Discoveries using the telescopes on Mauna Kea

[mermaid53]

Good site, thanks!

[TomK]

"Re-making planets after star-death"

"Astronomers Dr Jane Greaves, of the University of Cardiff, and Dr Wayne Holland, of the UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh, may have found an answer to the 25-year-old mystery of how planets form in the aftermath of a supernova explosion. The two researchers will present their work on Thursday 6 July at the National Astronomy Meeting at the University of Hull, and in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society."

https://phys.org/news/2017-07-re-making-...death.html

Basically, a supernova should clear out the immediate environment of any material plus destroy any existing planets, but it seems to be possible for planets to reform later on. The mechanism is probably the remaining neutron star (or pulsar) re-collecting enough material from the interstellar medium to form new planets. They used the JCMT on MK to make the observations with SCUBA and SCUBA-2; Wayne being the project scientist for both instruments.

It was nice to see this story. I've known Jane and Wayne for a couple of decades and they are both good friends. In particular, Wayne and I used to be the opposing captains in the annual UKIRT vs JCMT soccer match!

[rbakker]

Thank you as always for the great information Tom.
A small sidetrack: would a professional astronomer such as yourself be able to name the second-largest moon of Neptune? Just curious (it was a jackpot question in a pub quiz).

[TomK]

Good question!

Well, I couldn't answer that without looking it up, and I would be surprised if most pros could - it'd be the sort of question a planetary scientist might know though, and I guess a lot of amateurs would know. With my curiosity piqued, I actually asked colleagues the same question at work today. No one knew the answer! One person was close (it happened to be another astronomer living Puna!) who guessed at Nereid, which is the third largest, but no-one got the correct answer - Proteus.

[rbakker]

Thanks Tom. It's the second moon question I've had recently (the other was Pluto's moon). Obviously they didn't want anyone to win the jackpot this week. Proteus is an interesting moon, I read, discovered much later than Nereid, who was long thought to be the second largest Neptunian moon. So well done to that Puna astronomer! I'm off to learn all the second-largest planets...

PS If anyone ever hears of pub trivia in East Hawaii, please let me know.

[TomK]

No problem at all, it was a fun experiment!

Do you mean Pluto's main moon or the second largest? I'd have got the main moon in an instant (Charon), it's well-known especially amongst astronomers given the history of its discovery, but would have had no chance with the second largest (which, after looking it up, is either Nix or Hydra).

Don't know about pub quizzes here. Hopefully someone can answer that without looking it up.

PS. As I learned today, Nereid was discovered in 1949 by Kuiper, (and that's where the name Kuiper Belt comes from) and Proteus, despite being larger, was only discovered during the Voyager 2 flyby in 1989.

[rbakker]

Many planets in our solar system seem to have one main moon and the rest are just tiddlers. The question about Pluto also mentioned the pilot of the boat across the Styx so I knew what they were after. There was a question a while ago about Mars' two moons and someone at the table asked why we never see photos of a Mars landscape with two nice moons in the sky. Well, they're tiny, that's why, we're lucky to have such relatively thumping big moon.
I can't wait to see what the great telescopes on MK continue to discover about other planets, thank you to all of the astronomers.

[TomK]

rbakker - thought this would interest you. A few years ago I used the Pluto-Charon system to check that UKIRT was working properly after we'd switched from wide-field mode to Cassegrain mode (a mode in which we have specialist instruments that are used to observe only very small parts of the sky and individual objects). I was actually quite surprised to find that Pluto and Charon were easily resolved from each other despite not having calibrated the telescope's optical system.

http://apacificview.blogspot.com/2011/07...haron.html

[TomK]

A little over a week ago I posted this here:

"The Juno mission is about to end soon with the probe being destroyed when it makes a controlled entry into Jupiter's atmosphere, but as part of the "de-orbiting" process it is making some very close flybys of Jupiter and on July 10th will fly over the famous Red Spot at an altitude less than 6000 miles above the storm."

Both the Subaru and Gemini North Telescope on MK were going to be involved in preparing for this flyby although the weather at the summit hasn't been good for the last few nights, so right now am not sure how much they were able to contribute.

In any case, NASA has released the first unprocessed images of the event and they have also included some processed images from "citizen scientists". Once NASA has corrected and calibrated the data, I'm sure they will show some really stunning images of the Great Red Spot. Even the unprocessed images are incredible which isn't usually the case.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-...t-red-spot

[rbakker]

TomK - thanks, it did very much interest me. You have a great job! Fantastic pictures of Jupiter too.