Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine
Kid’s Korner A cool Sun for cool music? We learn about the world by slicing it up into smaller pieces. We study history, geography, math, art, music, science, and lots of other subjects. But to really understand our world, we must reconnect the pieces to see how they all work together.
Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine Sunspots are areas of particularly strong magnetic forces on the Sun's surface. They appear darker than their surroundings because they are cooler. Even so, scientists have discovered that when there are lots of sunspots, the Sun is actually putting out MORE energy than when there are fewer sunspots. Sunspot activity occurs in cycles of about 11 years. But during about 1645 to 1715, hardly any sunspots
Above: Through special DARK filters, sunspots may look like the picture on the left. The sunspot groups are as big as the giant planet Jupiter! On the right is a closeup of some other sunspots. The larger sunspot on the right is bigger than Earth!
This is a story about connections. This is a story were seen! From the time sunspot Why so cold? about how But why did Europe get so much records were first kept until now, events on the colder than normal during these such a "solar rest period" has not Sun 300 Above: Each year of this Douglas years? Only recently did scientists been seen. It was during this y e a r s Fir tree's life, a new ring of growth make the connection and figure out period that Europe experienced the ago may was added. "Little Ice Age." It was during this the most likely answer. h a v e time that Stradivari came along and affected some of the Violins are made from wood. The Astronomers have been studying made possibly the best violins ever beautiful music we best violins are made from very the Sun for hundreds of years. from the slow-growing trees of his hard, dense wood. The best wood Using very special dark filters and chilly era. still hear today. comes from trees that have grown lenses, they have studied the most In the 17th century very slowly, laying down a thin ring obvious feature on the Sun: (1644 to 1737) of dense new growth each year. Sunspots. lived a violin Long winters and cool summers maker n a m e d make for slow tree growth. Antonio Stradivari. His workshop During about 1560was in Cremona, Italy. He made 1850, which included hundreds of violins, many of the time Stradivari which are still played today. made his violins, Europe They are prized for their rich (including Italy) and beautiful sound, especially in experienced a "Little Ice the hands of master violinists. Age." It was so cold that normally freeNo one has since been able flowing rivers and to make a violin that sounds canals froze over. quite like a Stradivarius (a violin made by Stradivari). Stradivari used the Just how did Stradivari make hard, dense wood such wonderful violins? No from the spruce one knows for sure, but one trees growing Above: This picture is of made of three overlapping photos. It shows the rings in the new idea makes a lot of " essiah."The first row during this time spruce tree used to make the most famous Stradivarius violin, the M sense. in a nearby forest of numbers gives the width of each ring in millimetres (one mm is about the thickness of a fingernail). The bottom row gives the years in which each ring grew. to make his violins.
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NASA's WISE finds Earth's first Trojan Asteroid Astronomers studying observations taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission have discovered the first known "Trojan" asteroid orbiting the sun along with Earth. Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet near stable points in front of or behind the planet. Because they constantly lead or follow in the same orbit as the planet, they never can collide with it. In our solar system, Trojans also share orbits with Neptune, Mars and Jupiter. Two of Saturn's moons share orbits with Trojans. Scientists had predicted Earth should have Trojans, but they have been difficult to find because they are relatively small and appear near the sun from Earth's point of view. "These asteroids dwell mostly in the daylight, making them very hard to see," said Martin Connors of Athabasca University in Canada, lead author of a new paper on the discovery in the July 28 issue of the journal Nature. "But we finally found one, because the object has an unusual orbit that takes it farther away from the sun than what is typical for Trojans. WISE was a game-changer, giving us a point of view difficult to have at Earth's surface."
The WISE telescope scanned the entire sky in infrared light from January 2010 to February 2011. Connors and his team began their search for an Earth Trojan using data from NEOWISE, an addition to the WISE mission that focused in part on near-Earth objects, or NEOs, such as asteroids and comets. NEOs are bodies that pass within 28 million miles (45 million kilometres) of Earth's path around the sun. The NEOWISE project observed more than 155,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and more than 500 NEOs, discovering 132 that were previously unknown. The team's hunt resulted in two Trojan candidates. One called 2010 TK7 was confirmed as an Earth Trojan after follow-up observations with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The asteroid (300 meters) unusual orbit motion near
is roughly 1,000 feet in diameter. It has an that traces a complex a stable point in the
Black Hole hosts Universe's most massive water cloud In a galaxy 12 billion light-years away resides the most distant and most massive cloud of water yet seen in the universe, astronomers say. Weighing in at 40 billion times the mass of Earth, the giant cloud of mist swaddles a type of actively feeding supermassive black hole known as a quasar. Among the brightest and most energetic objects in the universe, quasars are black holes at the centres of galaxies that are gravitationally consuming surrounding disks of material while burping back out powerful energy jets.
"As this disk of material is consumed by the central black hole, it releases energy in the form of xray and infrared radiation, which in turn can heat the surrounding material, resulting in the observed water vapor," said study co-author Eric Murphy, an astronomer with the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. The vapour around this particular quasar represents enough water "to fill all the oceans on the Earth over
Above: This artist's concept illustrates the first known Earth Trojan asteroid, discovered by NEOWISE, the asteroid-hunting portion of NASA's WISE mission. The asteroid is shown in gray and its extreme orbit is shown in green. Earth's orbit around the sun is indicated by blue dots plane of Earth's orbit, although the asteroid also moves above and below the plane. The object is about 50 million miles (80 million kilometres) from Earth. The asteroid's orbit is well-defined and for at least the next 100 years, it will not come closer to Earth than 15 million miles (24 million kilometres). "It's as though Earth is playing follow the leader," said Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator of NEOWISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Earth always is chasing this asteroid around." A handful of other asteroids also have orbits similar to Earth. Such 140 trillion times—that's a lot of water." Murphy and colleagues found the wet black hole using a spectrograph attached to the ten-meter Caltech Submillimetre Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The team also revealed that the unusually warm water cloud is bathing other gases and dust around the black hole. In fact, there's enough gas and dust present that the black hole could grow to be 6 times its current size— or more than 120 billion times the mass of our sun, Murphy said. Perhaps even more surprising is that the colossal cosmic reservoir formed when the universe was a mere 1.6 billion years old. "To me, the most exciting aspect of this
objects could make excellent candidates for future robotic or human exploration. Asteroid 2010 TK7 is not a good target because it travels too far above and below the plane of Earth's orbit, which would require large amounts of fuel to reach it. "This observation illustrates why NASA's NEO Observation program funded the mission enhancement to process data collected by WISE," said Lindley Johnson, NEOWISE program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We believed there was great potential to find objects in near-Earth space that had not been seen before." www.nationalgeographic.com
discovery is that it demonstrates how pervasive water is even at a tenth the current age of the universe," Murphy said. "The fact that we have detected such a large amount [of water] at this early stage in the universe is another indication that molecules and chemical enrichment of galaxies were able to occur so rapidly after the big bang." Astronomers are hoping to use the find to study how large quantities of water in the young universe may have acted as efficient coolants of the interstellar medium—the thin gas and dust that exists between stars—possibly affecting star formation and the evolution of galaxies such as our Milky Way. www.nationalgeographic.com
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