Description of August 27th radio show: Stars

As promised, below is a description of the August 27th edition of this radio show, already available here. On this program, I discussed:

• News: Phoenix Mars Lander to get its deepest soil sample yet in the upcoming weeks; NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity climbs out of Victoria Crater where it had spent more than half of its time on Mars; Visual Monitoring Camera on ESA's Mars Express turned into a webcam (watch here); ESA's Rosetta spacecraft on-track to rendezvous with asteroid (2867) Steins on September 5th; ESA about to launch GOCE spacecraft to measure the Earth's gravitational field (link); ESA funds a team of engineers to develop mission-critical control systems for future robotic missions to Mars (link); NASA invites media to experience lunar life; NASA seeks input for a GPS-like system on the Moon (link); NASA and Alliant Tech Systems investigates rocket failure on August 22nd; leak shuts down Chinese PLATO observatory in Antarctica; JPL opened doors to students this summer, go here for details; CA high school students chat with NASA astronaut Greg Chamitoff who is currently on-board the International Space Station; NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman talks about life onboard the International Space Station at the American Museum of Natural History.
• Calendar of upcoming science events in the greater New York / Poughkeepsie area.
• Stars: Stars come in a very wide range of masses (by far the most important characteristic which determines the properties of a star), and have very different properties - brightness, evolution, lifetime - across this range. Brown dwarfs are very low mass stars, only slightly more massive than Jupiter, with a mass too low to trigger fusion in their core. There is increasing evidence that maybe brown dwarfs are formed differently than stars or planets (link). Sun-like star tau Bootis observed to flip the orientation of its magnetic field, just like the Sun does every sunspot cycle (link). Also, very bright flare observed from red dwarf EV Lacertae, 1000x more powerful than a normal Solar flare - believed to be produced by this stars very powerful magnetic fields (link). Massive stars burn much hotter than the Sun. As a result, one can get mixing between gas at the edge and gas in the core through convection (hot gas rises, cool gas falls.) A recent study of this process in massive stars found that more complicated than previously thought, possibly not due solely to rotation (link). Light echoes used to measure distance to Cepheid variable stars, a key link in the distance scale astronomers use to measured the distance to far-away galaxies and supernovae. New "brightest" star in Galaxy possibly discovered by Spitzer Space Telescope (link). ESO's VLT celebrates 10 year by imaging cloud of gas expelled by eta Carinae, one of the most massive stars in the Milky Way (link). Massive belt of gas and dust discovered around red supergiant WOH G64 in the Large Magellanic Cloud (link).

Thank you very much for listening, hope you enjoyed. As always, please email me or leave below any comments, questions, or concerns you might have.