Description of October 15th Radio Show: Star Formation, Planet Formation, and Massive Stars

Long available here, below is the detailed description of this radio show:

• News: Evidence that boundaries of sunspots play an important role in the producing the Solar wind (link); NASA's spacecraft MESSENGER completes second flyby of Mercury, images a substantial portion of Mercury's surface never observed before (link); ESA spacecraft Venus Express observes the Earth to use as a template for studying extrasolar planets; Mars Odyssey shifting orbit around Mars to better measure the spectrum of interesting regions of the Martian surface; Phoenix Mars Lander obtains new samples for study (link); asteroid collides with Earth exactly when and where as predicted; Spitzer spacecraft releases images of Comet Holmes obtained after its eruption last year, show large dust grains ejected during this event; Cassini flew by Saturn's moon Enceladus again last week to better study the plumes emanating from its surface (link), recent flyby of Saturn's moon Titan - the largest moon in the Solar system - by Cassini reveals that Titan's atmosphere can hold onto Saturn's magnetic field as it passes through (link), and Cassini images a massive cyclone at Saturn's North Pole similar to the one long seen at Saturn's South Pole (link); IBEX spacecraft to study particle accelerated at the outer boundary of the Solar System ready for launch (link); ESA has delived all of its instruments to the Indian Lunar satellite Chandrayaan-1; new crew departed for International Space Station; congrats to Dr. Ellen Ochoa, deputy director of NASA's Johnson Space Center, for being the first female recipient of the "Engineer of the Year" award given at the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Conference; research at Queen's University in UK developing a robotic system to repair satellites in space (link); ESA to test Intermediate Experiment Vehicle in 2012; NASA examines heat shield from Apollo mission to help design new lunar crew vehicle (link); NASA studying possibility of putting a large liquid mirror on the Moon; NASA issues 2008 edition of Spinoff magazine, available here.
• Wednesday Morning Astronomer (an Astronomer's response to this ESPN column): I agree that commercial rocket launches are a long, way, away from being a viable alternative. However, the lack of sunspots seen recently from the Sun isn't really a problem, and the reversal of Earth's magnetic field is going to take 100s if not 1000s of year, not occur during 2012.
• Calendar of upcoming events in the greater New York / Poughkeepsie area.
• Molecular Clouds and the Formation of Stars and Planets: Observation of a molecular cloud by astronomers in the Canary Islands discovers naphthalene, a precursor to amino acids (link); Spitzer observations of star forming region W5 show evidence for star formation being triggered by stars which just formed in the area (link); a similar process believed to be occurring in the star forming region NGC 346 located in the Small Magellanic Cloud (link); this is evidence that the Solar System was the result of a shock wave collided with its progenitor gas cloud (link); infrared survey of the Milky Way done using Spitzer space telescope detects stars in all phases of their creation - from the proto-stars created by the collapse of their natal molecular clouds to young stars blowing holes in the interstellar medium after they "turn on" (link; evidence for stars forming in the gas stripped from a galaxy as it collides with another galaxy (link); ESO's Very Large Telescope uses optical interferometry to study the structure of the disk formed by the collapse of a dense cloud of gas into a star(link); evidence for water being formed and destroyed in the outflows of material from this disk as it collapses onto the central star; chemical compositions of comets suggests that material flowed from the inner part of this disk to the outer part as our Sun formed (link 1, link 2); isotopic abundance of Oxygen in early Solar system changed during the formation of the Sun (link); asteroids in the Solar System believed to contain carbon molecules which can survive entry into the Earth's atmosphere and possibly be building blocks for life on the Earth (link); gap observed in the gas and dust disk around a young star believed to be evidence for a planet forming there (link); future telescopes believed might be able to detect disk gaps formed by planets as small as Mars (link); astronomers at University of Toronto might have made an actual picture of a planet orbiting another star (link); bizzare new exoplanet found - not sure if it is a planet or a brown dwarf (link); evidence for recent collision between two planets seen around distant star BD+20 307 (link); most massive star in Milky Way weiged in at over 110 times that of the Sun (link).

Hope you enjoyed this program and, as always, any and all feedback is appreciated. Again, thank you very much for listening.