Greetings from the Large Binocular Telescope on Mt. Graham! Read below for some basic information about what I’m doing up here and you’ll be rewarded with some extra credit opportunities. . .

My bad luck continues with telescope observing, since it was too windy for us to open last night (25meter per second winds… how fast is that in miles per hour?), but the view up here is slowly helping to alleviate my foul mood. Below is a picture of the view from the observatory kitchen.

Although there was a big forest fire that came dangerously close to the observatory in 2004, the dead trees that you see were killed by a species of bark beetle. It turns out that bark beetles aren’t the only abundant insect species up here though. In fact, I encountered the object below during a visit here in 2008…

Yes you are seeing that right! It’s a large bucket overflowing with fried moths. As you walk around the Submillimeter Telescope next door in the summer, there’s a distinct fried mothy smell that pervades the building and every few seconds you hear a little zzzzzzt! Between the fire and the insect outbreaks in recent years, the endangered Mt Graham red squirrel population is increasingly threatened by loss of habitat. In fact, I had to obtain a squirrel permit (pictured below) in order to be allowed up to the observatory.

OK good work on making it this far. Below, please find your reward (s)!

First, here is an article about the system I mentioned in class (and in my last post), where there is evidence of a Late Heavy Bombardment-like event in another planetary system. This was a big news story a couple of weeks ago, and would be a great article to read and summarize for the class for extra credit (reminder: presenting two articles is equivalent to attending one lecture and is good for half a homework’s worth of extra credit).

Secondly, check out this funny comic about the Drake Equation (if you didn’t see it when I posted it briefly in class on Tuesday), which is also related to our discussion of the (pseudo)science of alien abduction!

Finally, there are two great upcoming lectures that are very much related to what we’ve been discussing in class. Both are geared toward the general public, and you guys already know much more about these topics than the average person! All you have to do is attend and write a one page (double spaced) summary of what you learned.

The first is at the Biosphere this coming Saturday, the 12th at 12pm. Dr. Ilaria Pascucci who is a very important researcher in the exoplanet community, will give a talk called”Where did all of Earth’s Water Come From?”. This is a topic we’ll be covering in class next week! More information here.

If you’re looking for something a little closer to home, there is also a University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory public lecture next Wednesday evening, the 16th, at 7pm. The lecture, called “Mars: Active and Icy” is by U of A professor Dr. Shane Byrne and is about geological activity on Mars as revealed by recent missions to the red planet. Read more here.

Finally, Homework #11 and MA #10 are both posted. Have a great weekend everyone!

First, a reminder that the MIDTERM IS NEXT THURSDAY. This means that there is NO HOMEWORK due next week. We will review for the midterm in class on Tuesday, so come  prepared with any lingering questions that you want answered before the exam.

Also, check out some new astronomy results that were announced at the Signposts of Planets Conference at NASA Goddard (the conference I’m at right now) yesterday.

A baby exoplanet!

A comet storm in a nearby solar system

Spiral arms in disk may indicate forming planet 

The (positive, though sometimes discouraging) habit that scientists have of publicly questioning one another’s work made the news this week. There was even an article in the premier science journal Nature about this debate, which is over whether the extrasolar planet that has been reported around the star Fomalhaut (the “Eye of Sauron” system) is real or not. Use the links below to read more.

The Nature Article

The Discovery News Article I Mentioned in Class

Also, there are two extra credit opportunities coming up this next week:

1) Space Shuttle Astronaut Fred Gregory is giving a public lecture *TONIGHT* Wednesday, September 28 at 7pm in the Kupier Space Sciences Building on the U of A campus, room 308. More details are here.

2)The next Steward Observatory Public Evening Lecture is by Dr. Mark Sykes next Monday, October 3 at 7:30pm on the U of A campus (Steward Observatory room N210). Dr. Sykes is a member of the NASA Dawn mission team. The Dawn spacecraft is currently in orbit around the asteroid Vesta, where it will stay until next year when it heads for another of the biggest asteroids in the asteroid belt, Ceres. More information about the Dawn mission can be found here.  You should also mark your calendars for the following public evening lecture by my colleague Dr. Don McCarthy (who subbed for the first three classes of the semester). He will be speaking about “Spacetime, Multiple Universes, and Time Travel: The Outrageous Legacy of Astronomy Camp (XXV)“. If you go to either of these, remember that you can stay afterwards and look through the observatory’s 36-inch (diameter) telescope! Ask to see the supernova in M101 (The Pinwheel Galaxy). It’s already past it’s peak brightness, so pretty soon you’ll run out of chances to see the brightest nearby supernova in decades!

Finally, the Size and Scale video that I showed at the beginning of class yesterday can be found here if you want to share it (or watch it again and turn the dramatic music up higher this time!)

Last week several exciting new discoveries were made in the field of Extrasolar Planets (planets outside our own solar system – we will do a whole unit on these later in the semester). They include:

The very first confirmed “circumbinary” planet, which means a planet that is in a system with not just one star, but two! The planet lines up perfectly with Earth and its two “suns” so that it passes right across their faces from our point of view, blocking a very small amount of the total light coming from the star behind each time it does. You can read more about this planet, discovered with the NASA Kepler satellite, here.

50 new exoplanets discovered at the European Southern Observatory, including 16 new “Super-Earths”. In our solar system, we have no planets that are intermediary in mass between the Earth and Neptune, which has roughly 17 times the mass of the Earth, but modern astronomers are finding tons of planets that have masses in between the Earth and Neptune, for which we don’t have any solar system analogs. Are these scaled-up versions of Earth-like terrestrial planets or scaled-down versions of “Ice Giants” like Neptune and Uranus? Nobody knows! You can read more about this discovery in the press release here.

Hi everyone. In my first post of the semester, here are the “Wordles” (generated at wordle.net)  that I’ve made based on your responses to (a) Homework 1 Part 1 “Good Science is….” and (b) the notecards you filled out on day 1 of class “Astronomy is… Astrology is… Math is… Science is…”. As a reminder, the worldle takes all of the words in your responses and sizes them based on how many times they were used. Words that you guys used a lot are large and those that you used infrequently are small.

Good Science is… (from Homework #1 … revised from the one that I showed in class so that case is ignored)

And these are the four generated by your responses on the first day of class when you were asked to complete the following with the first thing that popped into your head.

Astronomy is…

Astrology is…

Math is…

Science is…