Next week’s night sky:
Wednesday marks the first quarter moon. Jupiter and Saturn will be to the right of the moon, seemingly in a line pointed at the moon. On Sunday, the golden handle appears on the moon. The “Golden Handle” effect is produced by the way the slanted sunlight lights up the prominent mountains of the moon. Best seen through some sort of magnification, the golden handle will appear as a small line trailing from the light side of the moon to the dark side.
A planet orbiting a dead star
For the first time, researchers may have discovered around a white dwarf. This suggests that even after stars die, they may still host planets.
White dwarfs are the cooling Earth-size cores of dead stars left behind after average-size stars have exhausted their fuel and shed their outer layers. Our Sun will eventually fade into a white dwarf after first bloating to become a red giant. The same fate awaits more than 90% of the stars in our galaxy.
Previous research has found the remains of worlds that disintegrated when the progenitor stars of white dwarfs engulfed nearby planets during their red giant phase. This raised the question of whether any worlds might avoid this destruction and end up orbiting the resulting white dwarfs.
In the new study, researchers discovered a white dwarf was orbited by a roughly planet-size body! Researchers hypothesize that if a giant planet survived the journey close to a white dwarf, then it means that smaller planets could as well.
All in all, these findings could offer a way for a white dwarf to give rise to a second generation of life in a planetary system, long after the star ran out of hydrogen fuel and died.
To learn more, go here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2713-y
Possible life on Venus
On Monday, an international team of researchers presented evidence that the cloud tops of Venus contain traces of phosphine. What’s more, they say, the chemical’s presence is a mystery. No known non-biological processes can create phosphine in the conditions found on Venus.
Research stresses that the presence of this gas is not conclusive proof that there is life on Venus. However, this is a chance that there could be an organism producing this gas. A more likely explanation is that some unknown chemical reaction caused this, although this also seems unlikely.
Most researchers agree that the best way to find out is to launch a mission to Venus. While detecting life itself would be challenging, detecting organic molecules — a strong indicator of life — is not that tricky. All we need is time. To learn more, go here: Phosphine gas in the cloud decks of Venus (PDF paper).
A huge telescope grant.
The Giant Magellan Telescope has received a $17.5 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to build testbeds and prototypes needed to verify the performance of the complex adjustment systems designed to keep the telescope’s seven 8.4-meter (27.6-foot) primary mirror segments “in phase.” That precise alignment is critical to ensuring the segments act in concert like a single 24.5-meter (80-foot-wide) mirror.
The Giant Magellan Telescope has received a $17.5 million grant. This grant will allow them to build testbeds and prototypes needed to verify the performance of the complex adjustment systems. The Giant Magellan Telescope is expected to have a resolving power ten times greater than that of the Hubble Space Telescope when it achieves first light in 2029.
This huge leap in telescopic power will help researchers all over the world!
Do you have any cool astronomy research news from this week? Share it in the comments below!