SCI 101

Astronomical Discoveries
Pamela Clemente
AB English I

Article #1

Kepler astronomers discover ancient star with five Earthsize planets

Astronomers poring over four years of data from NASAs Kepler spacecraft have discovered a star thats 11.2 billion years
old and has at least five Earth-size planets.
We thus show that Earth-size planets have formed throughout most of the universes 13.8-billion-year history, leaving open
the possibility for the existence of ancient life in the galaxy, the astronomers wrote in their paper, An Ancient Extrasolar
System with Five Sub-Earth-Size Planets, published today by the Astrophysical Journal.
Tiago Campante, a research fellow at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, is leader of the research project
and first author of the paper. Steve Kawaler, an Iowa State University professor of physics and astronomy, is a project
collaborator and co-author of the paper.
The paper describes Kepler-444, a star thats 25 percent smaller than our Sun and is 117 light-years from Earth. The stars
five known planets have sizes that fall between Mercury and Venus. Those planets are so close to their star that they
complete their orbits in fewer than 10 days. At that distance, theyre all much hotter than Mercury and arent habitable.
Kawaler said Kepler-444 is very bright and can be easily seen with binoculars.
Kawalers role within the research team was to help with the stellar seismology work that determined the size of Kepler-444.
To do that, Kawaler and the rest of the team studied sound waves within the star. Those sound waves affect the stars
temperature, creating pulsating changes in brightness that offer clues to the stars diameter, mass and age.
Kepler takes high-precision measurements of those changes in brightness. Thats how Kepler does its primary job: Finding
distant planets by measuring tiny changes in brightness as they pass in front of their stars.
This is one of the oldest systems in the galaxy, Kawaler said of the Kepler discovery, noting that our Sun is 4.5 billion
years old. Kepler-444 came from the first generation of stars. This system tells us that planets were forming around stars
nearly 7 billion years before our own Solar System.
Planetary systems around stars have been a common feature of our galaxy for a long, long time.
That discovery is going to help astronomers learn even more about the history of the Milky Way.
Source: http://astronomynow.com/2015/01/27/kepler-astronomers-discover-ancient-star-with-five-earth-size-planets/

OPINION:
From the first rocky exoplanets to the discovery of an Earth-size planet orbiting another star in its habitable zone, we are
now getting first glimpses of the variety of galactic environments conducive to the formation of these small worlds. As a
result, the path toward a more complete understanding of early planet formation in the galaxy starts unfolding before us.

Article #2

NASA: Whats hidden beneath Europas icy surface?

Four hundred years ago, the astronomer Galileo's discovery of Jupiter's four large moons forever changed humanity's view
of the universe, helping to bring about the understanding that Earth was not the center of all motion. Today one of these
Galilean moons could again revolutionize science and our sense of place, for hidden beneath Europa's icy surface is
perhaps the most promising place to look for present-day environments that are suitable for life.
This new appreciation began to unfold in 1995, when a spacecraft named in Galileo's honor arrived in the Jupiter system to
follow up on earlier discoveries by the Voyager mission. The Galileo spacecraft sent tantalizing samplings of data that
provided strong evidence for a deep global ocean beneath Europa's icy crust, leading to speculation on the potential for life
within
icy
moons.
As Europa orbits Jupiter it experiences strong tidal forces - somewhat like the tides in Earth's oceans caused by our Moon.
The tidal forces cause Europa to flex and stretch because its orbit is an ellipse, rather than a circle, and the tide is much
higher when the moon is close to Jupiter than when it is farther away. This continuous flexing creates heat, which makes
Europa's interior warmer than it would be from the Sun's heat alone. In addition, the flexing could produce volcanic activity
from the rocky interior, as on the neighboring moon Io. The tidal forces also cause Europa's icy outer shell to flex, likely
causing the long, linear cracks seen in images of its surface.
A source of energy that could be utilized by living things Europa appears to meet these minimum requirements for life. It is
special among the bodies of our solar system in having a potentially enormous volume of liquid water, along with geological
activity that could promote the exchange of useful chemicals from the surface with the watery environment beneath the ice.
However, our current understanding of how material moves within Europa's icy crust is not well-developed. Even the
existence of a subsurface ocean, while strongly suspected, is not yet proven.
Water is essential to life, serving as a perfect liquid medium for dissolving nutrients for ingestion or wastes for excretion, and
for transporting chemicals living things can use. Several lines of evidence strongly suggest that the planet-sized moon
contains an ocean of liquid water many tens of miles deep. If it does exist, the ocean lies beneath an ice shell that is at least
a few miles thick, and perhaps tens of miles thick. At the ocean bottom lies a rocky seafloor in direct contact with the water,
possibly supplying chemical nutrients into the ocean by hydrothermal activity.
Favorable environments for the chemistry of life (or even life itself, in microbial form) could exist in areas within Europa's ice
shell that contain salty fluids or around possible hydrothermal systems driven by tidal heating. An ocean rich with chemistry
conducive to life could be maintained by a cycle that moves water through the moon's ice shell, ocean and rocky interior.
Studying Europa's chemistry - on the surface and within the suspected ocean - is important for understanding its habitability
because living things extract energy from their environments via chemical reactions. Interactions between materials from
Europa's surface and those in an ocean environment beneath the ice could produce elements essential for life such as
carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and sulfur.
Europa's surface is mostly water ice (H2O), but the surface is bombarded by intense radiation from Jupiter, which can alter
the chemistry of the ice. Through this process, the hydrogen and oxygen from water ice can combine with other materials on

the surface to create a host of molecules like free oxygen (O2), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), carbon dioxide (CO2) and sulfur
dioxide (SO2).
If these compounds are finding their way into an ocean as part of an ongoing cycle, they could be used to power the
reactions living things depend upon. Meanwhile, cycling of ocean water through minerals in the seafloor could replenish the
water with other chemicals that are crucial for life.
Life extracts energy from its environment in order to carry out biological processes like maintaining cellular structures,
growing and reproducing. Most living things on Earth's surface depend (directly or indirectly) on energy supplied by the sun,
but there are many organisms that extract their energy from chemical sources like those produced by hydrothermal activity.
Europa's constant tidal flexing provides heat energy to drive chemical reactions in the rocky interior, recycling the elements
and making them available for potential use by living things. If Europa's seafloor has volcanoes (as its sibling moon Io does)
or hydrothermal vents, they may drive the chemistry of the ocean and play an important role in cycling nutrient-rich water
between the ocean and the rocky interior. Tidal flexing of the ice shell could create slightly warmer pockets of ice that rise
slowly upward to the surface, carrying material from the ocean below. Jupiter's intense radiation also provides a source of
energy by ripping apart chemicals on the surface, where they can recombine to form new compounds.
Source: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2015/03/nasa-whats-hidden-beneath-europas-icy-surface-1.html#more

OPINION:
The greatest uncertainty about energy as it relates to Europa's habitability is in how material cycles between the ice, the
ocean and the rocky mantle on the ocean bottom. There are, potentially, sources of chemical energy for life being created
on the surface and in the rocky interior, but their availability for use by living organisms depends on how well Europa's
different layers are able to exchange material. In essence, the more energetic Europa is, the more energy would be
available for life. Determining the balance of all these forces - Europa's energy balance - is a major hurdle toward
understanding the icy moon's habitability.

Article #3

Planet reared by four planet stars

Growing up as a planet with more than one parent star has its challenges. Though the planets in our solar system circle just
one starour sunother more distant planets, called exoplanets, can be reared in families with two or more stars.
Researchers wanting to know more about the complex influences of multiple stars on planets have come up with two new
case studies: a planet found to have three parents, and another with four.
The discoveries were made using instruments fitted to telescopes at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego: the Robo-AO
adaptive optics system, developed by the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in India and the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and the PALM-3000 adaptive optics system, developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and Caltech.
This is only the second time a planet has been identified in a quadruple star system. While the planet was known before, it
was thought to have only three stars, not four. The first four-star planet, KIC 4862625, was discovered in 2013 by citizen
scientists using public data from NASA's Kepler mission.
The latest discovery suggests that planets in quadruple star systems might be less rare than once thought. In fact, recent
research has shown that this type of star system, which usually consists of two pairs of twin stars slowly circling each other
at great distances, is itself more common than previously believed.
"About four percent of solar-type stars are in quadruple systems, which is up from previous estimates because
observational techniques are steadily improving," said co-author Andrei Tokovinin of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American
Observatory in Chile.
The newfound four-star planetary system, called 30 Ari, is located 136 light-years away in the constellation Aries. The
system's gaseous planet is enormous, with 10 times the mass of Jupiter, and it orbits its primary star every 335 days. The
primary star has a relatively close partner star, which the planet does not orbit. This pair, in turn, is locked in a long-distance
orbit with another pair of stars about 1,670 astronomical units away (an astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and
the sun). Astronomers think it's highly unlikely that this planet, or any moons that might circle it, could sustain life.
Were it possible to see the skies from this world, the four parent stars would look like one small sun and two very bright
stars that would be visible in daylight. One of those stars, if viewed with a large enough telescope, would be revealed to be
a binary system, or two stars orbiting each other.
In recent years, dozens of planets with two or three parent stars have been found, including those with "Tatooine" sunsets
reminiscent of the Star Wars movies. Finding planets with multiple parents isn't too much of a surprise, considering that
binary stars are more common in our galaxy than single stars.
"Star systems come in myriad forms. There can be single stars, binary stars, triple stars, even quintuple star systems," said
Lewis Roberts of JPL, lead author of the new findings appearing in the journal Astronomical Journal. "It's amazing the way
nature puts these things together."
In the new study, the researchers describe using the automated Robo-AO system on Palomar Observatory to scan the night
skies, searching hundreds of stars each night for signs of stellar companions. They found two candidates hosting
exoplanets: the four-star system 30 Ari, and a triple-star planetary system called HD 2638. The findings were confirmed
using the higher-resolution PALM-3000 instrument, also at Palomar Observatory.

The new planet with a trio of stars is a hot Jupiter that circles its primary star tightly, completing one lap every three days.
Scientists already knew this primary star was locked in a gravitational tango with another star, about 0.7 light-years away, or
44,000 astronomical units. That's relatively far apart for a pair of stellar companions. The latest discovery is of a third star in
the system, which orbits the primary star from a distance of 28 astronomical unitsclose enough to have influenced the hot
Jupiter's development and final orbit.
"This result strengthens the connection between multiple star systems and massive planets," said Roberts.
In the case of Ari 30, the discovery brought the number of known stars in the system from three to four. The fourth star lies
at a distance of 23 astronomical units from the planet. While this stellar companion and its planet are closer to each other
than those in the HD 2638 system, the newfound star does not appear to have impacted the orbit of the planet. The exact
reason for this is uncertain, so the team is planning further observations to better understand the orbit of the star and its
complicated family dynamics.
Source: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-planet-reared-parent-stars.html

OPINION:
Roberts and his colleagues want to understand the effects that multiple parent stars can have on their developing youthful
planets. Evidence suggests that stellar companions can influence the fate of planets by changing the planets' orbits and
even triggering some to grow more massive. For example, the "hot Jupiters"planets around the mass of Jupiter that whip
closely around their stars in just daysmight be gently nudged closer to their primary parent star by the gravitational hand
of a stellar companion.

Article #4

Cosmic Dust Ancient galaxy from the early Universe

yields an unexpected discovery
"It is the first time dust has been discovered in one of the most distant galaxies ever observed - only 700 million years after
the Big Bang. It is a galaxy of modest size and yet it is already full of dust. This is very surprising and it tells us that ordinary
galaxies were enriched with heavier elements far faster than expected," explains Darach Watson, an astrophysicist with the
Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
Dust plays an extremely important role in the universe - both in the formation of planets and new stars. But dust was not
there from the beginning and the earliest galaxies had no dust, only gas. Now an international team of astronomers, led by
researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, has discovered a dust-filled galaxy from the very early universe. The discovery
demonstrates that galaxies were very quickly enriched with dust particles containing elements such as carbon and oxygen,
which could form planets. The results are published in the scientific journal, Nature.
Cosmic dust are smoke-like particles made up of either carbon (fine soot) or silicates (fine sand). The dust is comprised
primarily of elements such as carbon, silicon, magnesium, iron and oxygen. The elements are synthesized by the nuclear
combustion process in stars and driven out into space when the star dies and explodes. In space, they gather in clouds of
dust and gas, which form new stars, and for each generation of new stars, more elements are formed. This is a slow
process and in the very earliest galaxies in the history of the universe, dust had not yet formed.
Because the galaxy is very distant and therefore incredibly faint, it would not usually be detectable from Earth. But a
fortunate circumstance means the light from it has been amplified. This is because a large cluster of galaxies called Abell
1689, lies between the galaxy and Earth. The light is refracted by the gravity of the galaxy cluster, thus amplifying the distant
galaxy. The phenomenon is called gravitational lensing and it works like a magnifying glass.
"We looked for the most distant galaxies in the universe. Based on the colours of the light observed with the Hubble Space
Telescope we can see which galaxies could be very distant. Using observations from the very sensitive instrument, the Xshooter spectrograph on the Large Telescope, VLT in Chile, we measured the galaxy's spectrum and from that calculated its
redshift, i.e. the change in the light's wavelength as the object recedes from us. From the redshift we can calculate the
galaxy's distance from us and it turned out to be, as we suspected, one of the most distant galaxies we know of to date,"
explains Lise Christensen, an astrophysicist at the Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute.
Darach Watson explains that they then studied the galaxy with the ALMA telescopes, which can observe far-infrared
wavelengths and then it became really interesting, because now they could see that the galaxy was full of dust. He explains
that young stars in early galaxies emit hot ultraviolet light. The hot ultraviolet radiation heats the surrounding ice-cold dust,
which then emits light in the far-infrared.
Source: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2015/03/cosmic-dust-ancient-galaxy-from-the-early-universe-yields-an-unexpected-discovery-1.html

OPINION:
It is this far-infrared light, which tells us that there is dust in the galaxy. It is very surprising and it is the first time that dust
has been found in such an early galaxy. The process of star formation must therefore have started very early in the history
of the universe and be associated with the formation of dust. The detection of large amounts of solid material shows that the
galaxy was enriched very early with solids which are a prerequisite for the formation of complex molecules and planets.