Author: Webmaster RASC Vancouver

Our public relations coordinator, Scott McGillivray, talked on Global TV about the Cassini Mission and Saturn.

Four previously unknown exoplanets were discovered by Australian citizen scientists and confirmed to be orbiting a nearby star.

The citizen scientists were part of a crowd-sourcing project that aired on ABC’s Stargazing Live. Viewers were asked to hunt for exoplanets by trawling through observations of about 100,000 stars via a project on the Zooniverse website using data from the Kepler Space Telescope. The citizen scientists will be listed as co-authors on a scientific paper about the discovery.

The four exoplanets are “Super Earths” about twice the size of Earth. They are orbiting a star in the Aquarius constellation 600 light years away from Earth. The four discovered planets are most likely rocky and far too hot to support human life, said Dr Lintott, principal investigator at Zooniverse. The star’s planets are “crammed together” suggesting there may be additional planets further from the star.

Simulation of the exoplanets found by citizen scientists.

Additional details can be found in this article.

Observing Opportunity for Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak

There may be a nice opportunity to view Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak in the next few days as the current Vancouver forecast calls for partially clear skies from Sunday, April 2nd to Tuesday, April 4th.

This comet is now as bright as 6.5 mag and may brighten even more as it gets closer to the Sun. The comet is closest to Earth on April Fools’ Day, about 21.2 million km away, the closest approach to Earth since its discovery. The comet’s perihelion point, where is it positioned closest to the sun, occurs on April 12th.

It is in an excellent position for observing: near the constellations Draco, Ursa Minor (the Little Dipper) and Ursa Major (the Big Dipper). The comet is quite diffuse but should be visible with binoculars and small telescopes.

41P makes a trip around the sun every 5.4 years, coming relatively close to Earth on only some of those trips. The comet is a member of the Jupiter class of comets.  A NASA team will be observing 41P on April 1 using the Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii. Because comets formed early in the solar system’s history, Comets that come close to the Earth give scientists a chance to deepen our understanding of the processes that led to the formation of our planet.

“An important aspect of Jupiter-family comets is that fewer of them have been studied, especially in terms of the composition of ices in their nuclei, compared with comets from the Oort cloud”,  said Michael DiSanti of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

A Surprise Brightening of Comet C/2017 E4 Lovejoy

Comet C/2017 E4 Lovejoy was only expected to reach 9th magnitude at its brightest in mid-April but it has already reached 7th magnitude and it’s more condensed and is easier to see. E4 Lovejoy is located in Pegasus, in the east just before dawn. Recent images show a small ion tail. A Sky and Telescope article has images and more details.

Our NOVA Newsletter, for Mar-Apr 2017, is available as a hi-res or low-res pdf file.   An archive of older issues can be found on our Newsletter page.

Contents of Volume 2017, Issue 2, Mar-Apr:

• A Most Boring Subject? by Leigh Cummings
• President’s Message by Suzanna Nagy
• Astronomers in Petticoats by Bill Burnyeat

Whole New Worlds: An Aladdin History of Exoplanets from A Capella Science, Trudbol, SamRobson, Gia Mora.

An entertaining video on exoplanets – you don’t often find “transiting photometry” in song lyrics!

NASA has made a poster of the the TRAPPIST-1 system available following their announcement on the discovery of the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. In this system, called TRAPPIST-1,  all of the planets are likely to be rocky based on their densities. Further, three of these planets are located in the habitable zone the where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water.

The TRAPPIST-1 star is classified as an ultra-cool dwarf and all seven planet orbits are closer to their star than Mercury’s orbit is to our Sun. The planets are also close to each other; to an observer on one of the planet’s surface, the others would appear larger than the moon our sky.

Suzanna Nagy’s article on “What Kind of Telescope Should I Buy?” in the Sept/Oct 2016 edition of our Nova newsletter praised the Dobsonian design. A Dobsonian is a type of reflector telescope that uses two mirrors. Suzanna’s article listed several advantages of the Dobsonian design. However, a recent edition of XKCD has revealed a little-known deficiency of a reflector.

Our president, Suzanna Nagy was interviewed in a recent Star Spot Podcast.

Our public relations coordinator, Scott McGillivray, talked on Global TV about Saturn and the Cassini mission, Orbital  ATK missions that launch rockets from planes, making plans for the Solar Eclipse on Aug 21, 2017 (eclipse map), and image processing of raw Juno data.

Scott’s segment on Saturn and Cassini is a good lead in for the Paul Sykes Lecture on Jan 21st at 7:30pm at SFU’s Burnaby campus:  Going out in a Blaze of Glory: Cassini Science Highlights and the Grand Finale

Cassini will send back its final bits of unique data on September 15, 2017 as it plunges into Saturn’s atmosphere, vaporizing to protect tiny Enceladus, one of Saturn’s ocean worlds. Come and hear the story of recent science discoveries and the upcoming excitement during the final orbits. Dr. Linda Spilker, Cassini Project Scientist, will present highlights of Cassini’s ambitious inquiry at Saturn and an overview of science observations in the final orbits.

Our NOVA Newsletter, for Jan-Feb 2017, is available as a hi-res or low-res pdf file.   An archive of older issues can be found on our Newsletter page.

Contents of Volume 2017, Issue 1, Jan-Feb:

• Paul Sykes Lecture: Cassini Science Highlights and the Grand Finale
• President’s Message by Suzanna Nagy
• AOMO Update by Alan Jones
• Great Northerly Conjunction of Venus – March 2017 by Milan B
• Albedo: Zero Point Zero Low by Dan Collier