Image Source.

Sometimes, you just get these serendipitous moments. Yesterday, in the parking lot of the grocery store, there was a U-haul rental truck sporting a remarkably sophisticated graphic that explains the Manson impact structure in Iowa. When I got home, I went to the U-haul website, and discovered that they have a clear and beautifully self-contained tutorial on giant impacts. The site even explains the terms in the ballistic range equation, which gives the distance from impact that a piece of ejecta lands, given the radius and gravitational acceleration of the Earth, along with the ejection angle and the ejection velocity. And for those wanting more details, U-haul points to Jay Melosh’s Impact Cratering: A Geologic Process (one of the Oxford Monographs on Geology and Geophysics).

Inside the grocery store, at the checkout counter, I noticed that this week’s issue of The Sun is carrying a rather startling astronomically themed story:

Which brings me to the serendipity. Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll be engaging in a joint presentation/discussion with Chris McKay of NASA’s Ames Research Center on the topic of “Real Doomsdays: How Life Could End on Earth”. We’ll be discussing not just the long-term fate of life on Earth, but also the fate of the Earth itself. And indeed, a black hole plunge is one of a handful of fates that Earth might suffer in the ultra-distant future. If our planet isn’t engulfed by the red giant Sun, then it’ll eventually either be ejected into the utter isolation of the exponentially expanding intergalactic medium to slowly evaporate via nucleon decay, or it’ll wind up in the Milky Way-Andromeda central black hole. Presumably, that’s the eventuality that the editors of this week’s Sun are referring to.

Anyway, here are the details. The event is free, and is organized by Tucker Hiatt and the Bay Area Wonderfest organization:

WHO: UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist Greg Laughlin and NASA planetologist Chris McKay

WHAT: “Real Doomsdays: How Life Could End on Earth”

WHERE: Roxie Theater, 3117 – 16th Street, San Francisco

WHEN: 1:00-2:30 PM, Sunday, August 28, 2011

Image: ASTEP Telescope — Yan Fantei-Caujolle (2009)

Ready or not, HD 156846b, is less than a day away from its much-awaited periastron passage and transit opportunity. Let’s have a show of hands: If it’s dark, if the star is up (RA 17 20, Dec -19 20), and if you’re capable of 1% photometry, then you should be out there on the sky!

Mauro Barbieri, who led the HD 17156b transit discovery back in 2007, has been working very hard behind the scenes to orchestrate observing campaigns in various spots around the globe. This morning, he sent me three nights of baseline photometry from Claudio Lopresti, who has been observing from Italy. These baseline observations show how the increasing air-mass will likely lead to a downward drift in the light curve near the end of tonight’s observing session. If the best-fit prediction turns out to be correct (and assuming, of course, that the planet defies the geometric odds and actually occults the star) then it will be tough to convincingly bag the transit from southern Europe. The party, however, could easily start early…

Observatories in South America have a better chance. For example, at La Silla, there are ~6 hours during the 1-sigma transit window when it is both dark and when the star is at an air mass of less than two. Unfortunately, however, at the moment, the weather forecast for La Silla does not look good. The forecast at Cerro Paranal, however, is excellent.

The most exotic photometry is on tap from Dome C at elevation 3233M in Antarctica, where, barring clouds, rain or snow, the ASTEPS telescope is scheduled to observe. According to the Weather Underground, conditions at Dome C are currently overcast, calm and -88F. (“Feels like -88F”)

Just a few more days until the midpoint of the HD 156846b transit opportunity, which is a tough, but in my opinion, highly worthwhile challenge for small-telescope photometric observers. Given the parent star’s -19 degree declination, the best opportunities are south of the border. There is even speculation that an Antarctic time series will be obtained.

As is often the case, observers worldwide will be struggling with high air masses and twilight conditions. Because of this, it’s very important to obtain baseline photometry of HD 156846 on several nights both before and after the main opportunity. This will help inoculate against instances of transit fever.

And when the data come in? Lubos Brat has set up a globally accessible drop at the ETD, which I highly recommend. Quoting Lubos:

Photometry should be uploaded to TRESCA Observer’s log at http://var2.astro.cz/EN/obslog.php. Please use the target name HD156846 and observers project TRESCA while uploading the data. All data will be aggregated, and everybody can see the joined results at the page:
http://var2.astro.cz/EN/obslog.php?obs_id=1&projekt=TRESCA&star=HD156846

HOW TO START TO USE the Observer’s log:
1) Sign in to the var2.astro.cz server.
2) Click to link Observer’s logs
3) Click to Insert new data (Type object name HD156846 and observer project TRESCA)
4) With first data, your observer’s log will be created.
5) All questions can be sent to brat@pod.snezkou.cz

Here’s to clear skies!

The transit discovery opportunity for HD 156846b is fast approaching, and observations, especially for observers at southern latitudes, are very much in demand for the nights of August 23rd, 24th, and 25th. If you are considering observing, please see Lubos Brat’s campaign page at the Exoplanet Transit Database for more details.

And if you have a portable telescope/CCD combination, and a carbon footprint to match, why not consider a last-minute trip to Tahiti for on-the-spot observations? A quick check on Expedia shows that round-trip direct flights departing from Los Angeles this weekend can be had for a mere USD 1537:

HD 156846b clearly owes its current high-eccentricity orbit to ongoing Kozai oscillations driven by BD-19 4605B, a V=14.1 early M-dwarf binary companion to HD 156846 that lies at a projected separation of ~250 AU:

In all likelihood, HD 156846b is currently near the peak eccentricity of its Kozai cycle. During most of the planet’s history, it orbits with a significantly different inclination, and with a significantly less elongated orbit. Konstantin Batygin made some reasonable assumptions regarding the orbital properties of the companion star, and did an integration using the double-averaging method to show that the planet has likely not had sufficient time to lock its spin period to the pseudo-synchronous value. It’s thus quite likely that HD 156846b rotates with a close-to-primordial day of less than 10 hours (like Jupiter) rather than at the much longer pseudo-synchronous spin period that almost certainly characterizes all of the other currently known transiting planets on significantly eccentric orbits.

I’ve written on a number of occasions about the apparent preference for regular satellite and planetary systems in which the total mass contained in satellites is roughly one or two parts in ten thousand as much as that contained in the primary body. This works for the large population of super-Earth/sub-Neptune planets orbiting nearby stars, as well as for the giant planets in our own solar system. Applying this rule of thumb to HD 156846b suggests that it could be accompanied by a satellite with a fair fraction of Earth’s mass. Such a satellite, if located ~0.01 AU from the primary, would cause barycenter-related transit timing shifts of order 6 seconds, and would likely be dynamically stable against both three-body orbital disruption and tidal orbital decay. Veering into an even more speculative mode, such a satellite, like Titan or Ganymede, would likely have a volatile-rich composition. During the current warm, high-eccentricity phase, it might be spewing out a huge cloud of molecules that just might be visible using high-resolution transit spectroscopy…

But first things first! It’s got to be determined that the planet actually transits before one can responsibly engage in such flights of fancy.

We’re now a mere two weeks away from the HD 156846b transit opportunity. As I write, the planet is gathering speed as it plunges toward its steamy periastron encounter with its parent star (or more precisely, given the 49 parsec distance to HD 156846, back in the year 1851, the planet was plunging toward its steamy encounter with the parent star).

With a mass of at least ten Jupiter masses, HD 156846b is pushing the upper limit of the planetary regime. Like Jupiter and Neptune in our own solar system, but unlike all of the other well-characterized transiting extrasolar planets, its energy budget is likely dictated more by its residual heat of formation than by either tidal dissipation or the energy that it receives from its parent star as it circulates on its 360-day orbit.

Remarkably, objects that are very similar in mass and temperature to HD 156846b are starting to be discovered via direct imaging. In an ApJ letter from earlier this year, Luhman, Burgasser and Bochanski reported the discovery of a candidate brown dwarf which, if confirmed, has a positively shirtsleeves ~300K effective temperature and a mass of ~7 Jupiter masses.

This candidate, WD 0806-661 B, is in a ~2500 AU-wide orbit about a nearby white dwarf star that lies 19.2 parsecs away. It can be seen in Spitzer’s 4.5-micron band at two distinct epochs, and was flagged as a result of its common proper motion with its white dwarf primary. As it’s been detected so far only at 4.5 microns, its spectrum is largely unknown. It has a good chance, however, of signing on the dotted line as a first representative of the Y spectral class.

Which underscores the importance that HD 156846b will have it it turns out to transit. At V=6.5, the parent star is very bright, over 2.5 times brighter than either HD 189733 or HD 209458. The transmission spectrum for HD 156846, especially on the cold limb, would thus give an important and detailed clue toward what one might expect from the spectra of field Y dwarfs. And given that one of these guys could be lurking just a light year or two or three away, and given that the WISE preliminary release is on line and available, that’d be a very interesting clue indeed…

Seems like every other year, a good opportunity arises for small-telescope photometric transit observers to participate in a big discovery. In 2007, oklo.org egged everyone on to observe HD 17156 during the transit window of its e=0.69, P=21.2-day planet, and the results were quite satisfactory. In early 2009, there was the exciting detection of the HD 80606b transit. This year, there’s a very interesting opportunity to see whether HD 156846b (RA 17 20 34.31129, DEC -19 20 01.4991, V=6.5) occults its parent star.

HD 156846 b was discovered by the Geneva Team in 2007, and weighs in at a hefty 10+ Jupiter masses. Its orbital period is 359.6 days, just short of a year, and it has a very high eccentricity, e=0.848. The orbital geometry is quite favorable, leading to a ~5% chance that transits will be observable. In addition, the transit window is well constrained as a consequence of the large radial velocity swing that the planet induces in its parent star. Here’s the set-up, with the inner solar system orbits shown for scale:

Observers worldwide should plan to be on the sky this August 23rd, 24th, and 25th, a bit more than three weeks from now. Be sure to check back at oklo.org and to follow twitter.com/transitsearch for updates and interesting details as this opportunity draws near!

Galex Far-UV survey image centered on 40 Eridani B.

Like many kids, I enjoyed reading The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis. Especially evocative were the descriptions of the dying planet Charn:

The wind that blew in their faces was cold, yet somehow stale. They were looking from a high terrace and there was a great landscape spread out below them.

Low down and near the horizon hung a great red sun, far bigger than our sun. Digory felt at once that it was also older than ours: a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon that world. To the left of the sun, and higher up, there was a single star, big and bright. Those were the only two things to be seen in the dark sky; they made a dismal group. And on the earth in every direction, as far as the eye could reach, there spread a vast city in which there was no living thing to be seen.

The story was written in the early 1950s, just as the future evolution of the Sun was beginning to be understood, but before the Henyey technique for computing full stellar evolutionary sequences had been developed. The scene, while compelling, seems to make little astrophysical sense. It describes a parent star on its ascent of the red giant branch, yet the star’s overall luminosity seems clearly on the wane. In truth, as a red giant swells up, its overall luminosity increases drastically, and the end game for habitable planets consists of fire rather than ice.

Earlier this year, however, there was a very interesting paper by Eric Agol that discusses the possibility of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. These planets, if they exist, would be spin-synchronized and would have orbital periods of order 10-20 hours. On such a world, the demise of habitability occurs as the parent white dwarf loses its heat of formation, and grows gradually redder, even as it maintains the same angular size in its fixed position in the sky.

Here’s the relevant summary diagram from Agol’s paper. As the parent white dwarf cools, it travels vertically up the plot.

Now admittedly, this set-up is sailing pretty close to the wind. Indeed, I’ve largely come to adopt the opinion that the whole idea of the “habitable zone” is the modern-day equivalent of Bode’s Law. And furthermore, it’s not exactly clear how one might arrange for habitable planets to be orbiting white dwarfs. The reason I’m enthusiastic is that Agol’s scenario is eminently testable. If white dwarfs harbor Earth-sized planets in quantity, then they can potentially be discovered by backyard astronomers. A one-Earth radius planet on an a=0.013 AU orbit around a typical 0.6 solar-mass white dwarf produces a central transit depth of ~50% during a transit that lasts one or two minutes.

Bruce Gary, who has been a leader in the area of transit detection using small telescopes, has recently organized a pilot photometric project to detect transiting planets orbiting white dwarfs. Here’s his description of the project from an announcement that he sent around last week:

All,

This is a “call for observers” for a 1-month project to evaluate feasibility of amateurs and others to detect white dwarf transits using available hardware.

This should be viewed as a “pilot project” designed to provide a first evaluation of the abundance of exoplanets orbiting white dwarfs in short-period orbits (near the habitable zone). It can play a role in designing a funded project using professional hardware to conduct a long-term and more comprehensive white dwarf (WD) transit search. Professional astronomer guidance is provided by Prof. Eric Agol, who has written several articles on the subject of exoplanets in WD habitable zones. I will archive light curves at a web site in a manner similar to what I did for the Amateur Exoplanet Archive (AXA).

I have tentatively identified September as the observing month. Coordinated observing by partners is encouraged to permit corroboration of any interesting light curve feature. Note that since WDs are very small, comparable to the Earth, a central crossing by an Earth-size exoplanet will produce a very deep transit feature, possibly causing a temporary complete fade. Another consequence of the small size is that transit lengths will be short, typically a couple minutes. In spite of the great depth the search for WD transits is an observational challenge because of the short length. The chance of success in detecting a WD transit may be small but the payoffs for success are great!

Anyone with experience observing exoplanet transits is qualified for this project. However, of the known 20,000 or so WDs only 168 are brighter than V-mag = 14.0. This means that telescope aperture matters, and for most WD targets an aperture of at least 10 inches will be needed.

The project will go by the name Pro-Am White dwarf Monitoring, or PAWM. A description of PAWM can be found at the following web site: http://brucegary.net/WDE/

Please forward this e-mail to anyone who might be interested in participating as an observer or professional adviser. Reply to this e-mail if you would like to receive occasional updates on PAWM.

Bruce L. Gary
Hereford Arizona Observatory

A very exciting project! Once September starts, I’ll be checking the PAWM site to watch how the survey unfolds…

A few weeks ago, I was in West Texas, seeing first-hand places that were familiar only from articles and maps. Marfa, Big Bend, the Glass Mountains.

Image Source.

The landscape west of the Pecos River, dry to begin with, is in the grip of exceptional drought. The temperature was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and there was a hot incessant wind. From a ridgeline near the top of an eroded volcanic intrusion in the Chisos Mountains, dry basins and ranges extended into the infinite hazy distance. It was easy to imagine that the Earth had lost its oceans, and had become a desert planet, with isolated pockets of life clinging to retain the veneer of a respectable planetary habitability.

There’s a recent, highly engaging article by Kevin Zahnle and collaborators (Abe et al. 2011) that argues that such a world might be better suited than the present-day Earth at staving off the biosphere-terminating ravages of the runaway greenhouse effect. Desert, or “land” planets keep their stratospheres dry, which allows them to better retain what water they do have, and land planets can more effectively re-radiate infrared radiation into space at given surface atmospheric pressure, allowing a cooler surface temperature at a given stellar flux. It cools down at night in the desert.

Abe et al.’s global climate models indicate that Earth will cease to be habitable in 2.5 Billion years. In the absence of oceans, on the other hand, they find that habitability would be extended by another 2 to 2.5 billion years. And provocatively, if Venus started out as a land planet, it may have been habitable as recently as a billion years ago.

My guess is that nearly everyone who frequents oklo.org has read and liked Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction classic Dune, which is folded into the introduction of Abe et al.’s paper:

We can imagine another kind of habitable planet that has only a small amount of water and no oceans; it might be covered by vast dry deserts, but it might also have locally abundant water. We call such a dry planet a ‘‘land planet.’’ The fictional planet known as Arrakis or Dune (Dune, Herbert, 1965) provides an exceptionally well-developed example of a habitable land planet. In its particulars, Dune resembles a bigger, warmer Mars with a breathable oxygen atmosphere. Like Mars, Dune is depicted as a parched desert planet, but there are signs that water flowed in the prehistoric past. Dune has small water ice caps at the poles and more extensive deep polar aquifers. The tropics are exceedingly dry, but the polar regions are cool enough and moist enough to have morning dew.

In Search of Planet Vulcan — The Ghost in Newton’s Clockwork Universe, by Richard Baum and William Sheehan, is one of my favorite astronomy books. It certainly has one of the best overviews of the momentous events and controversies surrounding the discovery of Neptune in September 1846. I’ll take the liberty to quote Baum and Sheehan’s recounting of the exact moment of Neptune’s discovery.

On September 18, Le Verrier wrote to Johann Gottfried Galle, then an obscure astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Berlin. A year earlier, Galle had sent Le Verrier his doctoral dissertation, which concerned observations made by 17th-century Danish astronomer Olaus Roemer. Belatedly, Le Verrier wrote to acknowledge it. Among other things, he queried Galle about Roemer’s Mercury observations, but then came quickly to his point:

“Right now I would like to find a persistent observer, who would be willing to devote some time to an examination of a part of the sky in which there may be a planet to discover… You will see, Sir, that I demonstrate that it is impossible to satisfy the observations of Uranus without introducing the action of a new Planet, thus far unknown; and, remarkably, there is only one single position in the ecliptic where this perturbing Planet can be located… The actual position of this body shows that we are now, and will be for several months, in a favorable situation for the discovery.

Galle indeed proved to be his man. He received Le Verrier’s letter on September 23, and at once sought permission from the observatory’s director, Johann Encke, to carry out the search. Encke was skeptical but nonetheless acquiesced: “Let us oblige the gentleman in Paris.” A young student astronomer, Heinrich Ludwig d’Arrest, begged to be included, and joined Galle as a volunteer observer. That night, they opened the dome to reveal the observatory’s main instrument, a 9-inch Fraunhofer refractor aimed at the spot assigned by Le Verrier. Recalculated for geocentric coordinates, its position was at right ascension 21 h, 46 min, declination -13 deg 24 min, very close to the position occupied by another planet, Saturn.

The question arose: What maps were available? At first they could think of none but “Harding’s very insufficient Atlas.” D’Arrest then suggested “it might be worth looking among the Berliner Akademische Sternkarten to see whether Hora XXI was among those already finished. On looking among a pile of maps in Encke’s hall [Vorzimmer], Dr. Bremiker’s map of Hora XXI [already engraved and printed at the beginning of 1846 but not yet distributed] was soon found.” As d’Arrest later recalled, “We then went back to the dome, where there was a kind of desk, at which I placed myself with the map, while Galle, looking through the refractor, described the configurations of the stars he saw. I followed them on the map one by one, until he [Galle] said: and then there is a star of the 8th magnitude in such and such a position, whereupon I immediately exclaimed, that star is not on the map!”

Neptune’s moment of discovery, at 11 PM Berlin local time on September 23, 1846, corresponded to 22:07 UT, or JD 2395563.4215. The period of Neptune is 60,190.03 days, or 164.79132 years. The first “Neptunian anniversary” of the discovery is therefore CE 2011 July 10 22:49:26.4 UT Sunday, that is, right now.

In 1846, photography was still in its very earliest stages, and it would be nearly two decades until the publication of Jules Verne’s De la Terre à la Lune. The fact that we greet the completion of one orbit in the possession of photographs of a crescent Neptune is a marvelous indeed.

Image Source.

Certainly, an occasion for celebration! On Friday, I got an invitational e-mail from Gaspar Bakos, who is hosting a Neptune-at-One cocktail party in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I briefly perused airfares before sadly having to decline.

A well-known theorem states that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. A corollary is that interesting discoveries tend to be made at the ~3-4 sigma level of confidence, and this is especially true if the supporting data is drawn from the public domain. If a signal is stronger than 4-sigma, then someone else has invariably pointed it out. If it’s weaker than 3-sigma, it’s probably wishful thinking.

With those rules of thumb in mind, I’m very optimistic that Kevin Schlaufman has obtained a genuinely important insight into how the planet formation process works:

The plot shown is above is from a paper that Kevin and I submitted soon after the 1,235 Kepler planet candidates were announced last Spring. After going through review, it was accepted by the ApJ, and it was posted to astro-ph last week.

I wrote about the underlying details of the plot in this post from several months ago. The basic idea is as follows: The 997 Kepler planet candidate host stars are divided up into two groups — (i) the less numerous group of stars that host a candidate with R_pl>5 Earth radii (red), and (ii) the more numerous group of stars that only host a planet (or planets) with R_pl<5 Earth radii (blue). The two groups of stars, along with a control sample of 10,000 non-candidate-bearing dwarf stars from the Kepler field (gray), are plotted in a color-color diagram (and then binned to create the diagram above):

The y-axis corresponds to the magnitude difference between a given star’s green (Sloane g filter) and red (Sloane r filter) colors. The x-axis charts the differences between the 2Mass J and H infrared colors for each star. Metal-rich stars tend to have redder optical colors than metal-poor stars, whereas the J-H index sorts the stars in terms of their overall temperatures (with cool stars to the right and warm stars to the left of the plot). Metal-rich stars thus lie along the upper part of the main-Sequence locus.

The binned version of the plot provides a confirmation of several trends that were already very well known. First, among host stars with masses similar to the Sun that harbor giant planets, there’s a strong preference for metal-rich stars. This is the classic planet-stellar metallicity effect. Second, among low-mass stars, there’s a dearth of giant planet candidates. This is the known giant planet-stellar mass effect. Finally, among the solar mass stars that host low-mass planets, there’s no discernible metallicity correlation.

The new result pertains to low-mass planets orbiting low-mass stars. The diagram shows that for this subset, there’s strong evidence for a metallicity correlation — At masses less than ~0.8 solar masses, higher metallicity stars are more likely to host low-mass planets. We take this as direct evidence regarding the overall bulk efficiency of planet formation for planets that aren’t required to bulk up via rapid gas accretion. Take a 0.7 solar mass with twice the Sun’s metal content and a typical 0.02 solar mass disk. The entire planet-forming disk contains about 150 Earth-masses worth of stuff heavier than hydrogen and helium. Kevin’s result is effectively saying that a good fraction of the time, a good fraction of this total burden of metals winds up in planets.

We had to be careful. There are a lot of systematic “gotchas” that can potentially throw a wrench into the exciting big-picture conclusions, and so much of the paper is devoted to considering potential show stoppers in turn. I think that the result is robust, and that it will hold up as the planet catalog continues to grow.