COMING EVENTS Galaxy Monsters

SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES

Dr. Greg Rudnick Physics & Astronomy, KU

Friday, Dec. 9, 2011 7:30 PM

2001 Malott Hall

Public Observing Sunday December 04

Prairie Park Nature Center 8:00 PM

President

Rick Heschmeyer rcjbm@sbcglobal.net

University Advisor Dr. Bruce Twarog btwarog@ku.edu

Webmaster Howard Edin

howard@howardedin.com

Observing Clubs Doug Fay

dfay@ku.edu

Report from the Officers: REMINDER: our last public observing session of the year, weather permitting, is SUNDAY, December 04, starting at 8PM. After a hectic start to the month of November, we are back to the regular monthly schedule with our end-of-year, holiday celebration. Our guest speaker is Dr. Greg Rudnick, KU professor of Physics and Astronomy and a leading expert on observational studies of galaxies that reveal the fundamental nature of their origin and evolu-tion. His focus will be on supermassive black holes, normally located in the central cores of galaxies, and their impact on galactic evolution. The event will include some holiday refreshments and a collection of door

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Volume 37 Number 12 December 2011

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INSIDE THIS ISSUE

Astro Stuff (continued) 2

Black Hole Birth 3

NASA Space Place 4

December Meeting Poster 5

30 Doradus 6

Lemaitre’s Law? 7

Jabbah & Associates 8

Stellar Life and Death 9

Lemaitre’s Law (continued) 10

Astronomy Stuff for the Holidays By Bill Pellerin, Houston Astronomical Society

Those of us who are astronomy enthusiasts are often asked by family and friends to identify an inexpensive item that we’d enjoy receiving as a gift. The purpose of this article is to identify several items that you may enjoy and provide you with the infor-mation you need to hand off to your gift-giver. The range of prices for these items is about $10 to about $200. You should be able to find something you need that fits the budget of the giver (even if you’re giving to yourself). I have no financial interest in any company or product mentioned here… just so you know. Lunawheel Moon Phase Calculator—$17.50 (includes shipping) from http://www.lunawheel.com. This gadget calculates the moon phase for any date 2000 years in the past or 2000 years in the future. Figure out if any day is good for observ-ing (lunar or deep sky). There are other interesting gadgets at the web site, too. Casio PAS400B-5 Wristwatch — about $30 from http://www.amazon.com . I’ve had one of these for years. In addition to telling you the mundane things like the time and date, it also tells you the moon phase, and sunrise and sunset times. (It doesn’t tell you moonrise and moonset times, though.) It’s marketed as a fishing watch, and there are other similar models in the Casio line. You have to enter your latitude and longitude manually. Fishing vest -- ~ $30 - $40 from various sources. Do an Internet search for ‘fishing vest’ and you’ll find plenty of these to buy. These are valuable to amateur astrono-mers because they have lots of pockets. field and it’s great. Small tool kit – Lots of these are available at computer stores and other general stores. When you go for an observing run it’s always a good idea to take a few tools along, so a small tool kit could save the day (night, actually). You don’t need the best possible tools, because these won’t get a lot of use. I have one that has small pliers, a screwdriver (with interchangeable bits), hex You can use these pockets for eye-pieces, filters, notepads, snacks, pens, flashlights, (small) sky maps, hand warmers, etc. I have one of these that I use on the observing wrenches, wire cutters, and so on. It’s good to know all that stuff is available if I need it.

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A Holiday Welcome to new club members Bill Dymacek and Maria Audrey Juarez

About the Astronomy Associates of Lawrence

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The club is open to all people interested in sharing their love for astronomy. Monthly meetings are typically on the second Fri-day of each month and often feature guest speakers, presentations by club members, and a chance to exchange amateur as-tronomy tips. Approximately the last Sunday of each month we have an open house at the Prairie Park Nature Center. Periodic

star parties are scheduled as well. For more information, please contact the club officers:our president, Rick Heschmeyer at rcjbm@sbcglobal.net, our webmaster, Gary Webber, at gwebber@ku.edu, or our faculty advisor, Prof. Bruce Twarog at

btwarog@ku.edu. Because of the flexibility of the schedule due to holidays and alternate events, it is always best to check the Web site for the exact Fridays and Sundays when events are scheduled. The information about AAL can be found at

http://www.ku.edu/~aal. Copies of the Celestial Mechanic can also be found on the web at

http://www.ku.edu/~aal/celestialmechanic

prizes.

A change in the administration of the AAL: after a decade of service as the Webmaster for the AAL website, Gary Webber is passing the baton to Howard Edin. Many thanks to Gary for his efforts to maintain and improve the site over all these years. If you have suggestions for addi-tions, improvements, and alterations to the AAL page, please contact Howard at how-ard@howardedin.com. Long-Term Planning I: On a more long-term view of events, the club has been contacted by the ASKC, the amateur club of Kansas City. The ASKC has volunteered to host the next Mid-States Regional Astronomical League (MSRAL) conference, scheduled for June 2012. Eric Bogatin is the new chair of the conference. The group is trying to have the conference on the UMKC campus and is working with Dr. Dan McIntosh of UMKC to coordinate. Eric has asked if AAL would be interested in getting involved in helping with the conference planning and execu-tion. This will be an item of discussion at the December meeting. Long-Term Planning II: AL-CON 2012 has been scheduled for July 4-7, 2012 in Chicago! Any suggestions for improving the club or newsletter are always welcome.

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The Observer’s Handbook 2012 – $26.95, published by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, http://rasc.ca/handbook. This is a great publication showing you what is going on in the sky in 2012. It’s not a substitute for a good set of sky charts, or the electronic equivalent, but absolutely worth having. Darkness -- $1.99 from the iTunes app store. This little app tells you when the sunrise and sunset will happen for your location, the moon phase, the moonrise and moonset times, and the time of astronomical twilight. Astronomical twilight is the time at which the sun is about 15 degrees below the horizon. The sky is not as dark as it will be, but it is dark enough to begin observ-ing of brighter objects. Astronomical dusk, when the sun is at least 18 degrees below the horizon is not reported by this soft-ware. There is another app, called ‘Phases’ which provides similar information, but it is more focused on the moon. Sky and Telescope’s Pocket Sky Atlas – If you’re still use paper maps, this is a great set to have. This atlas is small and easy to carry (although you’d need a big pocket to put it in), and it includes stars down to 7th magnitude (which you’d be hard-pressed to see from most sites), and 1500 deep sky objects. The book is spiral bound, so it lays flat on your observing table. This atlas does not include observing lists or descriptions of the objects on the charts. You’ll need to bring an observing list with you when you use this atlas. I have two of these – one at home, and one at my observing site. While I use my computer as my sky map, it’s good to have these maps in case my computer fails. Green Laser Pointer – Available from all the astronomy equipment sellers; at least one of them is available for about $70. (Doing an Internet search, I found some that are $10 or less – maybe these work, and maybe not. Buyer beware.) Although these are not welcomed on a field full of serious observers, they are indispensable when you’re doing a public star party. You’ve probably seen these. They shoot a green beam of laser light through the sky which reflects off the dust and moisture in the air. I’ve used mine to point to, say, Albireo when I’m showing the public Albireo in the telescope. Kids are amazed by these, but I never let them use the pointer. The problem is that sometimes they become more interested in the laser than in the sky. Observer’s Chair – If you don’t have one of these, you’ve probably seen one. The idea of these chairs is that the height of the seat is adjustable and so, for many telescopes, you can adjust the seat height so that you can look through the eyepiece while sitting down. You should not underestimate the value of being able to hold your body (and head) still while observing. It makes a huge difference. These are not cheap, at from $150 to $200, but they’re worth the money. I have only bought one of these and it has lasted me many years. Look for one that is robust and will last a while. As an example, go to http://www.telescope.com (Orion telescope), and search for item 05939.

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NASA's Chandra Adds to Black Hole Birth Announcement Over three decades ago, Stephen Hawking placed -- and eventually lost -- a bet against the existence of a black hole in Cygnus X-1. Today, astrono-mers are confident the Cygnus X-1 system contains a black hole, and with these latest stud-ies they have remarkably pre-cise values of its mass, spin, and distance from Earth. With these key pieces of information, the history of the black hole has

been reconstructed.

"This new information gives us strong clues about how the black hole was born, what it weighed and how fast it was spinning," said author Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cam-bridge, Mass. "This is exciting because not much is known about the birth of black holes." Reid led one of three papers -- all appearing in the November 10th issue of The Astrophysical Journal -- describing these new results on Cygnus X-1. The other papers were led by Jerome Orosz from San Diego State University and Lijun Gou, also from CfA.

Cygnus X-1 is a so-called stellar-mass black hole, a class of black holes that comes from the collapse of a massive star. The black hole is in close orbit with a massive, blue companion star. Using X-ray data from Chandra, the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, and the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics, a team of scientists was able to determine the spin of Cygnus X-1 with unprecedented accuracy, showing that the black hole is spinning at very close to its maximum rate. Its event horizon -- the point of no return for mate-rial falling towards a black hole -- is spinning around more than 800 times a second.

An independent study that compared the evolutionary history of the companion star with theoretical models indicates that the black hole was born some 6 million years ago. In this relatively short time (in astronomical terms), the black hole could not have pulled in enough gas to ramp up its spin very much. The implication is that Cygnus X-1 was likely born spinning very quickly. Using optical observations of the companion star and its motion around its unseen companion, the team made the most precise determination ever for the mass of Cygnus X-1, of 14.8 times the mass of the Sun. It was likely to have been almost this massive at birth, be-cause of lack of time for it to grow appreciably.

"We now know that Cygnus X-1 is one of the most massive stellar black holes in the Galaxy," said Orosz. "And, it's spinning as fast as any black hole we've ever seen."

Knowledge of the mass, spin and charge gives a complete description of a black hole, according to the so-called "No Hair" theorem. This theory postulates that all other information aside from these parameters is lost for eternity behind the event horizon. The charge for an astronomical black hole is expected to be almost zero, so only the mass and spin are needed. "It is amazing to me that we have a complete description of this aster-oid-sized object that is thousands of light years away," said Gou. "This means astronomers have a more com-plete understanding of this black hole than any other in our Galaxy."

The team also announced that they have made the most accurate distance estimate yet of Cygnus X-1 using the National Radio Observatory's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). The new distance is about 6,070 light years from Earth. This accurate distance was a crucial ingredient for making the precise mass and spin deter-minations. The radio observations also measured the motion of Cygnus X-1 through space, and this was com-bined with its measured velocity to give the three-dimensional velocity and position of the black hole. This work showed that Cygnus X-1 is moving very slowly with respect to the Milky Way, implying it did not receive a large "kick" at birth. This supports an earlier conjecture that Cygnus X-1 was not born in a supernova, but instead may have resulted from the dark collapse of a progenitor star without an explosion. The progenitor of Cygnus X-1 was likely an extremely massive star, which initially had a mass greater than about 100 times the sun be-fore losing it in a vigorous stellar wind.

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Re-thinking an Alien World: The Strange Case

of 55 Cancri e Forty light years from Earth, a rocky world named “55 Cancri e” circles perilously close to a stellar inferno. Completing one orbit in only 18 hours, the alien planet is 26 times closer to its parent star than Mercury is to the Sun. If Earth were in the same position, the soil beneath our feet would heat up to about 3200 F. Re-searchers have long thought that 55 Cancri e must be a wasteland of parched rock.

Now they’re thinking again. New observations by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that 55 Cancri e may be wetter and weirder than anyone imagined.

Spitzer recently measured the extraordinarily small amount of light 55 Cancri e blocks when it crosses in front of its star. These

transits occur every 18 hours, giving researchers repeated opportunities to gather the data they need to estimate the width, volume and density of the planet.

According to the new observations, 55 Cancri e has a mass 7.8 times and a radius just over twice that of Earth. Those properties place 55 Cancri e in the “super-Earth” class of exoplanets, a few dozen of which have been found. Only a hand-ful of known super-Earths, however, cross the face of their stars as viewed from our vantage point in the cosmos, so 55 Cancri e is better understood than most.

When 55 Cancri e was discovered in 2004, initial estimates of its size and mass were consistent with a dense planet of solid rock. Spitzer data suggest otherwise: About a fifth of the planet’s mass must be made of light elements and com-pounds—including water. Given the intense heat and high pressure these materials likely experience, researchers think the compounds likely exist in a “supercritical” fluid state.

A supercritical fluid is a high-pressure, high-temperature state of matter best described as a liquid-like gas, and a marvel-ous solvent. Water becomes supercritical in some steam turbines—and it tends to dissolve the tips of the turbine blades. Supercritical carbon dioxide is used to remove caffeine from coffee beans, and sometimes to dry-clean clothes. Liquid-fueled rocket propellant is also supercritical when it emerges from the tail of a spaceship.

On 55 Cancri e, this stuff may be literally oozing—or is it steaming? —out of the rocks.

With supercritical solvents rising from the planet’s surface, a star of terrifying proportions filling much of the daytime sky, and whole years rushing past in a matter of hours, 55 Cancri e teaches a valuable lesson: Just because a planet is similar in size to Earth does not mean the planet is like Earth.

It’s something to re-think about.

Get a kid thinking about extrasolar planets by pointing him or her to “Lucy’s Planet Hunt,” a story in rhyme about a girl who wanted nothing more than to look for Earth-like planets when she grew up. Go to http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/story-lucy.

The original research reported in this story has been accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The lead author is Brice-Olivier Demory, a post-doctoral associate in Professor Sara Seager’s group at MIT.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Artist’s rendering compares the size Earth with the rocky “super-Earth” 55 Cancri e. Its year is only about 18 hours long!

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30 Doradus and The Growing Tarantula Within This spiderweb-like tangle of gas and dust is a star-forming region called 30 Doradus. It is one of the largest such regions located close to the Milky Way galaxy, and is found in the neighboring galaxy Large Magellanic Cloud. About 2,400 massive stars in the center of 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula nebula, are producing intense radiation and powerful winds as they blow off material.

Multimillion-degree gas detected in X-rays (blue) by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory comes from shock fronts -- similar to sonic booms -- formed by these stellar winds and by supernova explosions. This hot gas carves out gigan-tic bubbles in the surrounding cooler gas and dust shown here in infrared light from NASA's Spitzer Space Tele-scope (orange).

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In 1974, soon after Cygnus X-1 became a good candidate for a black hole, Stephen Hawking placed a bet with fel-low astrophysicist Kip Thorne, a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, that Cyg-nus X-1 did not contain a black hole. This was treated as an insurance policy by Hawking, who had done a lot of work on black holes and general relativity. By 1990, however, much more work on Cygnus X-1 had strengthened the evidence for it being a black hole. With the help of family, nurses, and friends, Hawking broke into Thorne's of-fice, found the framed bet, and conceded.

"For forty years, Cygnus X-1 has been the iconic example of a black hole. However, despite Hawking's concession, I have never been completely convinced that it really does contain a black hole -- until now," said Thorne. "The data and modeling described in these three papers at last provide a completely definitive description of this binary sys-tem."

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Was the Real Discovery of the Expanding Universe Lost in Translation?

The greatest astronomical discovery of the 20th century may have been credited to the wrong person. But it turns out to have been nobody's fault except for that of the actual original discoverer himself.

Writing in the November 10th issue of the journal Nature, astrophysicist Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute has put to bed a growing conspiracy theory about who was fairly credited for discovering the expanding universe.

For nearly a century, American astronomer Edwin P. Hubble has held the fame for this landmark discovery, which would recast all of 20th century astronomy. Hubble reported that the universe is uniformly expanding in all directions. It solved Ein-stein's dilemma of explaining why the universe didn't already collapse under its own gravity.

Ironically, Hubble never got a Nobel Prize for this discovery, though astronomers from two teams who independently uncov-ered evidence for an accelerating universe won the 2011 Noble Prize in Physics. But Hubble did get the most celebrated telescope of modern history named after him.

Hubble published his landmark paper in which he determined the rate of expansion of the universe in 1929. This was based on the apparent recessional velocities (deduced from redshifts) of galaxies, as previously measured by astronomer Vesto Slipher, coupled to distances to the same galaxies, as determined by Hubble.

Hubble's analysis showed that the farther the galaxy was, the faster it appeared to be receding. The rate of cosmic expan-sion is now known as the Hubble Constant.

But two years earlier, a Belgian priest and cosmologist, Georges Lemaître, published very similar conclusions, and he calcu-lated a rate of expansion similar to what Hubble would publish two years later.

Lemaître based his analysis on Slipher's same redshift data, which he combined with estimates of galaxy distances inferred from Hubble's 1926 published observations.

But Lemaître's discovery went unnoticed because it was published in French, in a rather obscure Belgian science journal called the Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles (Annals of the Brussels Scientific Society).

The story would have ended there, except that Lemaître's work was later translated and published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. When published in 1931, some of Lemaître's own calculations from 1927, of what would be later called the Hubble Constant, were omitted!

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Jabbah and Associates WISE Space Telescope Release

No, it’s not a gang of intergalactic mobsters from the famous Star Wars movies. Jabbah is the name of the bright star right of center, surrounded by a red colored dust cloud. The Arabic name means “the forehead of the scorpion.” This view from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, takes in an area of the sky in the constellation of Scorpius surrounding Jabbah, which is larger than a grid of 8 by 8 full moons. Though Jabbah appears to be a single star, it is actually a whole system of stars (possibly as many as seven), each of which is many times more massive, larger, hotter and more luminous than the Sun. The Jabbah system is located about 440 light-years away from us and lights up a giant cloud of dust and gas near it. The cloud near Jabbah is designated IC 4592, and the portion farthest away to the far left in the image is IC 4601, which is another featured WISE image. The other bright stars in this image are mostly part of the "Upper Scorpius Association" and were probably once all born in the same cluster about 5 million years ago. Other WISE featured images that contain members of this asso-ciation are IC 4601, Rho Ophiuchus, and DG 129. These stars are all moving apart as the cluster ages, and are probably no longer bound to each other by gravity. Another star of interest in the image is 9 Scorpii, located in the lower right corner with the bright red dust cloud to one side of it surrounding it. 9 Scorpii is another very massive star that is probably a member of the Upper Scorpius Association. It is also moving through space at an enormous speed of 1,000 kilometers per second (224,000 miles per hour). With such a speed, the star may be a runaway star once in a system with a more massive member that exploded as a supernova and sent 9 Scorpii zooming through space. The red cloud near it may be a bow shock in front of it similar to the stars called Alpha Cam and Zeta Oph, also highlighted in WISE featured images.This image was made from observations by all four infrared detectors aboard WISE. Blue and cyan (blue-green) represent infrared light at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns, which is primarily from stars, the hottest objects pictured. Green and red represent light at 12 and 22 microns, which is pri-marily from warm dust.

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NASA's Hubble Finds Stellar Life and Death in a Globular Cluster A new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows globular cluster NGC 1846, a spherical collection of hun-dreds of thousands of stars in the outer halo of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring dwarf galaxy of the Milky Way that can be seen from the southern hemisphere. The most intriguing object, however, doesn't seem to belong in the cluster. It is a faint green bubble in the white box near the bottom center of the image. This so-called "planetary nebula" is the aftermath of the death of a star. As a star exhausts its internal fuel for nuclear fusion, the structural changes in the interior cause the star to expand until its outer layers are ejected, forming a spherical shell of gas that carries off the outer atmosphere of the star. The shell of gas glows due to ionization of the of the atoms by the ultraviolet photons emitted from hotter layers of the star exposed by the ejected at-mosphere. Repeated ejections of this type are part of the final phases of a red giants life and should leave be-hind a white dwarf star. The sun will end its life in this way 5 billion years from now.

AAL Astronomy Associates of Lawrence

University of Kansas Malott Hall 1251 Wescoe Hall Dr, Room 1082 Lawrence, KS 66045-7582

Celestial Mechanic November 2011

The fact that paragraphs were missing from the translated paper has been known (although not widely) since 1984. There has been persistent speculation among astronomers over "who dunnit?" Did the Monthly Notices editors cut the para-graphs out? Did Edwin Hubble himself have an influencing hand and censor the paper to eliminate any doubt that he was the original discoverer of the expanding universe?

After going through hundreds of pieces of correspondence of the Royal Astronomical Society, as well as minutes of the RAS meetings, and material from the Lemaître Archive, Livio has discovered that Lemaître omitted the passages himself when he translated the paper into English!

In one of two "smoking-gun letters" uncovered by Livio, Lemaître wrote to the editors: "I did not find advisable to reprint the provisional discussion of radial velocities which is clearly of no actual interest, and also the geometrical note, which could be replaced by a small bibliography of ancient and new papers on the subject."

The remaining question is why Lemaître essentially erased evidence for credit due to him, for first discovering (at least tentatively) the expanding universe.

Livio concludes, "Lemaître's letter also provides an interesting insight into the scientific psychology of some of the scien-tists of the 1920s. Lemaître was not at all obsessed with establishing priority for his original discovery. Given that Hubble's results had already been published in 1929, he saw no point in repeating his more tentative earlier findings again in 1931."

Perhaps in some alternative history parallel universe, people are marveling at the deep-space pictures from the Lemaître Space Telescope.

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