Hubble's latest pic of Saturn is a pretty good one

The notion of a picture being worth a thousand words can often be an understatement. Witness the newest, just-released photo of Saturn captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 observed Saturn on 20 June 2019 as the planet made its closest approach to Earth this year, at approximately 1.36 billion kilometers (845 million miles) away. (Photo: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley))

This image is the second in a yearly series of snapshots taken as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) project, according to news releases from the European Space Agency and the Space Telescope Science Institute. OPAL is helping scientists to understand the atmospheric dynamics and evolution of our Solar System’s gas giant planets. In Saturn’s case, astronomers will be able to track shifting weather patterns and other changes to identify trends.

Celestial Pig Pens and new tricks for old scopes

It takes a lot of detective work to figure out the nature of a type Ia supernova. Celestial Pig Pens and new tricks from old telescopes are contributing to the effort. That’s what we learned at the most recent meeting of Astronomy on Tap Seattle.

Messy Siblings: Supernovae in Binary Systems

Dr. Melissa Graham is a project science analyst for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, working out of the Astronomy Department at the University of Washington. Her main research focus is supernovae. In particular, she’s doing a lot of work on type Ia supernovae, which occur in binary star systems. One of the stars involved will be a carbon-oxygen white dwarf star.

“It’s a star that wasn’t massive enough to fuse anything else inside the carbon layers,” Graham explained. Outer layers of hydrogen and helium are thrown off in a planetary nebula phase, so the carbon and oxygen are what’s left.

Melissa Graham. UW photo.

“Carbon-oxygen white dwarf stars are very compact, very dense, about the size of the Earth but they can be up to about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun,” Graham said. These stars are pretty stable as stars go, so they don’t blow up under normal circumstances.

“When we do see these kind of supernovae that are clearly the explosion of carbon-oxygen white dwarf stars we have to wonder why,” she said. It turns out there are two possible scenarios. The binary can be a pair of carbon-oxygen white dwarf stars that spiral in on each other, merge, and then explode. Or the binary can include one white dwarf and a more typical hydrogen-rich companion star.

“In this case the companion star can feed material onto this carbon-oxygen white dwarf star, might make it go over 1.4 solar masses, become unstable, and then explode,” Graham said.

Which is which?

The key to figuring out which of these scenarios actually occurred is to take a look at the area around the supernova. If the companion is a more hydrogen-rich companion star, the neighborhood can get a little messy.

“It’s sort of like a celestial Pig Pen star that leaves a lot of material lying around,” Graham said. A blast from a supernova can interact with this material and cause it to brighten. The trouble is that astronomers typically only observe type Ia supernovae for a couple of months; they fade quickly. So if this extra material is far away from the event, they might not see the interaction. The answer is patience, to look at the supernova sites for up to 2-3 years after.

Graham did exactly that, using the Hubble Space Telescope to keep an eye on the locations of 65 type Ia supernovae.

“Out of these 65, I very luckily found one” in which there was brightening much later. They checked the spectrum of the light and found hydrogen, a sure sign that the companion in this particular type Ia supernova was a Pig Pen. Graham suspects that up to five percent of such explosions involve messy sibling stars.

Graham looks forward to having the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) come on line. She expects it will find some 10 million supernovae in a decade.

“This marks a massive increase in our ability to both find and characterize supernovae,” she said.

Old scope, new tricks

While we wait for LSST an old workhorse telescope is doing interesting work in a similar vein. Professor Eric Bellm of the UW works with the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), which uses the 48-inch telescope at Palomar observatory in California. The scope is a Schmidt, completed in 1948, and for years it was the largest Schmidt telescope in the world. It’s main function at first was to use its wide-field view of the sky to create maps that helped astronomers point Palomar Mountain’s 200-inch Hale Telescope.

Eric Bellm. UW photo.

The 48-inch was used to do numerous sky surveys over the years. It discovered many asteroids, and Mike Brown used it to find the dwarf planets he used to kill Pluto. The old photographic plates gave way to modern CCDs, and Bellm became the project scientist for the Zwicky Transient Facility—named for astronomer Fritz Zwicky, a prolific discoverer of supernovae—in 2011.

They outfitted the scope with a new camera with 16 CCDs that are four inches per side. They got some big filters for it and put in a robotic arm that could change the filters without getting in the way of the camera. They started surveying in March of last year and can photograph much of the sky on any given night.

“That’s letting us look for things that are rare, things that are changing quickly, things that are unusual,” Bellm said.

Examples of what the ZTF has found include a pair of white dwarfs that are spinning rapidly around each other, with a period of just seven minutes. They can see the orbits decay because of gravitational wave radiation. It has discovered more than 100 young type 1a supernovae. And it found an asteroid with the shortest “year” of any yet discovered; its orbit is entirely within that of Venus.

It’s doing the same sort of work that the LSST will do when it comes online.

“It’s super cool that we’ve got this more than 70 year old telescope that we’re doing cutting-edge science with thanks to the advances of technology,” Bellm said.

Astronomy on Tap Seattle is organized by graduate students in astronomy at the University of Washington, and typically meets on the fourth Wednesday of each month at Peddler Brewing Company in Ballard. The next event is set for September 25.

A surprise discovery from Apollo 11 lunar samples

As we look back at the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Toby Smith notes that the most interesting science that came out of the mission was a bit of a surprise. Smith, a senior lecturer in astronomy at the University of Washington, gave a talk at the most recent meeting of Astronomy on Tap Seattle.

“There’s only one reason Apollo existed—to beat the Soviet Union to the surface of the Moon,” Smith noted. Few considered the mission to be scientific. “It wasn’t fully embraced by the scientific community even in its day, even among planetary scientists.”

But they figured as long as they were there, they should do some sort of science.

“This little bit of science they did fundamentally changed how we view not only the Moon, but the Earth-Moon system and our solar system,” Smith said.

The Apollo 11 landing site, the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon, is essentially an ancient lava flow, a featureless plain of cooled volcanic rock, Smith said. Think of it like Big Island of Hawaii, except you don’t really see the solidified lava on the Moon. The surface is soft, ground down and rounded off into a soft powder by billions of years of impacts. As Neil Armstrong observed just after his first step, it has the consistency of flour. That consistency almost accidentally led to the mission’s best science.

An Apollo Lunar Sample Return container on display 

at the Destination: Moon exhibit at the St. Louis Science

Center in 2018. (Photo: Greg Scheiderer)

Armstrong spent about 15 minutes of the two-and-a-half hour Moon walk picking up rocks and putting them into a box. At the end he collected nine scoops of lunar regolith and dumped it into the Apollo Lunar Sample Return Container (a fancy NASA term for the case for rocks) as sort of a packing material so the larger rocks wouldn’t clatter around. If they’d taken any styrofoam peanuts he might have used those instead.

Naturally, when this material was brought back to Earth, the scientists looked at it, and Smith said it just might be the most studied geological sample ever.

Smith noted that the regolith is highly angular; lunar dust is sharp.

“This is not material that was broken up by being tumbled,” he said. “This is material that was broken up by being fractured by impacts.”

It’s a diverse sample. It contains basalt, breccia (material created by impacts that shatters and sometimes melts back together), and impact spheres. There was also one unusual, bright white material in the collection. It turned out to be anorthosite, which makes up about four percent of the sample.

“It represents a piece of the original crust of the Moon long since destroyed by four and a half billion years of impacts,” Smith explained. Anorthosite is an igneous rock, like basalt, that comes from the cooling of melted rock. Basalt is created when lava moves across the ground, but Smith noted that anorthosite doesn’t work that way.

“Anorthosite forms in big pools of lava, huge pools of lava, huge chambers of lava,” he said. “As these chambers of lava slowly cool over time, the anorthosite floats to the top.”

“If this was found on the Moon it must mean that at some point early in the Moon’s history it must have been almost completely molten,” Smith added. This information made scientists re-think their notions about the origins of the Moon.

“Before Apollo there was no indication that the whole, entire Moon was almost completely melted,” he said.

The leading theory about the formation of the Moon these days is that something pretty big, about the size of Mars, smacked into the early Earth, and that material flung into space by the impact eventually coalesced into the Moon. The catch is that computer simulations of this event don’t often result in a completely molten Moon. So more study is needed. The lunar samples have been under constant scrutiny for the last 50 years, and Smith says he’s interested to see what new information can be gleaned from those samples as new analytical technology is developed.

Astronomy on Tap Seattle is organized by graduate students in astronomy at the University of Washington. The next gathering is set for Wednesday, August 28, 2019 at Peddler Brewing Company in Ballard.

Seattle Astronomy talks Apollo anniversary at Tacoma libraries

Greg gave the first of his series of talks about Apollo 11

June 29 at the Kobetich Branch of Tacoma Public Library.

Seattle Astronomy is doing our small part in celebrating  the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 and the first human landing on the Moon. Greg Scheiderer will give six talks as part of the Tacoma Public Library system’s summer reading program.

The talks, titled “Moon Walk: Apollo 11 and a Man on the Moon,” will explore the extraordinary shared experiences of the Apollo missions, look at the history that got us step-by-step up to the giant leap, share some of the iconic photography of Apollo, and, since it’s the summer reading program, offer a list of Apollo readings for adults and kids alike.

The first talk was given on Saturday, June 29, 2019 at the library’s Kobetich Branch. The rest of the schedule is as follows:

• Saturday, July 6, 2:30 p.m.: Swasey Branch
• Tuesday, July 9, 6:30 p.m.: Wheelock Branch
• Wednesday, July 17, 6:30 p.m.: Moore Branch
• Saturday, August 3, 2:30 p.m.: Fern Hill Branch
• Tuesday, August 6, 6:30 p.m.: Main Branch

You can also find schedule information on our calendar, in our Facebook events section, and on the library’s summer reading club events calendar. Come out and join us for a fun look back at Apollo 11!

Here’s our Apollo reading list!

Destination Moon exhibit opens tomorrow at Museum of Flight

Apollo 11 command module Columbia. Photo: Eric Long,
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution

The long-awaited exhibit Destination Moon: The Apollo 11 Mission, opens April 13 at The Museum of Flight. The centerpiece of the exhibit is the mission’s command module Columbia, which is on the last leg of a two-year, four-city journey that is the historic spacecraft’s first since being parked at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. in 1971. The Columbia took astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the Moon for the first Moon landing. The exhibit will be here through September 2, including the date of the 50th anniversary of the giant leap, July 20, 2019.

While some common elements of the exhibit have traveled to all four cities—Destination Moon stopped in Houston, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh prior to its Seattle trip—each museum has been able to put its own spin on the artifacts. At the Museum of Flight, Destination Moon represents an expansion of the Apollo exhibit that opened in May two years ago. (Here’s our article about the exhibit.) It’s here the the Museum of Flight has an edge, with the exhibit including two enormous F-1 engines that powered the launch of Apollo missions. Other museum artifacts are also included, as is a gallery about the legacy of Seattle-area industry, astronauts and engineers to the space program.

Your correspondent with the Apollo 11 command module 

Columbia in August 2018 at the St. Louis Science Center. 

Photo: Greg Scheiderer

Visitors can get pretty close to Columbia, but they can’t go inside. However, they can do so virtually through an interactive 3-D tour created from the Smithsonian’s high-resolution scans of the interior of the spacecraft.

The exhibit promises to be extremely popular. A free preview for museum members last weekend was well attended, and a host of special events for the first weekend are likely to draw many visitors. We were fortunate to see the exhibit in St. Louis last summer; it was near the end of the run and it wasn’t at all crowded. Waiting might be a good option if seeing it early and often isn’t a big deal for you!

The Columbia is a big deal artifact. I spent hours with it in St. Louis and a good bit of time at the member preview this week. Don’t miss this great opportunity to see a super cool piece of space history!