Interview with Dr. Aki Roberge

of Goddard Space Flight center is now online. For more information of her research, check out her webpage.

As always, please email or leave any questions, comments, and concerns below. Hope you enjoy!

February 20th radio show...

,.. is finally and available here. This show focused more on star and planet formation and extra-solar planets (planets which have been detected to orbit other stars), a topic in Astronomy which has been growing very rapidly recently. On this program, I discussed:

• Calendar of upcoming science events in the New York City / Hudson Valley area
• Interview with Dr. Aki Roberge of Goddard Space Flight Center, on open questions in star and planet formation.
• News:(radio show I mention in the beginning was "War on the Worlds" - book: HG Wells, radio show: Orson Welles) total lunar eclipse night of February 20th; NASA offering undergraduate and graduate fellowships on aeronautics (go here for more info); NASA releases list of next-generation Astronomy mission which it will study to determine their feasibility, scientific significance, etc.
• Star and Planet Formation:Discovery of a Solar System like extra-solar system planetary system, the first time anything resembling our own Solar System has been detected around a star other than our Sun; recent Spitzer survey discovers evidence of rocky planets forming around 20%-60% of solar mass stars; observation of a very young star discovers it has a very large disk surrounding it and that this disk contains no dust near the star - meaning rocky planets like our Earth couldn't form there; "moth-like" gas and dust disk observed surrounding another young star shows sign of disruption from surrounding material - implications for planet formation in such a system not known.

Sorry for the delay, and hope you enjoy. As always, please leave any questions or comments below.

Past Interview: Dr. Dan Babich (California Institute of Technology)

Another previously-aired interview for your listening enjoyment:

• Dr. Dan Babich - California Institute of Technology: Introduction to the Cosmic Microwave Background, and how it can be used to study the properties of the early universe (Air Date: 2007 October 3 and 2007 October 10)

Hope you enjoy and, as always, please email or leave comments below.

Thanks a lot, Yosi

Lunar Eclipse Tonight!

Tonight, visible from the Northeastern US and else where, should be a total lunar eclipse - the Earth will pass directly between the Sun and the Moon, placing the Moon in the Earth's shadow and causing it to turn a very deep red, since only this visible "color" of sunlight makes it through the Earth's atmosphere. (This is an aside, but this is also why our sky is blue. Blue light from the sun is scattered in our atmosphere and makes it to the ground where we see it, while red light passes through so we don't see much red light when we look up.)

The eclipse will

• start at around 8:30 PM EST,
• reach totality (the Moon is completely in the Earth's shadow) at around 10 PM EST, and remain this way for roughly an hour,
• and end around midnight.

For more info, go to this webpage. For those in the Poughkeepsie area, I believe there will be a public observing night tonight at the Class of '51 observatory on the campus of Vassar College. For those in the Long Island area, there will be a viewing at the Custer Institute. Of course, this will only be visible if it isn't cloudy.

Interview with Dr. Jennifer Wiseman

Available here is the interview I aired last Wednesday (13 February 2008) with Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, who is lab chief of the ExoPlanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory at Goodard Space Flight Center. She was nice enough to talk about all of the work being done at Goddard on discovering and studying extra-solar planets, as well as work being done on star-formation, high-energy astrophysics, and other branches of Astronomy. Here are some websites where you can find more information on the projects she discussed:

• Research at the ExoPlanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory in Goddard
• Planetquest at JPL
• Upcoming missions being planned and developed at the ExoPlanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory in Goddard
• Kepler mission to search for Earth-like planets orbitting other stars.

As always, please leave any questions / comments you have below. If I can't answer them, I will forward them along to Dr. Wiseman and will send her answer to you. Hope you enjoy, and thanks a lot for listening

February 13th radio show...

is finally online and now available here. This was the second show in the ongoing series on Goddard Space Flight Center. On this show, I discussed:

• Calendar of science events in the greater New York City / Poughkeepsie area.
• Interview with Dr. Jennifer Wiseman of Goddard Space Flight Center
• News: European Space Agency (ESA) opens new European Space Astronomy Center in Spain; NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft has begun monitoring five nearby stars with known transiting planets to try and detect evidence for additional planets around these objects; Chinese-lead international consortium installs new, robotic Astronomical facility called Plateau Team Observatory (PLATO) on Dome A in Antarctica; ESA's Herschel telescope - the next generation infrared satellite to go into space, with a considerably larger mirror than Spitzer or Hubble - has entered final testing phase before its scheduled launch late this year; NASA testing new robot designed to search for life in the oceans of Europa, a moon of Jupiter's; NASA announces competition to rename GLAST, go here for more details.

Hope you enjoy and, as always, please leave any questions or comments you have below. Thanks a lot for listening!

Past Interview: Dr. Chromey (Vassar College)

Since I'm currently airing a new series of interviews, I've decided to post every week - in addition to the new material - a prior interview for your listening pleasure. This week's past inteview is:

• Prof. Chromey - Vassar College: Astronomy Research at Vassar (Air Date: 2007 September 26)

Hope you enjoy and, as always, leave any questions or comments below. Thanks.

NASA Scholarship Program

NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate is offering scholarships to both undergrad and graduate students interested in aeronautics and related subjects. Undergrad applicants have to be in their second year, and can earn up to $15,000 per year for two years. Too my knowledge, there is no restriction on the year of study for graduate students, who can earn up to $35,000
per year for three years. Money can be used for tuition, room and board, and other school-related expenses and students can also apply for optional summer internships at NASA research centers to earn an additional $10,000 in stipends.

All applicants must be U.S. citizens., and all applications must be submitted between Feb. 22 and Mar. 17, 2008, for its fall 2008 scholarship program. For more details on this program and how to apply, go here, and to learn more about NASA's aeronautics programs, go here.

Good luck!

Past Interviews Podcast

For any of you who read this blog using a podcast service such as iTunes, for some reason they only include a link to the first interview in this post. There are plenty of others, and if you are interested in downloading them, point your browser here http://astroshow.blogspot.com/2008/02/past-interviews.html.

Thanks, and enjoy.

Goddard Space Flight Center

Starting tomorrow, I'm going to be broadcasting interviews I've done with Astronomers who work at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Goddard is a pretty wonderful place, and last April I was lucky enough to be invited to give a seminar to the high-energy Astrophysics group there (if you are curious, click here to view my presentation). While I was there, Dr. Dave Thompson was kind of enough to give me a tour of some of the unique satellite building / testing facilities they have there. If you are interested in what they look like, feel free to look at the photo album below:

Visit to Goddard Space Flight Center

Sorry, I'm not the best photographer, but I hope you get the idea.

GSFC is an absolutely huge place, where a large amount of research - both in Astronomy and in other fields - is conducted on a daily basis, as you can read here. I've done my best to get inteviews who cover the full range of research going on at GSFC, and my (preliminary) line-up is the following:

• Dr. Jennifer Wiseman: Star and planet formation and extra-solar planet research at GSFC (Expected Air Date - 13 February 2008)
• Dr. Aki Roberge: Star and planet formation (Expected Air Date - 20 February 2008)
• Dr. Mark Clampin: James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble (Expected Air Date - 27 February 2008)
• Dr. Gary Hinshaw: Cosmic Microwave Background (Expected Air Date - 5 March 2008)
• Dr. Tod Strohmayer: X-ray emission from neutron star and blackhole binaries (Expected Air Date - 12 March 2008)
• Dr. Ann Hornschemeier: The next generation X-ray satellite Constellation-X (Expected Air Date - 19 March 2008)
• Dr. Neil Gehrels: The Swift satellite and Gamma-Ray Bursts (Expected Air Date - 26 March 2008)
• Dr. Julie McEnergy: GLAST, the hopefully-soon-to-be-launched next generation gamma-ray observatory (Expected Air Date - 4 April 2008)
• Dr. Dave Thompson: Multi-wavelength observations of the gamma-ray sky (Expected Air Date - 11 April 2008)

As I broadcast (podcast) interviews, I will post links with information on these particular projects. But in the meantime, I encourage you to check out the following websites:

• Homepage of GSFC
• Outreach website at GSFC
• Educational programs at GSFC
• High-energy Astrophysics at GSFC. This webpage contains a lot of resources which are absolutely vital for Astronomers, and one I personally use on a regular basis.
• High-Energy Astrophysics Outreach webpage

Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank the media officer at GSFC, Rob Gutro, for contacting scientists at GSFC to be guests on this program. This would not have been possible without his help. Hope you enjoy!

Past Interviews

Since I'll be doing a fairly long series of interviews starting on tomorrow's show, I thought it might be worthwhile to post a list of past interviews:

• James Battat - Harvard University: Measuring the distance to the Moon in order to test General Relativity (Air Date: 2007 September 17)
• Prof. Chromey - Vassar College: Astronomy Research at Vassar (Air Date: 2007 September 26)
• Dr. Dan Babich - California Institute of Technology: Introduction to the Cosmic Microwave Background, and how it can be used to study the properties of the early universe (Air Date: 2007 October 3 and 2007 October 10)
• Prof. Rothman - Princeton University: Is it possible to detect gravitons, the "force carrier" of gravity? (Air Date: 2007 October 24)
• Josh Schroeder - Columbia University: Pseudo-science on the Internet (Air Date: 2007 October 31)
• Dr. Kim Vy Tran - University of Zurich: The formation of the most massive galaxies (Air Date: 2007 November 14)
• Dr. Daniel Savin - Columbia University: Laboratory Astrophysics (Air Date: 2007 December 12)
• Michael Bank - Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association: Amateur Astronomy in the Hudson Valley (Air Date: 2007 December 19)
• Tom Rankin - Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association: How to buy a telescope (Air Date: 2008 January 9)

Hope you enjoy and please email or leave any questions / comments below - I'll be more than happy to forward them to the interview subject if you want. Thank you for listening.

Want to name a new telescope?

GLAST, the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope, is scheduled to be launched soon, and as tradition has it, will be named to something less bureaucratic when/if successfully (don't want to jinx it) deployed. One example is the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which before launch was named "Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility", or AXAF for short. Well, NASA is open to suggestions for renaming GLAST, and you can submit your entry here. I'd be curious to read what you suggested and why, so feel free to leave your entry below or email it to me. Thanks a lot, and good luck!

February 6th radio show...

... is now online and available for your listening pleasure. This program was mostly an all-news show, but constitutes the beginning of a series on Goddard Space Flight Center, the NASA research facility which has played a large role in developing, building, and maintaining some of NASA's most successful missions - such as the Hubble Space Telescope, Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) - which discovered the hot and cold spots, and the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (CGRO) - which for a long time was the only source of information on Gamma Ray Bursts and other high-energy phenomena, to name a few. I'll post more on this series later but, first, the synopsis of this week's show:

• News: NASA's Deep Space Network broadcasts Beatles song "Across the Universe" across the universe.
• Solar System: Messenger (NASA), in its first flyby of Mercury before it orbits this planet, uncovers evidence for recent volcanic activity, identifies deep impact craters, discovers a weird spider-like feature on the surface, and determines that Mercury's magnetosphere is strong enough to protect its surface; Venus Explorer (ESA) uses carbon monoxide to trace the motion of low atmosphere winds on Venus; lots of Mars news - high-altitude ice dense enough to cause shadows are seen by OMEGA instrument on Mars Express (ESA), HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (NASA) discovers features of Martian surface which indicate the presence of high-speed winds, HRSC on Mars Express (ESA) identifies features in Terby crater which were likely carved by water, and 3D map of Martian surface compiled using HRSC images released; Hubble images massive storms on Jupiter that originate deep in Jupiter's atmosphere; Cassini determines that in the densest parts of Saturn's rings particles are even spaced - origin for this unknown, and some neat Cassini tools are now available online; dust captured by Stardust as it passed by Comet 81p/Wild 2 has same chemical composition as asteroids, which implies that some comets may have initially formed in the asteroid belt and then moving to the outer Solar System or that, when the Solar System was forming, material was moved around.
• Magellanic Clouds: Hyper-velocity star HE 0437-5439, currently in the Milky Way, believed to have originated in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC); peanut-shaped nebula DEM L316 in the LMC actually two different supernova remnants - one produced by the explosion of a white dwarf, the other by a massive star - with two very different ages which coincidently overlap on the sky; detection of a large Hydrogen cloud leading from the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds to Milky Way, believed to indicate where Magellanic clouds are going next.
• Wednesday Morning Astronomer: (an Astronomer's response to this) Fast-moving neutron star RX J0822-4300 requires a huge power source to make it moving so fast, as will be the case for any spaceship which can travel interstellar distances in a reasonable amount of time.
• Calendar of upcoming science events in the greater New York City / Poughkeepsie area.
• Description of Goddard Space Flight Center.

Hope you enjoy and please leave any questions / comments below or email them to me. Thanks a lot for listening -- Yosi

3D Map of Mars

The European Space Agency recently released a 3D map of Mars, made by combining images of the Martian surface taken with the High Resolution Stereo Camera on board Mars Express. They are absolutely gorgeous, and are available here. Enjoy!

Partial Solar Eclipse in the Southern Hemisphere

Will take place on February 7th, over New Zealand, most of Antarctica and parts of Australia. For more info, go to spaceweather.com. As always, if you take any pictures, I'd be more than happy to link to them from here.

January 30th radio show...

is now online and ready for download (you need something to listen to during the halftime show of the Super Bowl, right?). This was the third all-news show in a row, and I discussed:

• News: Telescope Array, a new high energy cosmic-ray observatory in Utah, starts taking data; asteroid 2007 TU24 flew within 300,000 miles of the Earth on January 29th.
• General Relativity: Hubble Space Telescope detects a double Einstein ring - the result of two galaxies being directly behind a very massive object which distorts their image into a circle - an example of "strong lensing" predicted by general relativity; flaring from the super-massive black hole OJ287 in the center of a distant galaxy result of another black hole orbiting it, timing of flaring consistent with what expected from general relativity; small distortions in the shape of galaxies ("weak lensing", also predicted by general relativity) behind massive galaxy clusters Abell 901 and 902 used to map out the distribution of dark matter in this cluster.
• Galaxy Cluster / Large Scale Structure: High energy X-ray detected from Ophiuchus galaxy cluster by Integral the result of electrons being accelerated to very high energies (higher than that in the most powerful particle accelerators on Earth) in the gas between galaxies; galaxies detected by Spitzer in filaments of gas leading to galaxy cluster Abell 1763.
• Black Holes: Super-massive black holes in the center of galaxies which produce narrow flows of relativistic gas called "jets" believed to be spinning very rapidly; several super-massive black holes found in galaxies without bulges - previously believed to not be possible, or at least very rare.
• Calendar of upcoming events in the greater New York / Hudson Valley area
• Neutron Stars: XMM-Newton measures mass, radius of neutron stars, which implies that they are made of "normal", but extremely dense, matter.

Hope you enjoy listening, and please leave any questions or comments below.

Yosi

New Cassini Videos

NASA has put a new online tools that shows you exactly where the Cassini spacecraft, which is currently orbiting Saturn, is as well as what it is looking at. Click here if you are interested. Sounds pretty neat to me.