Some of the brightest planets, including Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, will be visible this fall in Erie. On Sept. 5, Darren Williams will discuss the planets and other astronomical objects that can be viewed with and without a telescope when Open House Nights in Astronomy returns to Penn State Behrend.
This summer, four planets — Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars — will be visible after sunset. To commemorate the occasion, the School of Science at Penn State Behrend invites guests to visit the college for three special Telescopic Observing Nights.
The search for planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy has revealed an extraordinary family of planets whose orbits are so carefully timed that they provide long-term stability for their planetary system. A paper describing the formation of this planetary system by a research team that includes a Penn State astrophysicist will be published in the journal Nature on May 11.
Now, more than ever, planets are generating an exciting buzz within the astronomy community, and that buzz will be the topic of discussion when Open House Night in Astronomy returns to Penn State Behrend Feb. 25. The presentation, “Mysterious Planets,” will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Roche Hall Atrium of Penn State Behrend’s School of Science Complex. It is free and open to the public.
Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, will host an afternoon of solar observations and planetarium shows in recognition of National Astronomy Day on Sept. 19.
Darren Williams, professor of physics and astronomy at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, and Jim Gavio, director of the Erie Planetarium at Penn State Behrend, will offer suggestions for astronomy beginners in “Getting Started in Astronomy,” the next Open House Night in Astronomy lecture on the campus.
Their presentation will be held at 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 26, in 21 Witkowski Building. It is free and open to the public.
An aging star polluted with lithium. A massive planet with a highly elliptical orbit. To an international team of astronomers, these add up to the first clear evidence of a planet's destruction by its star—and maybe a glimpse of Earth's far-off fate. The team, including Alexander Wolszczan, Evan Pugh Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State, was using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Fort Davis, Texas, to study the star named BD+48 740, which is older than the Sun with a radius about 11 times bigger. They were also looking for planets that might orbit the star."
A loose group of stars that has been known for more than 180 years but never before studied in detail has been revealed to be an important new tool in the quest to understand the evolution of stars like the Sun, and in the search for planets like Earth. "We have discovered that a previously unappreciated open star cluster, which is a little younger than our Sun, holds great promise for use as a standard gauge in fundamental stellar astrophysics," said Jason T. Wright, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, who conceived and initiated the research.
Wright's research team's first paper on the cluster, known as Ruprecht 147, has been submitted to the Astronomical Journal for publication. Team member Jason Curtis, a graduate student in Wright's lab, led the work for this paper and will present the team's project in Barcelona, Spain, next week at the 17th Cambridge Workshop on Cool Stars, Stellar Systems, and the Sun.
The explosion of digital data is behind the boom in careers based on statistics, including actuarial science, informatics, and machine learning, Altman notes. “These fields have all been very highly ranked for a number of years now,” she explains. “Data are a huge resource, but statisticians are needed to help people make sense of the information gathered.
Three planets -- each orbiting its own giant, dying star -- have been discovered by an international research team led by Alexander Wolszczan, Evan Pugh Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State and the discoverer of the first planets ever found outside our solar system. Using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, astronomers observed the planets' parent stars, which are tens of light years away from our solar system. One of the massive, dying stars has an additional mystery object orbiting it. The new research is expected to shed light on the evolution of planetary systems around dying stars. It also will help astronomers to understand how metal content influences the behavior of dying stars.
The research will be published in December in the Astrophysical Journal. The first author of the paper is Sara Gettel, a graduate student from Penn State's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the paper is co-authored by three graduate students from Poland.
A new state-of-the-art instrument -- a precision spectrograph for finding planets in habitable zones around cool, nearby stars -- is being developed at Penn State with support from a new $3.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation. "This new Habitable Zone Planet Finder instrument will allow us to detect the existence of planets that are similar in mass to Earth and also are in orbits that allow liquid water to exist on their surfaces," said Suvrath Mahadevan, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and a co-principal investigator of the project.
Thanks to popular Hollywood films such as "E.T.," "Avatar" and "Super 8," life on other planets seems highly conceivable to people who have considered the idea that we are not alone in the universe. Jim Kasting, distinguished professor of geosciences in Penn State's College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and an expert in atmospheric evolution, is one person who considers it a lot. By studying early Earth's atmosphere and the origins of oxygen in it, Kasting has become one of the foremost experts on planetary habitable zones.
It's a planet like our own in size and composition, and one where
surface conditions could support life, explains Jason
Wright, assistant professor of Astronomy.
Astronomers on two research teams, including an astronomer at Penn State, have demonstrated the power of a new technique to determine the chemical composition of the atmospheres of planets far outside our solar system. Using the technique -- called narrow-band transit spectrophotometry -- the teams discovered the element potassium in the atmospheres of giant planets similar in size to Jupiter.
A mysterious planet-like object orbiting a not-quite-starlike "brown dwarf" is the most recent enigma discovered by astronomers with their ever-more powerful telescopes. Kamen Todorov, a graduate student at Penn State, and a team of co-investigators including Kevin Luhman, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, used the keen eyesight of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini observatory to directly image the planet-like object. The astronomers estimate that the smaller orbiting object is five to 10 times the mass of Jupiter and that it orbits at roughly the distance from the Sun to Saturn or Uranus, which makes it planet-like, but it formed only 1 million years ago -- much faster than the time some theories predict is needed to build a planet. The team's discovery, which resulted from a survey of 32 brown dwarfs in the Taurus star-forming region, will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.
