The American Astronomical Society (AAS) holds two meetings each year—and its winter one is its largest, with 2,800 astronomers, educators, students, and others intrigued by the galaxies beyond will attend this year’s 221st meeting right here in Long Beach.
Having started on Sunday and running through to this Thursday, some 1,900 presentations and talks will span through the field’s most impressive work done over the past year.
For example, Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, presented on Monday his research in finding the “second Earth” since he discovered that within 17 percent of stars sits an Earth-sized planet in an orbit closer than that of Mercury. Using data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, Fressin’s work posits the Milky Way as home to some 17 billion Earth-sized worlds.
“We found that the occurrence of small planets around large stars was underestimated,” said Fressin, noting that every time someone looks up at a star, nearly every single one is home to a planetary system.
Photo courtesy of NASA.
In a similar vein, Christopher Burke of the SETI Institute—also analyzing data from NASA’s massively influential Kepler Observatory—talked not just of the “explosion of planetary knowledge” thanks to Kepler, but specifically the discovery of KOI 172.02, one of 461 new planet candidates. To put that number in perspective, from 5000 B.C.E. to 1992 C.E., we added only four additional planets to our knowledge, from five to nine. In addition to the latest 461 discovered by the Kepler mission recently, the nearly four-year orbit of the spacecraft has brought into knowledge 2,740 worlds orbiting some 2,036 stars.
The KOI 172.02 “exoplanet”—any planet body that sits outside our own solar sytem—is slightly larger than Earth and circles a sun just over 100 days more than our own. The key: its distance is just right for liquid water, thereby making it the closest planet similar to our own that anyone has ever discovered.
“There is no better way to kickoff the start of the Kepler extended mission than to discover more possible outposts on the frontier of potentially life bearing worlds,” said Burke.
Supernova Cassiopeia-A exploding. Photo courtesy of NASA.
Yesterday, Fiona Harrison of CalTech in Pasadena, showed off a stunning image from NASA’s NuSTAR spacecraft, whose mission was to help provide researchers a better understanding of how galaxies are created and how black holes grow.
The image shows supernova Cassiopeia-A exploding some 11,000 light-years from Earth, where light from the massive explosion reached visibility from Earth about 300 years ago.
For more information about AAS, their meetings, as well as their organization, click here.
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