Author: Webmaster RASC Vancouver

Here is a recap of some Exoplanets news that came to my attention last week – four science stories and one music video.

First, NASA announced that Tess, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, has discovered its first Earth-size planet in its star’s habitable zone. TOI 700 d orbits a red dwarf star that is relatively quiet – no flares were detected in 11 months of TESS data. The star is located just over 100 light-years away in the southern constellation Dorado. It has about 40% of the Sun’s mass and size and about half its surface temperature. Three planets have been detected but only the outermost is in the habitable zone where water can remain liquid on its surface.

Anna Hughes, a PhD candidate at UBC, spoke at the January RASC Vancouver monthly meeting about Magnetic Fields Around Dwarf Stars. Some types of magnetic fields are associated with active stars that can throw bursts of radiation and charged particles at orbiting planets, potentially sterilizing them. She explained her work in studying magnetic fields around ultra-cool dwarf stars and their impact on the potential habitability of surrounding exoplanets. Ultra-cool dwarfs were not expected to have magnetic fields because they are completely convective, without the shearing between different layers that generates magnetic fields in larger stars. Using large arrays of radio telescopes, Hughes studied several ultra-cool dwarf stars where the presence of magnetic fields has recently been detected. One of the system she studied was Trappist-1, a system with seven confirmed exoplanets, three of which are in the habitable zone.

Cool fact: ultra-cool dwarf stars have not yet experienced death. Their lifetimes are expected to exceed several hundred billion years which is longer than age of the universe.

A high-school student discovered a new exoplanet three days after starting his internship at NASA. NASA confirmed the work of Wolf Cukier, that was submitting in a paper announcing the discovery of TOI 1338 b at the 235th American Astronomical Society meeting. It is a binary system and Cukier saw a signal that that was first thought to be a stellar eclipse. Instead, it turned out to be a planet orbiting two stars.

Artash Nath, a Grade 8 Student from Toronto, posted a message to the RASC mail list about his project with a free module using Python and a Jupyter Notebook that allows anyone to get started with machine learning on a dataset of transit light curves to predict the exoplanet planet-star radius ratio. An online tutorial is available from his Github account www.github.com/Artash-N.

On a lighter note, a older video on exoplanets created by Montrealer, Tim Blais from A Capella Science, got my attention by fitting “Pegasi 51-b” and “Spectral Class G” into the rhyme and rhythm of his “Whole New Worlds” video.

The Plate Solving 1 article described how Plate Solving software uses pattern matching to determine the stars and other objects that appear in an image. Plate Solving provides additional benefits when used with a computer connected mount – including accurate gotos with automated alignment.

The usual setup routine for using a goto mount is to first roughly polar align mount so that the mount’s polar axis is pointing at true north. This is often done with a small polar scope attached on the mount. An alignment process with the following steps is then repeated on several stars:

• Select an alignment star that is visible from a list provided by the mount
• Slew to the selected star
• Use the hand-controller to center the selected star in the finder and eyepiece.

Plate solving can automate the alignment process. It requires a computer that controls the mount’s movements and can take images through the scope or finderscope. Many astronomy apps such as Stellarium, Carte du Ceil, or KStars are capable controlling a variety of mounts from vendors such as Celestron, Meade, iOptron, or Skywatcher. The process starts by selecting a target star or object in the App – then the computer takes over:

• The computer tells the mount to slew to the target.
• An image is taken through the scope and downloaded to the computer.
• The computer uses Plate Solving to determine that region of the sky that the scope is actually pointing to.
• The computer issues a sync command to update the mount’s alignment model to where the scope is pointing.
• If the scope is not pointing at the target then the computer again tells the mount to slew to the target and the above steps are repeated

KStars displays a map of the sky for my location and time. I normally start by selecting a bright star relatively close to Polaris – making sure to pick one that is above 45 degrees in the North or North-East to avoid being block by the hedges or house in my front-yard. I then using KStars to have the mount “goto” to the target – in the image below my target was the bright star Mirfak in Perseus.

The EKOS alignment module in KStars handles the automated alignment procedure and plate solving.

The main settings that I use are are highlighted with orange oval boxes in the screenshot above.

• Select the “Slew to target” radio button to repeat a slew to the target if, after plate solving, the scope is not actually pointing at the target.
• Set the Scope selection to “Guidescope” because I do automated alignment and plate solving using my guidescope.
• Select “ZWO ASI178” in the CCD drop-down as that is the camera I have attached to the guidescope.
• Set “Exp: 2 sec” to use a short 2 seconds exposure time. I occasionally increase this if not enough stars are visible.
• Set “Bin: 4×4” so binning is used to combine pixels and decrease the size of the images.

Then I just click the “Capture and Solve” button. After an image is taken and plate solving is done, the image and results of plate solving, including the RA (right ascension) and Dec (declination), is displayed on the left hand side. On this night, plate solving succeeded despite the presence of the significant cloud cover seen in the image.

I use automated plate solving with my guidescope when doing visual observing – it turns my guidescope into an automated electronic finderscope that is faster and more accurate than doing a manual alignment.

When imaging, I extend the procedure to do plate solving with my primary scope and a Nikon DSLR camera. One great feature in KStars is that it shows the camera FOV on the sky map with its rotation after plate solving. That makes is easier to rotate the camera and compose the image so that it includes additional interesting objects.

Try it out – for technolophiles, doing automated alignment with plate solving with inexpensive hardware and free software is pretty cool stuff.

RASC Vancouver’s Scott McGillivray talks about how the recent discovery of a massive black hole was a mistake and the brightness of Betelgeuse.

https://globalnews.ca/video/rd/ffc0a398-2f33-11ea-8138-0242ac110003/?jwsource=cl

Betelgeuse, a bright star that is a shoulder in the constellation Orion, has observably dimmed in recent months leading to speculations that it may be getting ready to die in a fiery supernova explosion.

You can now register and book accommodation for the RASC 2020 General Assembly.

Book early to reserve a room at a discounted group rate and take advantage of early-bird pricing that is in effect until Feb 15th, 2020.

The General Assembly, or GA, takes place at the Executive Plaza Hotel & Conference Centre on North Road in Coquitlam – just a 5 minute walk from the Lougheed Skytrain Station – from June 5th to 7th, 2020. The GA is an excellent opportunity for members of the RASC and the public to gather and strengthen the bonds of community.

The GA is of particular interest to RASC members from across Canada but all astronomy and space enthusiasts, including non-members, are encouraged to register. The GA is green, inclusive, and youth-friendly.

The Stars Belong to Everyone!

Here is the new RASC Vancouver Council from the Dec 2019 Annual General Meeting. Visit the contacts page for email addresses and more information.

(Left to right) Back-row : Alan Jones (VP, AOMO), Scott McGillivray (PR & AOMO), Kyle Dally (Merchandise), Ken Arthurs (Telescopes & Observing), Ken Liu

Front-Row: Phil Lobo (Treasurer), Ken Jackson (Webmaster), Gordon Farrell (President & NOVA Editor), Leigh Cummings (LPA), William Fearon (Library), Francesca Crema (Membership), Suzanna Nagy (Secretary & Membership).

Missing: Halley Miller (Events and National Rep), Robert Conrad (Observing & Education), Andrew Krysa (Education), Howard Trottier (at-large), Bill Burnyeat (at-large), J. Karl Miller (Honorary President).

I was really lucky today, got to see most of the eclipse while sightseeing in coastal port of Malacca (Melaka). The photos were taken around the maximum eclipse which was at 13:17 local time. The magnitude was around 0.95 while about 92% of the Sun was eclipsed by the Moon. It was a little eerie, dark but not too dark, shadows were really unusual, but in this town full of tourists today very few people were aware of what was going on high up in the sky. My camera was hand held as well as the solar filter (my son was helping me). All in all, it was an awesome event and made me very happy. The next eclipse is also annular and will be happening in Northern India among other places, so very doable for me.

by RASC Vancouver member Milan B from Malacca, Malaysia

The final “Ring of Fire” solar eclipse of 2019 occurred early on December 26^th spanning the Indian Ocean region from the Middle East to the western Pacific. An annular solar eclipse occurs when the Moon is visually too small to completely cover the disk of the Sun, leaving in a bright “annulus” or “Ring of Fire” surrounding the Moon.

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Most annular solar eclipses occur when the moon is near apogee, the farthest point in its orbit around Earth – so it appears smaller as seen from Earth. This Dec 26th eclipse is unusual in that the moon is not near apogee – it is almost exactly at its mean distance from Earth. In this eclipse, the moon is still too small to cover the sun’s disk completely because the Earth is close to perihelion, its closest point to the sun for the year – so the sun appears larger as seen from from Earth.

Possible meteor shower in Monoceros – the Unicorn!

“What’s rarer than seeing a unicorn? How about a unicorn spitting meteors at the rate of 400 per hour?”

lead in from Sky & Telescope’s Nov, 2019 article on the Alpha Monocerotids meteor shower

A meteor shower is possible this week on the evening of Thursday Nov 21st and extending into the early morning on Nov 22nd. Meteor forecasters Esko Lyytinen (Finnish Fireball Network) and Peter Jenniskens (NASA/Ames) predict this could cause another outburst of alpha Monocerotid meteors.

During previous outbursts, in 1925 and 1935, activity reached meteor-storm levels with a zenithal hourly rate (ZHR) of more than 1,000. Near-storm level ZHRs around 700 to 400 were experienced in 1985 and 1995. Conditions this year are nearly the same as those in 1995 leading Lyytinen and to Jenniskens to predict a ZHR of 400.

The peak rate is centered at 08:50 PM PST on Thursday November 21st. The show is expected to be brief, with the peak rate lasting only 15 to 45 minutes. The meteors can appear anywhere in the sky but the paths of meteors will appear to originate from a point in the constellation Monoceros, near the bright star Procyon. The predicted ZHR is an over-estimate based on the extending the peak rate to a full hour, observing at the zenith with very dark skies. The best case, for real observing at a good location, might be closer to a maximum of 5 meteors per minute.

There is some good news & bad news for BC observers:

• The current weather forecast looks somewhat favourable, partially cloudy is pretty good for this time of year in our temperate rainforest.
• The radiant will be below the horizon during the shower peak which may compromise the view, but a few long earth-grazers may appear shooting upward from the eastern horizon.

It is still worth going out for a look. Try to find a dark place with an open view to the east.

Jess McIver‘s talk on Cosmic collisions observed with Advanced LIGO at last Thursday’s public monthly meeting was an eye-opener for me. I knew little about gravity waves and her talk was filled with fascinating facts. The following are some of the highlights for me.

Gravity waves are produced by asymmetric events like two black holes in close orbit around each other or a fast spinning neutron star with bumps on its surface.

The LIGO detectors are incredibly sensitive interferometers that can sense changes in length up to 10,000 times smaller than the width of a proton.

There are 4 operational gravity wave detectors around the world: LIGO in Livingston Louisiana, another LIGO close by in Hanford Washington, GEO600 in Germany, and VIRGO in Italy. Another detector in Japan is expected to become operational within the next few months.

Gravity wave detectors are more like microphones than telescopes as they can pickup events from any direction in the sky. The current detection techniques assume that detectable events are rare so they don’t have to take into account two events at the same time in different parts of the sky.

It can be better to listen to gravity wave signals rather than using our eyes as is done with light-based astronomy. You can even download ringtones made from gravity wave sounds by The Albert Einstein Institute Hanover.

The strength of a gravity wave signals drops off proportionally with distance. This is quite different from how light works where the strength of the signal drops with the distance squared.  So there is hope in detecting ultra-distant gravitational waves. Improving the sensitivity of a detector by 100 times means we can see 100 times farther, rather than the 10 times farther that we could see with a light detector that was 100 times more sensitive. Very Cool! I had to look up more information on this one and found more details in this Forbes article.

Signals are found using matched filtering, in which data from detectors are cross-correlated with a theoretical waveforms constructed from Einstein’s general relativity equations applied to events like black-hole merges.

Gravity waves may be a good tool for exploring dark matter since dark matter is affected by gravity, but it may hard to detect signal from dark matter unless it clumps into compact objects like black holes or neutron stars.

The Gravitational Wave Open Science Center provides open data from gravitational-wave observatories, along with access to tutorials and software tools.

Citizen scientists all over the world are contributing to LIGO research with Gravity Spy.

Our NOVA Newsletter for Nov-Dec 2019 is available as a pdf file. An archive of older issues can be found on our Newsletter page.

Contents of Volume 2019, Issue 6, Nov-Dec 2019:

Manning Park Dark Sky Event Beginner’s Weekend, by Suzanna Nagy

President’s Message by Leigh Cummings

Manning Dark Sky – Intermediate Weekend by Ken Jackson

Why Star-Hop? 14 Reasons by Robert Conrad and Andrew Krysa

RASC Vancouver has started a project to setup a radio telescope and we are asking for donations of surplus equipment such as the following:

• Laptops (maybe you have one from your latest upgrade, want a new one and need an excuse 😀). The laptops will be used, with radio astronomy software, for a portable setup at RASC Vancouver events,
• Antennae and large dish antennae,
• Cabling,
• Radio receivers,
• Ham radio equipment.

You never know what will be useful since we are just starting out. If you have equipment to donate then email Ken Arthurs, our Director of Telescopes at [email protected].

The Sept/Oct edition of our NOVA newsletter has an article that describes our initial forays into radio astronomy.