Some auroral stuff

Since everyone appears to have been in auroral fever mode following the sighting of a Coronal Mass Ejection by both the Solar Dynamics Observatory and SoHO, I might as well add my tuppence.

The CME, which can be seen here in pictures taken by one of the STEREO craft, was a release of hot, relatively dense plasma from the Sun. This added to the normal flow of matter that expands away from the solar surface, much as any gas expands when heated, called the solar wind. The solar wind, being a plasma not a gas, also has to obey magnetohydrodynamics – which just means, it has to deal with electromagnetic forces on top of all the stuff normal gases have to deal with. It carries with it an imprint of the magnetic field of the Sun present at the moment of departure, much like the magnetic imprint on the seabed of the Earth, caused by magnetic sensitive materials lining up to the Earth’s field.

The Earth protects itself with its own magnetic field, generated by convection in the outer core, which sees iron rising and falling, generating electric currents and therefore magnetic fields. The Earth also has its own plasma within that field, created by ionising sunlight and other radiation hitting our atmosphere. The meeting of the solar wind plasma and interplanetary magnetic field (imf) and the terrestrial plasma and magnetic field sees the Earth’s field pushed closer to the ground on the sunward side where the solar wind is flowing towards and exerting greatest pressure on. At the back, the tail in the wake of the pressure extends outward, leaving a windsock like appearance to the region under the control of Earth’s field (the magnetosphere). If the solar wind changes to a lower pressure, the windsock can extend further, if the wind exerts higher pressure, it can be curtailed. This curtailment sees plasma raced back towards the Earth and accelerated through a number of processes that lead to the aurora.

The CME represented a region of suddenly high relative pressure. As soon as it was seen (and there’s a website to help spot things like this), the alert was on for what would happen when it arrived. A planned space station spacewalk was forced to take into account increased radiation exposure. On the ground, the papers warned of aurorae and when the 1st of August CME struck the Earth on the 3rd, the skies did indeed light up, photographed as far south as Germany. The website spaceweather.com holds a rolling gallery of auroral pictures. It also shows a number of indices that are supposed to help you predict what would happen.

As explained in this thread on the forum of the Sky at Night Magazine, there are a number of auroral activity proxies (actually monitors of geomagnetic disturbances, which are the conditions aurorae most normally happen in). The first is the Kp Index, which is derived from magnetometers around the world giving a 0-9 planetary measure of ‘K’ the amount that geomagnetic activity is disturbing fields on the ground. A Kp index of roughly 5.33 would see an aurora on the horizon of Kendal (see here for your area). 7.33 would put it above and any higher would see the aurora noted south of Kendal as well (assuming all disturbances are equal, which they’re not).

The second is satellite data measuring the properties of the IMF, the field carried by the solar wind. If it points southward (negative Bz, or the yellow line going beneath the white line of the second graph on the website), it is able to connect to the magnetosphere more easily than if it is northwards. This implies a higher likelihood of disturbances high up leading to lights down here.

Finally, there is the actual pulse and flow of particles into the atmosphere as seen by satellites. The third website shows the ‘auroral oval’. In fact it is an extrapolation from various individual satellite flies. The data gathered from an individual pass is fed through a computer model of magnetic convection and an estimate for the rest of the cap comes out. If that oval touches the tip of Scotland (and is real) and the activity level (which comes from the actual particle flux measured by the satellite) is at 9 or 10, then it bodes well for an aurora.

I would add another website to their list, perhaps one with infrared satellite data showing the cloud distribution and how it is changing. So summarising:

Is the Kp 6 or above?

Does the yellow line dip into negative territory?

Is the auroral oval touching Scotland with an activity level of 9 or above?

Do the clouds look like they’re out of your way or likely to be at some point?

If the answer to all four of these questions is yes, then there’s a heightened chance of auroral activity. But only increased.

Following the first wave of lights, it was noted that a second, slower wave was also headed Earthward and expected to hit sometime yesterday, on the 4th or the 5th. I stayed out for hours on the night of the 4th, staring at extremely clear skies having been clouded out on the 3rd. The answer to all four of the questions asked above was ‘yes’, but there wasn’t even a glimmer on the horizon. I did take photos on the off chance that there was something too faint to be visible, but nothing turned up in the viewfinder. I did see a few early Perseids though.

Then on the 5th, news that the CME had been a double event meant the papers picked it up with the Telegraph predicting aurora, amongst others, and the BBC explaining substorms, but with diagrams that showed an egg shaped rather than windsock magnetosphere. Unfortunately, it appears the second wave hit around mid-day, providing Southern Lights, but nothing for the north. By the time night fell here, the answer to each of the questions (with the possible exception for a short period of time of Kp) was no.

Some spaceflight stuff

NASA is to hold a news briefing on an upcoming spacewalk by astronauts Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson, aboard the International Space Station. The briefing will take place at 1pm CDT on the 3rd of August and will be broadcast on NASA TV. The spacewalk, at 5:55am on the 5th of August, will be in support of the European built Columbus module, which will be slotting onto the station soon, as well as outfitting the Russian Zarya module for robotics work.

A few NASA astronauts have been here and there meeting members of the public. At this event, T J Creamer discussed his time on the ISS as part of the Expedition 22/23 crew with followers of his twitter feed, which sent back the first live tweet from space. Meanwhile members of the STS-132 final full crew of the space shuttle Atlantis were asked an interesting question at the National Air and Space Museum – what does it take to be an astronaut? I’m sure they all resisted the temptation to say “a big rocket”. You can learn more about NASA astronauts at this website.

Of course, big rocket implies big explosion, which is why safety features have to be included in space missions. Ejector seats can’t happen as these require windows that weaken the hull. For the space shuttle, the only way out was through a hatch with a parachute and hope the thing is in the process of landing and within six kilometres of the ground (but not too much within). The traditional design for helping astronauts off an exploding, launching rocket is a Launch Abort System that sits on top of their capsule and carries a number of smaller rockets. Should something bad happen (as shown below), the capsule blasts away from the firework beneath it. The trouble is, having such a thing on top of the capsule affects how the rocket moves, adds weight and means dumping a load of equipment after a certain point in the launch. Boeing think they have an alternative for their new CTS-100 capsule. Called a pusher system, rather than having rockets on top, this one uses thrusters beneath the capsule. This enables a successfully launched capsule to use the abort fuel for movements in space, though it does entail keeping the volatile mixture in the spacecraft.

Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has spotted a dust devil on Mars. Signs of the phenomena, kind of like a tornado traced by Martian dust, happening near Opportunity have been seen from orbit, but this is the first time an image has been captured by that rover itself in six and a half years of its ninety day mission. Opportunity’s twin, Spirit, lying in a dustier, rougher terrain, has seem them by the dozen, however NASA is bracing rover-huggers for the possibility that Spirit may well be seeing no more. As the Martian winter starts to fall in an area, sunlight becomes too dim for a rover to run normal operations off. Power is therefore routed to keeping everything ticking over and hopefully a little warm. During this time, the rover is hibernating, sending no signals to Earth unless there is spare power, but for a successful hibernation, the rover should be positioned on a Sun facing slope in order to catch the best of what little solar power is available. Spirit suffered wheel failures before winter set in and finally ended up partially sunk in a crater hidden submerged in the dust the rover was swimming through to get to the slope. Efforts to free the thing failed to dislodge it in time, and the rover ended up hibernating in suboptimal conditions. The earliest time that a signal from the rover could’ve been heard was July 23rd, when the Sun became strong enough to power the device again, however, it is believed that hazy skies would mean the surface strength of the Sun would be reduced, making it more likely that a September reunion between ground control and rover would happen. Either way, the rover should call home sometime before March, if it wakes up. Nancy Atkinson of Universe Today is more confident that the gloomy implications of the press release. She predicts that not only will Spirit rise once more, the little rover will enact the plans ground control have been working on to pull out of the sand-trap. Time will tell.

Not showing the least bit of respect for its elders, the ATHLETE rover, potentially to be used on the Moon or Mars, has been showing off its dexterity by dancing in a NASA video…

NASA’s increasing concentration on surface missions to the red planet has had one notable casualty. The Mars Scout program was to provide the infrastructure for relatively low cost missions to Mars. Unfortunately, as more and more missions head for the surface, the price tag for the average mission has risen far higher than the cap for Mars Scout. The Scout program replaced the Discovery program, which sends stuff all across the solar system, but was barred from the Sun or Mars on cost grounds a while ago. Discovery missions can now go back to Mars, but the budget for them is lower even than for Scout missions. The final Scout project is set for launch in 2013. More details here.

Even further out and the Cassini probe has been studying Titan’s dunes. The dunes of Titan are 100 metre mounds of hydrocarbons. They are lined up by winds blowing the hydrocarbons, much as on Earth they blow sand, but careful studies of them appeared to show something a little odd. They appeared to have been created by winds blowing the opposite way to those atmospheric circulation models suggested they should be blowing. The models said winds should blow Eas-West at the latitudes the dunefields occurred at (within thirty degrees of the equator), but the dunes said West-East. Researchers went back to their models and looked at them over the course of a year and the answer popped out. During the solstices, which happen twice a Titan year, or twice every twenty-nine Earth years, there is a transitional period of one or two years where the winds blow the wrong way. Furthermore, these winds are stronger, blowing 1-1.8m per second. The normal winds blow at less than 1m a second, which is below the threshold for dune creation out of the cold hydrocarbon mush. Meanwhile on the moon Rhea, it is what Cassini hasn’t seen rather than what it has that is interesting. Previous studies of charged particles around Rhea have shown a drop in the number of electrons around the equator. One explanation for this, put about in 2008, was that there may be rings around Rhea, the first ever ringed moon. Cassini then conducted a number of observations designed to look through the haze of any rings composed of small particles to see their effect on Sunlight passing through (as it did with the jets of Enceladus) as well as taking images at less severe angles to try and spot larger objects reflecting a little light. Nothing has been detected at all, never mind a set of rings.

And finally, the Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope has been giving us views of the universe through infrared eyes. One of its present missions is to create a survey of the Milky Way. It has done the bit looking towards the centre of the galaxy and now is doing the bit that looks away from it, learning how star formation happens in areas of the galaxy that aren’t as dense as the rest. It has spotted some pretty big stars, twenty times the mass of the Sun, and astronomers would like to know how they came about.

Talking science and science policy again

Starting off with the politics.

Tangentially related to space, a solar panel factory in Wrexham, currently supporting 750 jobs, is to expand, creating some new jobs and a training academy. Meanwhile planned changes to the Maths A-level have been criticised as making them harder may put people off. Employers and universities have been complaining about grade inflation making it impossible to differentiate between high scoring students, but some have found ways of using the modular approach to A-levels to give an insight into development through looking at the interim exams. Critics say this would be lost and people would be put off if the A-level returned to an end course exam structure.

NASA has been told not to cancel any contracts associated with the Constellation project in case the various components, especially the Orion capsule, have a chance of being used in future projects. The orders were inserted in provisions for a bill funding the war in Afghanistan and demanded that funds allocated to contracts related to Constellation, which was felled by an overall lack of funding, be retained for their original purpose. The idea is to stop anything getting cancelled that might determine which of the various plans being debated for the future of human spaceflight with NASA can plausibly go ahead. The $18 billion allocation to NASA in the provision has been unfavourably compared to the $20 billion set aside for air conditioning units in tents for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Incidentally, the paths for human spaceflight have their various lobbies forming. Elon Musk of the private rocket company SpaceX has been complaining far and wide about one version of the plan that would put five times as much money into paying Soyuz to launch NASA astronauts as it would put into developing a home grown private space industry. This plan is the present form of the NASA reauthorisation bill that made it through a Senate committee with bipartisan support. Eventually. The bill must now make it through various stages of government, but support inside Washington doesn’t mean support outside of it as the private rocketeers fight for their funds.

Musk hopes to harness the growing power of the science blogging community, but what motivates the science community to blog? Here’s a discussion of science writing origins by science writers themselves to get a feel of why. Might add in my own later. Might not.

Writing isn’t all they do in this multimedia age. Here’s a video with science blogger (and occasionally professor at UCL, CERN researcher et al) Jon Butterworth and others on the Guardian’s site, discussing the recent ICHEP2010 conference.

Getting ready to roll…

Quite a few things are limbering up for a launch of one kind or another.

The James Webb Space Telescope isn’t due to set off until 2014, however, the various bits and pieces are to be tested to make sure they’ll survive the ordeal of living in space. The various segments of the 6.5m mirror have been cooled to 25K, or -248C, to see how they react to the cold. Changes in the material as it shrinks need to be accounted for when the mirror is smoothed, since this is the temperature that the mirror will be operating at.

A glimpse into the making of the Herschel Space Telescope’s 3.5m mirror has been revealed by ESA. Herschel’s mirror, despite being larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s 2.5m mirror, is a third of the mass, all thanks to a small company in France.

The various parts of the Ariane 5 rocket that will launch from Arianespace, ESA’s spaceport, are in the process of being assembled. Flight V197 is expected to blast off on the 4th of August.

Back in 1996, the Cassini probe, now sending back great stuff from Saturn, underwent preflight testing. This image gives an idea of the size of the device compared to a man in a boiler suit. I cannot guarantee that this is an average sized man in a boiler suit as he was chosen for his working capacity rather than illustrative purposes. Actually, I can’t even guarantee it is a man.

Something else not a man and provided for illustrative purposes is this mockup of Robonaut 2, enjoying a moment in the limelight with some passing students.

Another picture is this one of Professor Brian Cox demonstrating something about protons in the upcoming Wonders of the Universe series, which will be the sequel to Wonders of the Solar System.

With several new rovers setting their robotic eyes on the red planet, researchers are determined to find a good place to stick them. One possible site has reared its head, looking rather like a site in Australia known for preserving the most ancient evidence of primitive life on Earth. Nili Fossae shares many features with Pilbara in North-West Australia. The rocks are ancient, a considerable fraction of their planet’s age, and mineralogically very similar. In Pilbara, ancient microbes left signatures in the rocks called stromatolites that could be identified today, it is possible that if there were early life on Mars a similar process could also have left its mark. The site has been delisted as a possible landing place for the Curiosity rover as the rocky terrain doesn’t lend itself to landing. But other rovers are heading that way and it is possible that one may venture over to see it.

…and finally, one big thing getting a big launch is the twitter Meteorwatch (have I mentioned this before?). The trailer for the Meteorwatch, which will see people in their thousands viewing the Perseid meteor shower during the peak days of the 11th-14th of August, communicating their awe, questions, videos, observations and pictures over the website twitter, has been released over youtube and is visible below. The hope is that if the entire world watches over the course of a few nights, someone might catch a break in the clouds.

Talking science and science policy

…since they’re linked through the science blogging community.

A glimpse into the rearrangement of higher education was recently given when the first private university for over thirty years was given the go ahead. The college, which will deal in the humanities, will be free to expand and set fee levels as it wishes and in return will get no subsidy from the Government.

Also given the go ahead was the recent plan for putting central funds into the Iter fusion reactor to cover spiralling building costs.

Meanwhile in the UK’s own atomic establishment, the UK Atomic Energy Authority has a new chair from the world of particle physics, Professor Roger Cashmore, who will take up his post from Friday.

And as one thing starts, another ends. The workforce for the space shuttles has been given some more marching orders. This happens at a time of increased activity in the private space sector and when even hobbyists are starting to launch satellites into space.

Two meetings of the science blogging community have been set on different sides of the pond. First up is SpaceUpDC, advertised as an “unconference” where all delegates from tiny tots to government professors are awarded equal status. The event will happen from 9-5pm, August 27th-28th at George Washington University’s Funger Hall Auditorium. Further information about the event can be seen in their youtube trailer:

The UK equivalent, in a way, is Science Online, happening on September 3rd-4th at the British Library. This is very much a “conference”, discussing the effect of the web on science and vice versa. They have a twitter feed.

One way the web has been used by science is citizen science things such as the Zooniverse. The latest project for the Zooniverse, Project IX, is currently under development and in the spirit of the whole citizen science, open source thing, is being developed under the noses and with the help of the general public.

Another way the web is being used is by the Bad Astronomy Surly Cancer Drive Pendant, which uses the popularity of the (now to be on film) Bad Astronomy blog to help raise awareness of a cancer charity fund drive.

As for the normal blog stuff, you can get an idea of what is being written, filmed and broadcast by checking this aggregator site.

Some science education stuff

The young stargazers (8-16 years), youth wing of the Society for Popular Astronomy, twitter feed is getting a bit of a push on, so I thought I’d add an entry on some education bits and bobs.

Starting off with the young ‘uns. Kids under 14 are requested to make a piece of art (whatever they want to call art) for the European Space Agency’s website on the theme of living in space. But be quick, entries must be in by the 31st of July (this Saturday). If they do miss the deadline, don’t worry, there’ll be a new theme next month.

For those over seven in Kendal, there’s a talk at the library by Stuart Atkinson for ages seven and above on Friday. The talk poster is below:

The Hubble Space Telescope team have awarded special mentions to education concepts using their data. Gold Stars honours were awarded to fourteen different teams, such as Starry Critters, who produced these cards.

Students in the US have been flying weightless in the Vomit Comet as they test their concepts for Cubesats – small, cheap satellites. The concept getting tested in the microgravity situation was an accordion like device that deployed solar panels more efficiently than before. Videos and further explanations are here.

If you want to learn about Galileo, or even meet part of him, then there’s a museum in Florence where you can do just that – it is reviewed by NASA’s Blueshift Blog in this post.

A slightly less gruesome way to learn about the rivalry between the ideas of Hooke and Newton can be found embodied in a new chandelier, currently suspended in the Council Chamber of the Royal Society, of which they were both members. The installment has already scooped the creator 6,000 euros in a Spanish competition.

But maybe you’d prefer to learn not about scientists, but the ideas they came up with, but don’t like all the long words. Here is Relativity in words of four letters or less to assist you. Once you’ve absorbed all that, then there’s always a lucid explanation of String Theory for afters. Testing will commence in the comments section of this blog…

Science education must be getting somewhere as in the following advert, count the number of planets:

…probably something to do with the author of this forthcoming book…

On Saturday, those in London might be interested in knowing the Society for Popular Astronomy will be having its usual set of lectures in its quarterly meeting. Those lectures will be eventually placed online.

More videos will be filmed by the Sky at Night Magazine at the Salisbury Star Party on the 13th of August (the day before the Kendal Solar System Scale Model and during the twitter meteorwatch). They are interested in your help if you are attending.

The AAAS is looking to award early career scientists for outreach efforts in the US. Click here for further details.

And finally, it is possible for people to take to the stars amongst the stars a little too much, as the commander of the International Space Station found when responding to a love letter sent to him from a fan eight hundred kilometres below at the closest. He believes she is really into the whole space thing and he just happens to be someone she can use to embody it all.

Some spaceflight stuff

Following announcements by various others concerning new spacecraft, China has got in on the act by suggesting it will be building a super-heavy lift rocket. At present, the Chinese are well into development of the Long March 5 rocket, which is capable of lifting 25 tonnes to low Earth orbit, allowing work to be done with the space station, and 14 tonnes to geostationary orbit, where various communications satellites lie as well as unmanned missions into deep space and the Moon. The rocket under consideration, on the other hand, is large enough for manned missions to the Moon. Long March 5 is scheduled for first launch in 2014.

Rockets do tend to be the expensive part of sending people to the Moon, as pointed out by Mitchel and Webb recently:

Also getting in on the act, shortly after announcing they will sort out fusion matter of factly, is Iran. The regime had previously announced they had intended to put a man in space by 2024, however, in response to action taken against them by the international community, they say they will accelerate the plans to 2019. A new satellite, Rasad 1, is also to be launched at the end of August.

The Vice-President of the European Commission and European Commissioner for Industry and Entrepreneurship, Antonio Tajani visited ESA’s Centre for Earth Observation in Italy. He learned about the various uses for data from Earth Observation and the industrial ties to it, from designing to building to operating and even making use of data.

The Mars Rover Curiosity has taken its first steps in the lab (live on Martian baby-cam for all to see). The car sized rover will be launched to the red planet during November 2011, where it may become one of three active rovers scouring the alien sands of Mars.

November this year will see another machine blast off for a bit of a job in space. The Robonaut 2, called R2, will be launching on mission STS-133, presently scheduled for the 1st of November. Once up there, the highly dexterous robot will show people what it can do in space. R2 is designed to look and act human, and in an effort to make it appear even more human, NASA have given R2 its own twitter feed. R2 will be partly autonomous, using its sensors to determine the strength it requires for a task – like tweeting on its phone. If you want to ask R2 a question, it is doing a twitter interview, so mark your questions #4R2 and they’ll be answered in a session from 10am CDT on the 4th of August (although I did squeeze in a couple when he first went live). At 1pm on the same day, R2 will be doing the final demonstration for reporters. R2’s feed has been added to Collect Space’s astronaut twitter feed list here (also available as a list to follow here). NASA also has a group account, though that has had a recent problem.

From astronauts in waiting to astronauts still undergoing their laurel tour. The STS-132 final full crew of Atlantis have been visiting USA President Obama (picture here) as well as giving a presentation at the National Air and Space Museum, shortly after a replica Nobel Prize flown aboard Atlantis was entered into the museum’s permanent collection.

The third launch from Arianespace, Europe’s new spaceport, will take place on the 4th of August between 20:45 and 23:34 BST. The launch, the 196th Ariane family blast off, will deliver two multimedia communications satellites into geostationary orbit to provide services to north Africa, the middle east and parts of southern Europe.

The Cassini satellite has watched Saturn’s moon Prometheus slowly colliding with the inner edge of the F ring and gravitationally interacting with the material within it. A movie of images taken is here.

NASA’s Blueshift Blog’s own quick roundup of the best of the week’s new is here.

Discovery news has been worrying about how NASA would feed astronauts on the way to Mars. It isn’t like canned food could be popped in the microwave, wet food has a habit of going off rather quickly and even dry food and pills lose their nutrients over the course of such a mission. In order that the crew may have food to last over the course of 18 months, should they be forced to wait until second closest approach to Earth after landing, food would need a shelf life, both in terms of taste and nutritional value, of around five years. This menu is still a bit off according to their food scientists – around 2035 at the earliest.

The Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, has been making his views on the future of space exploration known in some reflections on the legacy of Apollo 11, heard in the following youtube audio slideshow clip:

There’s been a bit of a spacewalk to help do some work on the International Space Station. Briefing below:

Cosmonauts Yurchikhin and Kornienko began their EVA at 5:11 BST and began by replacing a video camera monitoring dockings with the Zvezda modules. They then routed and installed communication cables for the Kurs automatic docking system on Rassvet, the Mini-Research-Module-1. The spacewalk was completed at 11:53 BST, making it 147 EVAs for building and maintaining the station.

And finally, here’s This Week @Nasa:

Some spaceweather stuff

Another new sunspot has been peeking over the horizon (as seen here, here and here) and then finally popped out onto the scene (track it and other like it on spaceweather.com).

The Cluster mission has been watching the movements of ions in the Earth’s magnetosphere. The ions studied were O+, ionised oxygen atoms, which exist in high relative abundances in the upper atmosphere. The magnetosphere is the region in space where Earth’s magnetic field dominates over other magnetic fields, most notably that carried by the plasma of the solar wind, which determines where the charged particles in the solar wind go. O+ ions in our own atmosphere are generated by ionising radiation from the Sun. When a geomagnetic substorm is occurring and auroral particles start to ionise particles in our own atmosphere, then the number of O+ ions escaping increases. These gather in the magnetotail (the magnetosphere is pulled out into a windsock shape by the pressure of the solar wind from the Sun on one side and the wake on the other) before being forced back toward Earth by the tail pulsing in and out during the substorm. Then the ions form a ring around the Earth called the ring current. This current generates its own magnetic field, as all currents do, which has the effect of weakening the Earth’s own field, letting more stuff in. In a further experiment from Cluster, it was seen that radio waves created by particles being pushed out of the magnetotail, which accelerate some auroral particles into our atmosphere also disrupt this ring current by pushing its particles into the atmosphere as well. This leads to enhancement of the ionosphere, which can have an effect on radio communications and satellites.

Meanwhile, the THEMIS mission, which sees five satellites positioned around the magnetosphere/solar wind boundary in order to watch how it changes with time, is to see two of its satellites peel off and orbit the Moon in the ARTEMIS mission. Having long exceeded their expected two year mission, the three year old probes have already been allowed to drift to the point where the Moon’s gravity will overwhelm the Earth’s gravity and pull them into a new orbit. From this point, should the funding be available to ground control, they will be positioned in front of and behind the Moon to view the shockfront and wake of the solar wind as it hits an object with no magnetosphere, save for a few magnetic anomalies on the surface. The Moon passes through the magnetotail of the Earth during its orbit, but spends most of the time fully exposed, in a bit of an analogue to Mars, which also has crustal magnetic anomalies and exposure to the solar wind.

Meetings

The summer brings a little relief to undergraduate students in universities as they head off for a break, but it also provides some variety to researchers as they cram as many large meetings in foreign climes as possible into this area of the year.

Starting off with a completed meeting or two. Nancy Atkinson of the newly redesigned Universe Today site has been reporting on events at NASA’s annual Lunar Forum, and she finds lunar science as vibrant as ever – perhaps event more so with the glint of newly confirmed lunar ice in the eyes of researchers. A very kind soul, she’s even offering goodies from the event in a competition.

Jonathan Butterworth has been writing a blog or two for the Guardian regarding the ICHEP2010 meeting for high energy particle physicists and particle astrophysicists of all flavours. Apart from me. The meeting has already generated several related stories including this one pointing out energy ranges where they’re pretty sure the Higg’s boson (particle responsible for mass) no longer can be thought to exist and the remaining likely energies left to explore. Since 2001, Fermilab has explored and ruled out one quarter of those energies. The tentative schedule for the next decade of the Large Hadron Collider was also published at the meeting, with the next three years set to be a tussle between it and the Tevatron for exploring that final area of energy as well as performing all the other experiments required of such machines.

One conference going on now is Molecules in Galaxies, which is being live-tweeted by Chris Lintott (he of the Sky at Night and the Zooniverse). Interesting things featured include the Cosmic Eyelash, a gravitationally lensed galaxy full of starbirth lying in a distant recess of the universe, magnified by an intervening galaxy cluster.

Not all conferences of interest are officially academic, however. In the recent TEDGlobal conference, whose talks are put online, Dimitar Sasselov, a Kepler scientist has released to the world the size distributions of the four hundred exoplanets the team behind the space telescope are keeping under wraps for further analysis, added to those confirmed previously. They show a strong tendency in the data toward Earth sized planets, with an enormous 130 candidate planets coming out at around twice our size or less (down to around one Earth radius, which is around the limit of Kepler’s sensitivity). Now size doesn’t mean like, and indeed if they do have an Earth-like candidate in the list, it won’t be confirmed for some time as it would have to be orbiting another year before it is seen to dim the light of its star again and Kepler just hasn’t been staring that long. It should be said, the first paper I saw this in wasn’t a refereed journal paper, but the Sunday Times. The size distribution was announced a while ago (so why the hysterics from NASA Watch?), but this is the first nicely packaged graph of what it would look like, should the recent 706 candidate planets be confirmed. What the distribution could mean, more importantly, is that Earth sized worlds dominate the scene, so although we appear to be spotting big planets all over the shop now, smaller dots are even more prevalent. As I mentioned earlier, Kepler’s limit is around Earth sized, so imagine now going down to Venus size, or Mars size – how many of those worlds could be out there? Under the radar? If they’re in an Earth-like orbit around a Sun-like star, even a Kepler mission with suitable sensitivity would be unable to tell officially until three orbits had been registered.

And now onto two upcoming meetings. September will see Desert RATS, NASA’s annual display of new space technology crawling over terrain matched to another planet. We know the what and the when, but what about the where? Well, this time it is up for a vote. NASA can’t decide and wants your opinion through this website.

And finally, for those of a more scientific bent, the call has gone out for the 2010 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting on the 13th-17th of December. More details here.

Buckyballs in space

Carbon is an important little atom. It is not for nothing that we are referred to as “carbon-based”, when combined with hydrogen, the resulting complex hydrocarbon molecules are the basis of what is known as organic chemistry, providing plastics, oils and gases on which our civilisation is based. But in its purest forms, carbon is also quite useful – diamond, the crystal form of carbon, is a strong, nice looking gemstone; graphite, where layers of joined carbon atoms sit on one another, forms the basis of pencils, where the layers rub apart to leave a deposit, and carbon fibre materials make use of the strength of the layers to produce sturdy, heat resistant, lightweight materials. In astronomy, both of these forms of carbon are seen to exist. As white dwarf stars cool, they rearrange themselves until the carbon in them starts to become diamond. As for graphite, recent examinations of Apollo Moon-rocks have seen ‘grey whisker’, essentially carbon nanotubes or wrapped up graphite layers, deposited in the samples. But there is another form of carbon.

Buckminsterfullerenes, or Buckyballs, are molecules composed of sixty carbon atoms arranged in a geodesic ball, resembling the work of architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, after whom they are named. Buckyballs were first anticipated in 1970, but not observed in the lab until 1985. Now they have been spotted in space alongside C70, the 70 carbon atom equivalent, which now holds the record as the largest molecule spotted in the cold, dark of space.

It was known from laboratory experiments that buckyballs formed in the atmospheres of stars – it was one such experiment that led to the discovery of the things – but until now, they had never been seen. The Spitzer infrared space telescope, now on a zombie mission, having outlived the coolant that allowed its original cold mission to go ahead, scanned the remains of a star in the form of planetary nebula Tc1. It appears that the star gasped out its carbon rich layers, which are now cooling around a white dwarf stellar remnant. As that slowly turns to diamond, the buckyballs and possibly grey whiskers of graphite lie in orbit or escaping the stellar death throes. The carbon molecules were radiating energy at around room temperature, allowing them to be picked up by Spitzer, but it is estimated in one hundred years or so, they will be too cool to detect.

The very stable molecules are likely to be floating around for some time, however they will become too cool to see directly. Their indirect effects will include scattering of starlight in a characteristic way and interstellar chemistry, both factors in common with the grey whiskers and things that astronomers making detections through a very thin haze of these things need to account for.

The story has been reported here on the BBC, here in Astronomy Now and here in a NASA press release, which includes a video interview.