Date: October 10, 2010
Title: Astronomy in the News
Podcaster: Carolyn Collins Petersen
Organization: Loch Ness Productions (www.lochnessproductions.com)
Music from A Gentle Rain of Starlight, plus a soon-to-be-released new album by Geodesium. (http://www.geodesium.com)
Description: Carolyn Collins Petersen, TheSpacewriter, looks at recent astro-news.
Bio: Carolyn Collins Petersen is a science writer and show producer, as well as vice-president of Loch Ness Productions, (http://www.lochnessproductions.com/index2.html) a company that creates astronomy documentaries and other materials. She works with planetariums, science centers, and observatories on products that explain astronomy and space science to the public. Her most recent projects range from documentary scripts, exhibits for NASA/JPL, the Griffith Observatory and the California Academy of Sciences, to video podcasts for MIT’s Haystack Observatory and podcasts for the Astronomical society of the Pacific’s “Astronomy Behind the Headlines” project.
Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by the Physics Department at Eastern Illinois University: “Caring faculty guiding students through teaching and research” at www.eiu.edu/~physics/.
Transcript:
Hi, this is Carolyn Collins Petersen, TheSpacewriter, and today we’re going to explore astronomy in the news.
A few years ago I was asked to work on a project called Astronomy behind the Headlines. It’s a podcast publication of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific – an organization that has as its motto: Advancing Science Literacy Through Astronomy.
You can find these podcasts on the group’s website at www.astrosociety.org/abh. They cover a wide gamut of news about astronomy, all written for teachers, lay people and astronomy buffs who want to know more about the astronomy in the news. Check it out!
So, what IS making news in astronomy these days? Well, the search for planets orbiting other stars is bringing in the headlines. These so-called “exoplanets” are the target of multiple ground-based and space-based missions, particularly the Kepler mission, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Planet Quest survey, the California and Carnegie Planet Search, the Geneva Extrasolar Planet Search, and many others. Simply look on the Web using the search term “extrasolar planets” and you’ll have plenty of science sites to search from.
While astronomers haven’t found an Earth-LIKE planet yet, they have found plenty of others – some are called hot Jupiters, others are called super-Earths. These terms tell us those planets are like Jupiter but hotter, or like Earth but bigger. When they say “like” Earth, they usually mean that the world is probably a rocky world, not necessarily that it’s just like Earth. Beyond that, astronomers are still exploring these distant worlds, and to be sure – they ARE looking for Earth-like planets.
Of course, if you’re going to hunt for extrasolar planets, the question of LIFE on those planets is important, too. Astronomers don’t quite have the tools to spot life forms waving at us from distant worlds, but they do have ways of starting to detect the chemical signatures of life at other planets.
Astronomers also look at the nebulae from which stars and planets form, to search for what they call pre-biotic chemicals – that is, the organic chemicals that somehow combined to create the precursors of life on our own planet. The science that covers this field is called astrobiology.
We already know that Earth has life, and so one field of study looks at Earth as if it is an alien planet to figure out what the signs of life might be. That oxygen we breathe? It’s out of equilibrium in our atmosphere. It means there’s more of it than there should be than if it were naturally occurring. That is a sure signal to anybody who happens to be looking at US that something on this planet is producing huge amounts of oxygen.
Some very exotic astronomy events and objects grab the news headlines from time to time. You can’t miss with a headline about black holes. These objects, which are essentially collections of mass so dense that their gravitational pull tugs in everything – including light – were once the stuff of science fiction. Today, we know that a large one lies in the heart of our own galaxy—the Milky Way. Astronomers study it as much as possible to understand how it works. And, in recent years, they’ve discovered many links between the existence of black holes in galaxies and the evolutionary history of those galaxies.
Not all astronomy focuses on dim, distant objects. Scientists who study the worlds of our solar system focus on such widely ranging topics as rocky planet surfaces and gas giant atmospheres.
Or, they spend time tracking comets. Or, they track asteroids that happen to come a bit too close to Earth in their orbits. Others track down the bits of space debris that get caught up in our atmosphere. Much of this debris burns up before it ever gets close to the surface, but some of it actually makes it all the way down. These meteorites are an important field of study because they tell us about the mineral and chemical makeup of stuff “out there”. That “stuff” happens to carry a lot of information about the material that formed the planets, more than 4.5 billion years ago. So, when you hear about a meteorite hitting the ground, and the scientists racing to study it, think of them as racing to open a treasure chest of solar system history.
Finally, impacts on other planets often make the news. The most recent ones have been at Jupiter. Back in 1994, when Comet Shoemaker-levy 9 splashed into Jupiter, it made huge news because nobody had seen THAT happen before. Flash forward to 2010 and now we’ve seen it happen a couple of more times, and it now looks like impacts on Jupiter are more common than we thought. Now that we have high-resolution instruments to study Jupiter – both in amateur and professional observatories – we’re probably going to be treated to more impacts as time goes by.
What do we learn from those events? More about Jupiter’s atmosphere, for one. More about the populations of impactors that orbit out there, for another. And, we learn more about what might happen to US if something big happened to smack into Earth.
That HAS happened in the distant past, and most planetary scientists agree that it will happen again. That possibility often crops up in the news, usually as media outlets breathlessly report on yet another close-by asteroid buzzing our planet. But hey – it’s news!
So, there’s a bit of astronomy news every day. Keep an eye out for it. It’s a busy universe, and there’s always something going on!
If you’d like to learn more about astro stories in the news, point your browser to www.thespacewriter.com/wp and click on the 365 Days of Astronomy tab.
Thanks for listening and keep looking up!
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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