Wednesday 2 August 2017

Hubble Detects Exoplanet with Glowing Water Atmosphere


Scorching "Hot Jupiter" Has a Stratospheric Layer

Only when we fly in a commercial jet at an altitude of about 33,000 feet do we enter Earth's stratosphere, a cloudless layer of our atmosphere that blocks ultraviolet light. Astronomers were fascinated to find evidence for a stratosphere on a planet orbiting another star. As on Earth, the planet's stratosphere is a layer where temperatures increase with higher altitudes, rather than decrease. However, the planet (WASP-121b) is anything but Earth-like. The Jupiter-sized planet is so close to its parent star that the top of the atmosphere is heated to a blazing 4,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,500 degrees Celsius), hot enough to rain molten iron! This new Hubble Space Telescope observation allows astronomers to compare processes in exoplanet atmospheres with the same processes that happen under different sets of conditions in our own solar system.


via Hubble - News feed
http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2017-31

Exoplanet shines with glowing water atmosphere

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Scientists have found compelling evidence for a stratosphere on an enormous planet outside our solar system. The planet's stratosphere -- a layer of atmosphere where temperature increases with higher altitudes -- is hot enough to boil iron.
via Science Daily
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New simulations could help in hunt for massive mergers of neutron stars, black holes

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Scientists have developed new computer models to explore what happens when a black hole joins with a neutron star - the superdense remnant of an exploded star.
via Science Daily
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CERN know-how helps weigh the proton

The MPKI Penning-trap setup for precision mass measurements of single particles. A combination of strong electric and magnetic fields is able to store individual protons and highly charged carbon ions. (Image: Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics)

A team in Heidelberg, Germany has made the most precise measurement to date of the mass of a single proton, the particle that – together with the neutron and the electron – makes up all the matter in the universe, and therefore also us. They found that the proton is about 30 billionths of a percent lighter than previously thought. The result improves by a factor of three on the precision of the accepted value of the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) – which regularly collects and publishes the recommended values of fundamental physical constants – and it also disagrees with its central value at a level of 3.3 standard deviations, which means that the new value is significantly different from the previous result.

Proton mass is a fundamental parameter in atomic and particle physics, influencing atomic spectra and allowing tests of ultra-precise calculations within Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), the theory that describes how light and matter interact. In particular, a detailed comparison between the masses of the proton and the antiproton offers a stringent test of the fundamental symmetry of the Standard Model, the so-called charge, parity and time (CPT) invariance. This proton lightness could also potentially shed light on other mysteries, such as the well-known discrepancies in the measured mass of the heaviest hydrogen isotope, tritium.

The team at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Heidelberg and their collaborators from RIKEN in Japan used a device known as Penning trap, in which a combination of strong electric and magnetic fields, cooled to 4 degrees Kelvin (- 269.15 °C) is able to store individual protons and highly charged carbon ions. In this trap, the magnetic field forces the particles to move in circle and by measuring the characteristic frequencies of the trapped particles when they spin around, the mass of the proton follows directly.

The sensitive single-particle detectors were partly developed by the RIKEN group, drawing on experience gained with similar traps for antimatter research at CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator (AD). “The group around Sven Sturm and Klaus Blaum from MPIK Heidelberg that did the measurement has great expertise with carbon, whereas the BASE group contributed proton expertise based on 12 years dealing with protons and antiprotons,” explains RIKEN group leader and spokesperson of the AD’s BASE experiment, Stefan Ulmer. “We shared knowledge such as know-how on ultra-sensitive proton detectors and the ‘fast shuttling’ method developed by BASE to perform the proton/antiproton charge-to-mass ratio measurement.”

Although carefully conducted cross-check measurements confirmed a series of published values of the proton mass and showed that no unexpected systematic effects were imposed by the new method, such a striking departure from the accepted value will likely challenge other teams to revisit the proton mass. The discrepancy has already inspired the MPIK-RIKEN team to further improve the precision of their measurement, for instance by storing a third ion in the trap and measuring it simultaneously to eliminate uncertainties originating from magnetic field fluctuations, which are the main source of systematic errors when using the new technique.

“It is also planned to tune the magnetic field to even higher homogeneity, which will reduce additional sources of systematic error,” explains BASE member Andreas Mooser. “The methods that will be pioneered in the next step of this experiment will have immediate positive feedback to future BASE measurements, for example in improving the precision in the antiproton-to-proton charge-to-mass ratio.”

The research was published on 18 July 2017 in Physical Review Letters.


via CERN: Updates for the general public
http://home.cern/about/updates/2017/08/cern-know-how-helps-weigh-proton

Defunct satellites: Reliably determine and predict attitude motion

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Uncontrollable flying objects in the Earth‘s orbit are an enormous risk for active satellites and for spacecraft in general. Since April 2012, the European environmental satellite ENVISAT has also been adrift in orbit. Now, experts have developed pioneering methods to precisely determine the attitude rotation of malfunctioning satellites and, thus, to support de-orbiting missions in the future.
via Science Daily
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The Dust Monster in IC 1396

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Is there a monster in IC 1396? Known to some as the Elephant's Trunk Nebula, parts of gas and dust clouds of this star formation region may appear to take on foreboding forms, some nearly human. The only real monster here, however, is a bright young star too far from Earth to hurt us. Energetic light from this star is eating away the dust of the dark cometary globule near the top of the featured image. Jets and winds of particles emitted from this star are also pushing away ambient gas and dust. Nearly 3,000 light-years distant, the relatively faint IC 1396 complex covers a much larger region on the sky than shown here, with an apparent width of more than 10 full moons.

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