Date: December 29, 2010 Title: It Happened in 2010! [podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/astro365/20101229-365DoA.mp3[/podcast] Podcaster: Adler Planetarium Links: www.adlerplanetarium.org and www.adlerplanetarium.org/podcasts Description: Increased solar activity, planet discoveries, and crippled rovers… Katie Peterson and Robert Friedman talk to Larry Cuipik of the Adler Planetarium about some of the big stories of 2010. Bio: The Adler Planetarium – America’s First Planetarium – was founded in 1930 by Chicago business leader Max Adler. The museum is home to three full-size theaters, including the all-digital projection Definiti Space Theater, the Sky Theater which utilizes a Zeiss optical projector, and the Universe 3D Theater. It is also home to one of the world’s most important antique instrument collections. The Adler is a recognized leader in science education, with a focus on inspiring young people, particularly women and minorities, to pursue careers in science. Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Wayne Robertson, who encourages you to join him in supporting this great podcast. Transcript: Katie Welcome to a special edition of the Adler Planetarium’s bi-weekly podcast Adler Night and Day. The Adler Night and Day podcast provides listeners with a glimpse of what they can see in the night sky, as well as updates on recent solar weather and riveting conversation. For the 365 Days of Astronomy, we’ll be concentrating on the riveting conversation. Without further ado, I’m your host Katie… Robert And I’m Robert, and today we’re joined on Adler Night and Day by Larry Cuipik of the Adler Planetarium. Welcome, Larry. Larry Hi everybody. Katie So, we’re going to talk to Larry about some of the rather interesting stories of 2010. There have been some really big ones. We’ve had some mysterious stories, some sad stories, we’ve had some just really big stories. So, let’s jump right in. First of all… I want to talk about the moon. We’ve had some data come in, why don’t you tell us a little bit about that Larry Well, everybody probably watched the LCROSS impact. So… what did you see? Uh…? Katie (chuckles) Or we watched the moon. Larry That’s right, you watched the moon, and the problem was you didn’t see anything right away. Katie Nothing Larry But, what was discovered is that the moon has a lot more water in some of these dark craters than we expected and not just water it also has weird minerals they found probable silver, in the plume ! So, in order to find enough silver, there has to be a lot there. So, people might be looking at that silvery moon a little bit more in the future. Katie Wow! Now, a little quick question for our listeners, why is it that our Moon with no atmosphere, why are we able to find water… in any amount? Larry Well, there’s a couple of reasons. One is, that there are some craters that are so deep and so far out of the Sun’s direct radiation that ice layers form in the shadows. And those shadows never had sunlight on them, maybe for a billion years or more. And so their staying cold and out of sunlight and the temperature of the moon is minus two hundred degrees or so. So, the ice is melting or sublimating really slowly. Robert So what are we talking about? Like a Lake Michigan up there or a cup of tea? Larry Well, you’re actually talking about enough, it’s about 5% of what the impact blew up, was water. So, that’s a lot actually. And it doesn’t mean it’s everywhere, because we expected this particularly place to something, or might have something, but it turns out that there probably is a lower amount of water, baked into the soil. So, if you were to bake rocks out, uh, the water would come out and you’d be able to have even more water. Robert Cool, cooking soil for drinking water. Larry Absolutely. Robert So, there have been some other really big discoveries this year. Uh, can you tell us about that galaxy far, far away? Larry Well, it’s funny, we were talking about this several times over the past several days. And it turns out that this is a new record. There’s always a new record for the farthest, and farther and father away galaxies. Well, it turns out that now, with photographs from 2009 that the Hubble took, it was called the Ultra Deep Field but it was in infrared energy. It turns out that you can see special distant galaxies that were probably born only a few hundred million, maybe six hundred million years after the big bang. So we’re talking about a time over thirteen billion years ago and they discovered that by looking at very detailed lines, inside the rainbow spectrum , in the European southern observatory telescope called the VLT, or Very Large Telescope, so the Hubble told them were to look and then they’ve been examining these galaxies ever since Robert So, you said that was three hundred million years? Larry No, it’s about six hundred million years… Robert Right, so six hundred million years isn’t all that much… Larry …after the Big Bang. Robert … out of the 13 billion we’ve been around? Larry Right. So, it’s really the closest to the Big Bang that we’ve been able to see with actual objects there, instead of say the microwave background of radiation. Robert Cool. So, going on to a slightly different topic, um… what about that planet that was discovered with direct imaging or photography? Larry Well, it turns out that there are a number of new techniques that have been used to discover planets that are outside of our solar system. These are called extra-solar planets. And the one cool technique is called an optical vortex coronagraph! What a mouthful! Robert Yah, that’s complicated. Larry But it turns out that this enables you to see very close to where the star is so that you can actually see something very faint next to the star. Robert Why wouldn’t you always be able to see it… really close to the star? Larry Well, the star is so bright it’s like looking for a moth around a search light, when the search light is staring at you and you’re a mile away. So, it’s a very difficult thing. Remember the search light is the star in the analogy and the moth is simply reflected light from the search light. So the planet is shining in reflected light from that star and is very close by. Robert Usually, you’d be blinded by the light then. Larry You’d be very much blinded by it and so this special device is able to block out the light of the star, and not just the light of the star, but even the rings of the of optical aberrations around it. So you can actually get even closer than, ya know sometimes you’ve even seen spikes on those star images? Robert Yah, so that’s just like noise, right? Larry Well, no, it’s called the defraction effect. And this effect is something that’s common with reflecting telescopes, like the Hubble… and like many other telescopes that are large. So you can end up actually getting very close in by eliminating those spikes. By eliminating those extra defraction patterns. Robert Cleaning up the image some. Larry You get a much much tinier star… and the planet is visible. Robert Very cool. Katie And speaking of planets, we’ve had an Earth-like planet discovery declaration back in September but it may not be everything it seems to be? Larry Yah, it turns out that it was wishful thinking. So, it turns out that, what’s the holy grail of planet discovery? It’s an Earth-like planet around and Sun-like star. Katie Goldilocks. Larry Goldilocks planet! Goldilocks world. Who lives there now? We do! Right? When we’re looking for an extra-solar planet, we’ve never discovered one like this and we’re looking for it desperately! So usually we’re discovering huge planets and most of the huge ones are even close by their parent star and that’s related to the fact that most of the discoveries are actually the planet affecting the star wobbling. And so you literally have to look for tiny, tiny motions. It’s very similar to looking for these lines, or these special indicators in the rainbow spectrum of these distant galaxies. Well, these lines shift back and forth depending on the speed of the star wobbling. And so the tiny, tiny shifts are able to show us how massive the planet would be and were it would be around it parent. And so we’ve been looking for these tiny ones and it turns out that there is a lot of new planet discoveries going on. And in fact, there’s another mission called the Kepler Mission, and people that I know in Arizona are working on this. Well, it turns out that they discovered 700 new candidates by looking for planets eclipsing their stars. So it’s a really cool thing to do and they’re only looking at very small section of the sky over and over again near the summer constellation Vega and Lyra the Harp. So it’s an amazing new thing as of this year. Robert Why don’t they look all over the sky? Why are they focusing in this one area? Larry Well, they’re trying to look over and over to see when these little eclipses happen. They’re called transits, like mini-eclipses. And if you were to look in other places You wouldn’t be able to see that same spot over and over again. Robert Okay, I see. So these are pretty rare events that happen quickly? Larry Uh, they happen rarely and they’re looking at a hundred thousand stars at one time. Even in the small section of the sky. Robert Wow! A hundred thousand even in the small part of the sky… that’s a lot of stars. Katie So, now let’s get a little closer in to Earth. We’ve got Mars and our cute little Mars rover, Spirit. Spirit’s had a real rough year. What’s going on with poor little Spirit? Larry Yah, Spirit might never phone home again. We just don’t know. It’s actually in Mars winter… Robert It’s a cold winter. Larry …and it’s in hibernation mode. And it’s stuck in a sand dune. It’s been trying to get out for months now, and… Katie With like a broken foot… Larry …Yah, it’s just stuck there and it may never wake again. And so we don’t know that. But just think about this. It was supposed to last at least three months. This is now 82 months! So imagine if you had a three year warranty on your car, okay? This would now mean that your car is 80 years old. And it’s still going! Katie That’s pretty awesome…. I love those little rovers. Robert It’s the rover that keeps on ticking. Katie Ah, our last topic is the Sun. It is really picking up in activity, finally after a really long minimum. Also, coincidently we have SDO, the Solar Dynamics Observatory that launched and started sending back data and information and images right about the dame time the sun’s activity started to increase. And, before, we were concerned that this minimum was going on a bit too long and now we have new concerns. Tell us a little about those concerns. Larry Well, it turns out that solar weather should be a big concern because all of us across the world are more interdependent upon energy and it turns out that the problem is interconnectedness. So, because we’re so dependent on each other, strong solar storms can actually cause power failures. So, imagine if your power did fail because of a storm here on Earth, for a few hours. But, maybe it fails for a few weeks? If that happens then it’s going to affect everything that we do. And that means that the gas pump doesn’t work. It means the electric lights don’t work. The heat doesn’t work, etc, etc, etc… And it turns out that there have been storms much, much higher than those that have already knocked out power in let’s say, 1989 in Montreal. And there have been storms, one was in May of 1921, and that was probably a couple of times stronger than the 1989 storm. Katie Wasn’t the one you spoke of in the ‘20s, weren’t the aurora visible down in Florida? Larry Actually, that one was a bit earlier in 1859, it’s given a name because somebody was watching a projected image of the Sun and they saw something happen on that! In visible light. Katie Oh, that’s really cool. Larry And so, it’s called the Carrington event, because of that. And what happened is not just Northern Lights… that’s just the kind of beauty behind it. But what happened is that there’s people who are in telegraph offices and they got shocked! Robert Wow! Larry They got shocked, some of the lines were melted! Robert No way, just from the Sun? Larry If this kind of thing were to happen today, I’m talking about maybe some kind of economic catastrophe of trillions of dollars. Katie Yah, and I think what’s really interesting is that our last solar maximum was a fairly sizable one, it was a good healthy maximum, but we weren’t nearly as reliant on space-based technologies, and our grids were nearly as overworked as they are today. We are looking at a milder maximum?… but the consequences of a significant flare or storm are far worst than they were last go ‘round. Larry Absolutely! And in fact we probably, unless we take some serious precautions of turning things off, both on satellites and on the ground, selectively, there could be literally meltdowns. Katie So, what precautions are in place? Can we see these coming? We kind of can… we have a good idea if something’s going to slap us around. But what do we do if we see there’s a massive CME and it’s coming right at us, it’s Earth-directed, what do we do? Larry Well, if you’re in space you probably have to shield yourself, like most of us, if you’re not in space… what you have to do if you’re the power company, you have to start selectively turning off or isolating certain transformers. Cause literally some of those can melt. So we’re talking about literal melting of wires here. And with satellites, and we’re relying on Satellites so much today, we end up having to turn of, or redirect satellites into a mode where they’re not constantly being used. It’s kind of a hibernation mode. Like the Spirit. Robert If these sorts of events can melt transformers, are people safe? Am I safe walking down the street? Larry Yah, usually. The problem would be that electrical lines certainly could melt, and if that happens it’s just like a storm knocking over a power line. Robert But it doesn’t affect my body? Larry It doesn’t affect your body until you touch the wire. Robert Ah, good to hear. Stay away from live wires. Larry Yah, that’s right. Stay away from live wires. Robert Will do. Katie Well thanks, Larry. It’s been awesome having you join us today. Larry I’m glad to be here. Katie And I’d also like to thank the listeners of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast. And if you’d like to listen to full episodes of Adler Night and Day you can search us up on iTunes or visit us at www.adlerplanetarium.org/podcasts End of podcast: 365 Days of Astronomy ===================== The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Astrosphere New Media Association. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. 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