What's more, Guyon and
other astronomers say that further, as yet unfunded upgrades could also allow the VLT to spy any smaller, Earth - size planets in Alpha Centauri.
He and
other astronomers say the spinning binary, just 1.8 AU apart, could create «gravitational chaos» near the hypothesized planet, perhaps flinging it from the system.
Other astronomers say the method of pulling faint planetary signals out of background noise needs to be verified.
Not exact matches
When two
astronomers bump into each
other in the hallway, one doesn't
say to the
other: «We've discovered seven Earth - sized planets in the Goldilocks Zone just 40 light years away.»
Astronomers aren't sure why some galaxies» black holes are voracious eaters, glowing brightly, while
others seem dark and inactive, Doeleman
says.
«We imagined we were going to find
other planetary systems in our own image,»
says Andrew Howard, an
astronomer at the University of Hawaii.
But until
astronomers began finding planets around
other stars, no one calculated how swallowing nearby objects would affect a star,
says theoretical astrophysicist Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Having the mass and radii of a planet allows the
astronomers to calculate
other features such as a planet's average density, «and once you know the average density of a planet, then you can start to
say whether it's rocky or not,» Kane explained.
The Extravagant Universe, by Harvard
astronomer Robert Kirshner, 2002, quoting from memory what Zwicky would
say when the two of them had offices down the hall from each
other at Caltech: «In 1933, I told those no - good spherical bastards that supernovas make the neutron stars.
«Zwicky began referring to Baade as «the Nazi»... He regarded most of the
other Palomar
astronomers as fools, and Walter Baade as a cretin... He would swear torrentially at night assistants, using scientific terms laced with obscenities... He referred to Baade and the
others as spherical bastards — «They are spherical,» he
said, «because they are bastards every way I look at them.»
The origin of a fast radio burst in this type of dwarf galaxy suggests a connection to
other energetic events that occur in similar dwarf galaxies,
said co-author and UC Berkeley
astronomer Casey Law, who led development of the data - acquisition system and created the analysis software to search for rapid, one - off bursts.
«They were at the same latitude, and they were moving toward each
other,»
says astronomer Imke de Pater of the University of California at Berkeley.
Two outside sources
say the silver lining for
astronomers is that NASA hopes to share the fiscal burden equally between astrophysics and
other branches of the $ 18 - billion agency rather than pummeling its science programs.
Astronomer David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles, a co-discoverer of 1992 QB1, the first KBO
other than Pluto and Charon,
says that TAOS is looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
These bodies probably broke up when they collided at high speed with
other large asteroids in the crowded asteroid belt,
says astronomer Jake VanderPlas of the University of Washington.
«Supernova 1987A was quite different from
other supernovas because it was a compact star when it exploded,»
says Harvard
astronomer Robert Kirshner.
Among
other things, the new map will help
astronomers to understand and explain the motion of the Milky Way, which is apparently being tugged by the gravity of neighboring groups and clusters of galaxies,
says 2MASS team member Karen Masters of the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, who presented the it here at the summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Volcanism, Misra
said, may help distinguish between oxygen that is produced by life or
other planetary processes by helping
astronomers better understand the planet's environment.
«If it really mattered to another committee that someone had a lot of offers,»
says Joanne Cohn, an
astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, responsible for the astrophysics job wiki, «I'd expect them to check — committees do talk to each
other and to people writing reference letters.»
«It's always interesting to see a star with abundances like no
other,»
says Stan Woosley, an
astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Still, the burst puts scientists closer to the first generation than ever before: It is about 150 million years older than any
other known astrophysical object,
says astronomer Nial Tanvir of the University of Leicester in England, the lead author of one of the new Nature papers.
Until now, the prevailing hypothesis has
said that as stars evolve, metals (
astronomers» term for any chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium) in the swirling disk around them form tiny «seeds» that attract
other matter and slowly grow into planets.
But
other experts
say there's a big difference between water vapor, as discovered in HD 189733b's atmosphere, and liquid water, which is what
astronomers are really hoping to nail down.
The suggestion to divest the GBT (among
other sites) was not an easy one to make,
says Daniel Eisenstein, a Harvard University
astronomer and chair of the Portfolio Review Committee that issued the recommendation.
Many
other stars that resemble the Sun also have starspot cycles, but the
astronomers say that they need more data before they can be sure that Tau Ceti has an 11 - year cycle.
Astronomers there
say the University of California, which funds the observatory, has slashed its budget to fund
other projects and has issued a report recommending converting Lick to a public museum.
Elbert
said he expects many more gravitation wave detections so that he and
other astronomers can determine if black holes collide mostly in giant galaxies.
«With transits we can learn much more about the planets than with any
other method to find planets,»
says lead study author Hans Deeg, an
astronomer at Spain's Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands.
Says Burki: «It's like the
astronomers discovering there are planets around
other stars.»
Funding for astronomy is far more limited than that available for cancer research,
say, and compared with most
other fields of science, the number of professional
astronomers is astonishingly small (the membership of the American Astronomical Society would just about fit into Radio City Music Hall).
Other astronomers have claimed to find galaxies at even greater distances — at redshifts of 10 and 9, but those findings are still ambiguous,
says Joshua Bloom of the University of California, Berkeley, who observed the afterglow using the Gemini South telescope in Chile.
«Comets retain a record of conditions from the early solar system, but
astronomers think some comets might preserve that history more completely than
others,»
said Michael DiSanti, an
astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the new study in the Astronomical Journal.
Other astronomers find the detections convincing, although most reserve the name «planet» for bodies that form within a planetary system and orbit stars,
says theorist Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, D.C. «They should call them «planetary - mass brown dwarfs,»» Boss
says.
«You can see that this is an indirect method,» Maciejewski
says, acknowledging that
others have claimed planetary detections by transit timing in the past, only to have
other astronomers rule out the purported finds.
But what would
astronomers say about a planet by any
other name?
If you read the fine print of many
other companies they usually
say that
astronomers do not officially recognize the name of the star you just purchased.
«The first detection of biosignatures on
other worlds may be one of the most significant scientific discoveries of our lifetime,»
says Garreth Ruane, an
astronomer with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
«Our conclusions are contrary to
other recent work, but in line with the work of radio
astronomers who see no new stars being born in this desert,»
said Michael Feast, a co-author of the study, in the press release.
Researchers hope to extend their measurements to
other active galaxies; the technique could eventually help
astronomers better understand the rate at which the universe is expanding, study team members
said.
Boston University
astronomer Philip Muirhead
said that if planets outside the solar system, or exoplanets, were houses, GJ1132b «is not the house right next to yours, but it's on the
other side of the block,» according to USA Today.
But in a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, UW
astronomer Rory Barnes and his colleagues
say their scheme includes
other factors such as a planet's estimated rockiness and the eccentricity of its orbit.
Brown has
said that while he'd love to be the first to spot it, he's also hoping that
other astronomers will get inspired to join the search.
The radio observations have revealed a size of the fireball, unobtainable by any
other technique, thereby enabling
astronomers to learn about inner workings of such objects,»
said Shri Kulkarni, professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Astronomers say they found a dozen black holes in the center of the Milky Way and that thousands of
others are likely at our galactic core.