12-04-2017, 05:50 PM
Apologies for not updating this thread recently, sometimes life takes over...
Anyway, a couple of things caught my eye recently:
"Measuring the length of a day on exoplanets"
Not only has the number of exoplanets become extraordinary, what we're starting to learn about them is progressing at an ever-increasing rate. Now it seems we can even measure the length of a day on some of them despite being several light-years away, thanks to some recent research carried out using observations from the Keck on MK.
"The astronomers used the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii—which is managed by Caltech, the University of California, and NASA—to measure the spin rate, or the length of a day, of three planetary-mass companions known as ROXs 42B b, GSC 6214-210 b, and VHS 1256-1257 b. They used an instrument at Keck called the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to dissect the light coming from the companions. As the objects spin on their axes, light from the side that is turning toward us shifts to shorter, bluer wavelengths, while light from the receding side shifts to longer, redder wavelengths. The degree of this shifting indicates the speed of a rotating body. The results showed that the three companions' spin rates ranged between 6 to 14 kilometers per second, similar to rotation rates of our solar system's gas giant planets Saturn and Jupiter."
https://phys.org/news/2017-12-bodies-tho...stars.html
In the meantime, what might have been thought a phenomenon specific to Earthlings may also be pissing off galaxies in a recent study by astronomers using the Gemini North observatory on MK.
"It seems like even black holes can’t resist the temptation to insert themselves unannounced into photographs. A cosmic photobomb found as a background object in images of the nearby Andromeda galaxy has revealed what could be the most tightly separated pair of supermassive black holes ever seen."
http://gemini.edu/node/12733
Anyway, a couple of things caught my eye recently:
"Measuring the length of a day on exoplanets"
Not only has the number of exoplanets become extraordinary, what we're starting to learn about them is progressing at an ever-increasing rate. Now it seems we can even measure the length of a day on some of them despite being several light-years away, thanks to some recent research carried out using observations from the Keck on MK.
"The astronomers used the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii—which is managed by Caltech, the University of California, and NASA—to measure the spin rate, or the length of a day, of three planetary-mass companions known as ROXs 42B b, GSC 6214-210 b, and VHS 1256-1257 b. They used an instrument at Keck called the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to dissect the light coming from the companions. As the objects spin on their axes, light from the side that is turning toward us shifts to shorter, bluer wavelengths, while light from the receding side shifts to longer, redder wavelengths. The degree of this shifting indicates the speed of a rotating body. The results showed that the three companions' spin rates ranged between 6 to 14 kilometers per second, similar to rotation rates of our solar system's gas giant planets Saturn and Jupiter."
https://phys.org/news/2017-12-bodies-tho...stars.html
In the meantime, what might have been thought a phenomenon specific to Earthlings may also be pissing off galaxies in a recent study by astronomers using the Gemini North observatory on MK.
"It seems like even black holes can’t resist the temptation to insert themselves unannounced into photographs. A cosmic photobomb found as a background object in images of the nearby Andromeda galaxy has revealed what could be the most tightly separated pair of supermassive black holes ever seen."
http://gemini.edu/node/12733