One story is dominating the astronomy news this week – the announcement of exoplanet and, in the words of some sections of the media, potential ‘Earth twin’ Kepler-22b. I don’t want to talk about that though; I want to give some attention to a few other interesting bits of astro-news that are in danger of being eclipsed. If you do want to discuss the much hyped new planet however, it’s the topic for this week’s astronomy twitter journal club.
Firstly, a new era of submillimetre astronomy began at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii with the unveiling of the SCUBA-2 camera. This large instrument is the successor to SCUBA, which I’ve written about here before. Indeed it’s its faster, more sensitivity son, and should hopefully prove an invaluable tool in understanding the dusty Universe. To do this it has to be cooled to within 0.1 degree of absolute zero which the press release confidently states makes it “…colder than anything in the Universe that we know of”. Except, as was quickly pointed out on twitter, the Planck satellite which also has to operate at these chilly temperature.
The next story on my list is an intriguing e-petition calling for astronomy weather reports to be included in the normal weather forecast:
We the undersigned request that The Met Office produces regular Stargazing / Astronomy focused weather information, to be shown as part of the BBC Weather reports. Not only would this be a boon to amateur astronomers, it will also help keep the study of Astronomy prevalent in the public consciousness, which in turn helps encourage the study of science, which should be a boon to the economy.
Onto the Hubble Space Telescope and the publication of the 10,000th refereed scientific paper using its observations. Reaching this milestone really reflects how Hubble has managed to remain a cutting-edge instrument throughout its long life. The paper in question reports the finding of the faintest supernova ever associated with a long duration gamma ray burst – you can read it here. I wonder if the Space Telescope Science Institute will send the authors a prize for their achievement?
I was going to end with this story reporting the discovery of the most massive black holes ever seen. However, I really want to devote a separate post to this (coming soon, hopefully). Instead, here’s one of the most iconic images of our own planet – the blue marble hanging in space – which was taken nearly 40 years ago today. Thanks to Galileo’s Pendulum for the tip.
Last December I was at an ALMA workshop, predicting that there would be beautiful first images from the new array within a year. Today one arrived, and it didn’t disappoint:
This is ALMA’s view of the giant clouds of star-forming gas (red, pink and yellow) in the Antennae – a pair of colliding spiral galaxies – combined with the stars seen in the same system by the optical Hubble Space Telescope (blue). For lots more detail on the story check out this nice BBC News article. This image was made with only a small fraction of the dishes that will make up the final array so, all in all, the future’s looking pretty good for ALMA.