The big news this week is the discovery that Theta 1 Orions C, a bright star in the Trapezium in Orion (that is a collection of bright stars in the Orion nebula, just below his belt) is actually a binary star.
What’s more exciting is the discovery was made by the VLTI in Chile, an optical interferometer with amazing resolving power. Light from the 4 telescopes can be combined in a way to increase the resolving power to be equivalent to a single telescope with a much larger mirror.
In other space imaging news, an images of exoplanet HR 8799b was found in 10 year old images collected by the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) instrument on Hubble. It turns out the image had been collected many years ago, but the existence of the planet was not known at the time. HR 8799b was officially “discovered” at the Gemini North observatory in 2007. Later examination of the NICMOS images revealed the planet actually was imaged much earlier. In astronomy, it’s actually fairly common for some celestial object to be “discovered” and then later found in much earlier images. The star HR 8799 has 3 known planets, each with 7-10 time the mass of Jupiter orbiting far from their sun. HR 8799 is about 1.5 times the size of our sun. The inner planet has a nearly circular orbit, and although the shapes of the orbits of the other planets are not known, they most likely orbit in a roughly 1:2:4 resonance. Although the planets are much larger than the gas giants of our solar system, there are many striking similarities between HR 8799 and our own solar system, including the possibility of undiscovered terrestrial planets in the inner solar system.
Meanwhile, on Mars, Spirit set a new driving record (for 5 wheel driving) and Opportunity is using the RAT, MI, Mossbauer Spectrometer, and X-Ray spectrometer on a new target found on Meridiani. Some of these instruments have not been used in years. As usual, HortonHeardaWho has posted some terrific images on his flickr photo stream, it is definitely worth taking a look.
In other news, LISA, an spacecraft designed to detect gravity waves scheduled for launch in 2018, should also be able to detect and measure the mass of near earth asteroids as they pass by. They are predicting they will be able to measure 1 or 2 NEAs per year. Also, Paragon Space Development Corporation plans to grow plants on the moon
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