will be released together with the epoch photometry used for the stars. Solar system results will be released with preliminary orbital solutions and individual epoch observations. Non single star catalogs will be released. Full astrometric, photometric and radial velocity catalogs will also be released. All available variable star and non single star solutions. Source classification plus multiple astrophysical parameters for stars, unresolved binaries, galaxies, and quasars. Some parameters may not be available for fainter stars.
A Star Gazer's Guide to the Milky Way
Gaia Sky is a free and open source software package that can guide you through your travels in the stars.
Gaia Sky serves as a visualization tool you can use to explore our very own solar system, the milky way galaxy and beyond. Once you have downloaded and installed this software package you can move freely throughout the cosmos guided by many different star data sets. This software package also comes planetarium ready being capable of producing videos for full dome systems, it can also run in 360 mode with spherical, cylindrical and hammer projections. You can also observe the Gaia satellite while in orbit around earth to learn how it moves and it's altitude and positions in the sky.
Gaia sky contains a simulation of our own Solar System complete with all the planets, dwarf planets, some of the satellites, moons, asteroids, locations, trajectories and more. If has the capability to add levels of detail based views into different Gaia release data sets such as: Gaia DR2, Gaia Sky Catalogues and different sections dedicated to parallax relative errors, each data set ranges from millions to hundreds of millions of stars available and classified by Gaia. Included also is additional astronomical and cosmological data such as star clusters (MWSC), nearby galaxies (NGB), and distant galaxies and quasars (SDSS).
This wonderful edition to twenty first century computing Gaia Sky is designed for astronomy fans and professional enthusiasts, it was developed in 2014 directly into the framework of the data processing consortium of ESA's Gaia Cornerstone Astrometry Mission. The special focus of this project is to deliver visualization of the Gaia catalogue and to provide further support and aid of related outreach materials. Additionally, Gaia sky has a wide range of other scientific applications ranging from purely recreational to scientific exploration.
Completely flexible by design, you can navigate the galaxy with your own controllers and gamepads. It has 6 stereoscopic modes with which you can select Anaglyphic (red cam), VR Headset, 3DTV, Cross Eye and Parallel View. You can implement SAMP commands to interoperate with SAMP-ready software like Topcat and Aladdin. Gaia is also compatible if you want to upload your own data sets in TGAS, NGB, SDSS, MWSC, FITS, CSV and many other formats. Gaia is also scriptable and extendable because it is compatible with Python Scripting to specialize and extend performance capabilities built to suit.
Functioning as a visualization engine Gaia Sky represents the multi-dimensional nature of our universe and data collected with positions, parallaxes, proper motions of objects, tangential velocities projected throughout the sky, radial velocities if available, magnitudes of objects and even colors. the software package includes a stereoscopic mode with five 3D properties, a planetarium mode and a 360 panorama mode with three different projections. In this software package you will find a scripting engine that is built-in with a comprehensive API, a Gaia Sky VR spinoff is also in the works and is now in functional state.
Gaia Sky Software is available for Linux, macOS and Windows.
The minimum system requirements for version 2.0.0 are the following:
CPU: Intel core i5 3rd generation
GPU: Intel HD 4000, Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT, Radeon HD 5670 / 1 GB VRAM / OpenGL 3.0
RAM: 4+ GB RAM
Disk: 1 GB of free space
Credit: ESA
The September 2016 release
A new all sky star catalog of our very own favorite galaxy the Milky Way has been released by Gaia. This mission lead by ESA started its scientific work in July 2014. This first release is based on data collected during its first 14 months of scanning the sky. "Today's release gives us a first impression of the extraordinary data that awaits us and how that will revolutionize our understanding of how stars are distributed and move across our galaxy."
Will have information about positions (α, δ) and G magnitudes for all stars with acceptable formal standard errors on positions. Positions and individual uncertainties are computed using a generic prior and bayes' rule detailed in the "Gaia astrometry for stars with too few observations. A Bayesian approach" For this release approximately 90% of the sky will be covered.
"The beautiful map we are publishing today shows the density of stars measured by Gaia across the entire sky, and confirms that it collected superb data during its first year of operations” says Timo Prusti Gaia project scientist at ESA.
At the beginning of the routine phase a special scanning mode repeatedly covering the ecliptic poles on every spin was executed for calibration purposes. Photometric data of RR Lyrae and Cepheid Variable Stars including these high-cadence measurements will be released. The five parameter astrometric solution positions, parallaxes, and proper motions for stars in common between the Tycho 2 Catalog and Gaia will be released. The catalog is based on the Tycho Gaia Astrometric Solution.
Future releases may Include:
Five parameter astrometric solution of objects with single star behavior will be released under the assumption that at least 90% of the sky can be covered. Integrated BP/RP photometry, with appropriate standard errors for sources where basic astrophysical parameter estimation has been verified. Mean radial velocities for objects showing no radial velocity variation and for which an adequate synthetic template could be selected, under the assumption that this can be done for 90% of the bright stars on the sky.
Orbital solutions, together with the system radial velocity and five parameter astrometric solutions, for binary's having periods between 2 months and 75% of the observing time will be released. Object classification and astrophysical parameters, together with BP/RP spectra and/or RVS spectra they are based on will be released for spectroscopically and photometrically well behaved objects. Mean radial velocities will be released for those stars not showing variability and with available atmospheric parameter estimates.
Variable star classification will be released together with the epoch photometry used for the stars. Solar system results will be released with preliminary orbital solutions and individual epoch observations. Non single star catalogs will be released. Full astrometric, photometric and radial velocity catalogs will also be released. All available variable star and non single star solutions. Source classification plus multiple astrophysical parameters for stars, unresolved binaries, galaxies, and quasars. Some parameters may not be available for fainter stars.
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