Extreme Solar Systems III Meeting Session Table of Contents
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Lurking in the Shadows: Wide-Separation Gas Giants As Tracers of Planet Formation
Lurking in the Shadows: Wide-Separation Gas Giants as Tracers of Planet Formation Thesis by Marta Levesque Bryan In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Pasadena, California 2018 Defended May 1, 2018 ii © 2018 Marta Levesque Bryan ORCID: [0000-0002-6076-5967] All rights reserved iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I would like to thank Heather Knutson, who I had the great privilege of working with as my thesis advisor. Her encouragement, guidance, and perspective helped me navigate many a challenging problem, and my conversations with her were a consistent source of positivity and learning throughout my time at Caltech. I leave graduate school a better scientist and person for having her as a role model. Heather fostered a wonderfully positive and supportive environment for her students, giving us the space to explore and grow - I could not have asked for a better advisor or research experience. I would also like to thank Konstantin Batygin for enthusiastic and illuminating discussions that always left me more excited to explore the result at hand. Thank you as well to Dimitri Mawet for providing both expertise and contagious optimism for some of my latest direct imaging endeavors. Thank you to the rest of my thesis committee, namely Geoff Blake, Evan Kirby, and Chuck Steidel for their support, helpful conversations, and insightful questions. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Brendan Bowler. His talk at Caltech my second year of graduate school introduced me to an unexpected population of massive wide-separation planetary-mass companions, and lead to a long-running collaboration from which several of my thesis projects were born. -
The Nearest Stars: a Guided Tour by Sherwood Harrington, Astronomical Society of the Pacific
www.astrosociety.org/uitc No. 5 - Spring 1986 © 1986, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 390 Ashton Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94112. The Nearest Stars: A Guided Tour by Sherwood Harrington, Astronomical Society of the Pacific A tour through our stellar neighborhood As evening twilight fades during April and early May, a brilliant, blue-white star can be seen low in the sky toward the southwest. That star is called Sirius, and it is the brightest star in Earth's nighttime sky. Sirius looks so bright in part because it is a relatively powerful light producer; if our Sun were suddenly replaced by Sirius, our daylight on Earth would be more than 20 times as bright as it is now! But the other reason Sirius is so brilliant in our nighttime sky is that it is so close; Sirius is the nearest neighbor star to the Sun that can be seen with the unaided eye from the Northern Hemisphere. "Close'' in the interstellar realm, though, is a very relative term. If you were to model the Sun as a basketball, then our planet Earth would be about the size of an apple seed 30 yards away from it — and even the nearest other star (alpha Centauri, visible from the Southern Hemisphere) would be 6,000 miles away. Distances among the stars are so large that it is helpful to express them using the light-year — the distance light travels in one year — as a measuring unit. In this way of expressing distances, alpha Centauri is about four light-years away, and Sirius is about eight and a half light- years distant. -
Naming the Extrasolar Planets
Naming the extrasolar planets W. Lyra Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, K¨onigstuhl 17, 69177, Heidelberg, Germany [email protected] Abstract and OGLE-TR-182 b, which does not help educators convey the message that these planets are quite similar to Jupiter. Extrasolar planets are not named and are referred to only In stark contrast, the sentence“planet Apollo is a gas giant by their assigned scientific designation. The reason given like Jupiter” is heavily - yet invisibly - coated with Coper- by the IAU to not name the planets is that it is consid- nicanism. ered impractical as planets are expected to be common. I One reason given by the IAU for not considering naming advance some reasons as to why this logic is flawed, and sug- the extrasolar planets is that it is a task deemed impractical. gest names for the 403 extrasolar planet candidates known One source is quoted as having said “if planets are found to as of Oct 2009. The names follow a scheme of association occur very frequently in the Universe, a system of individual with the constellation that the host star pertains to, and names for planets might well rapidly be found equally im- therefore are mostly drawn from Roman-Greek mythology. practicable as it is for stars, as planet discoveries progress.” Other mythologies may also be used given that a suitable 1. This leads to a second argument. It is indeed impractical association is established. to name all stars. But some stars are named nonetheless. In fact, all other classes of astronomical bodies are named. -
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A&A 583, A85 (2015) Astronomy DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201526795 & c ESO 2015 Astrophysics Reaching the boundary between stellar kinematic groups and very wide binaries III. Sixteen new stars and eight new wide systems in the β Pictoris moving group F. J. Alonso-Floriano1, J. A. Caballero2, M. Cortés-Contreras1,E.Solano2,3, and D. Montes1 1 Departamento de Astrofísica y Ciencias de la Atmósfera, Facultad de Ciencias Físicas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] 2 Centro de Astrobiología (CSIC-INTA), ESAC PO box 78, 28691 Villanueva de la Cañada, Madrid, Spain 3 Spanish Virtual Observatory, ESAC PO box 78, 28691 Villanueva de la Cañada, Madrid, Spain Received 19 June 2015 / Accepted 8 August 2015 ABSTRACT Aims. We look for common proper motion companions to stars of the nearby young β Pictoris moving group. Methods. First, we compiled a list of 185 β Pictoris members and candidate members from 35 representative works. Next, we used the Aladin and STILTS virtual observatory tools and the PPMXL proper motion and Washington Double Star catalogues to look for companion candidates. The resulting potential companions were subjects of a dedicated astro-photometric follow-up using public data from all-sky surveys. After discarding 67 sources by proper motion and 31 by colour-magnitude diagrams, we obtained a final list of 36 common proper motion systems. The binding energy of two of them is perhaps too small to be considered physically bound. Results. Of the 36 pairs and multiple systems, eight are new, 16 have only one stellar component previously classified as a β Pictoris member, and three have secondaries at or below the hydrogen-burning limit. -
Tiny ASTERIA Satellite Achieves a First for Cubesats 16 August 2018, by Lauren Hinkel and Mary Knapp
Tiny ASTERIA satellite achieves a first for CubeSats 16 August 2018, by Lauren Hinkel And Mary Knapp The ASTERIA project is a collaboration between MIT and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, funded through JPL's Phaeton Program. The project started in 2010 as an undergraduate class project in 16.83/12.43 (Space Systems Engineering), involving a technology demonstration of astrophysical measurements using a Cubesat, with a primary goal of training early-career engineers. The ASTERIA mission—of which Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences Sara Seager is the Principal Investigator—was designed to demonstrate key technologies, including very Members of the ASTERIA team prepare the petite stable pointing and thermal control for making satellite for its journey to space. Credit: NASA/JPL- extremely precise measurements of stellar Caltech brightness in a tiny satellite. Earlier this year, ASTERIA achieved pointing stability of 0.5 arcseconds and thermal stability of 0.01 degrees Celsius. These technologies are important for A miniature satellite called ASTERIA (Arcsecond precision photometry, i.e., the measurement of Space Telescope Enabling Research in stellar brightness over time. Astrophysics) has measured the transit of a previously-discovered super-Earth exoplanet, 55 Cancri e. This finding shows that miniature satellites, like ASTERIA, are capable of making of sensitive detections of exoplanets via the transit method. While observing 55 Cancri e, which is known to transit, ASTERIA measured a miniscule change in brightness, about 0.04 percent, when the super- Earth crossed in front of its star. This transit measurement is the first of its kind for CubeSats (the class of satellites to which ASTERIA belongs) which are about the size of a briefcase and hitch a ride to space as secondary payloads on rockets used for larger spacecraft. -
Exep Science Plan Appendix (SPA) (This Document)
ExEP Science Plan, Rev A JPL D: 1735632 Release Date: February 15, 2019 Page 1 of 61 Created By: David A. Breda Date Program TDEM System Engineer Exoplanet Exploration Program NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology Dr. Nick Siegler Date Program Chief Technologist Exoplanet Exploration Program NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology Concurred By: Dr. Gary Blackwood Date Program Manager Exoplanet Exploration Program NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology EXOPDr.LANET Douglas Hudgins E XPLORATION PROGRAMDate Program Scientist Exoplanet Exploration Program ScienceScience Plan Mission DirectorateAppendix NASA Headquarters Karl Stapelfeldt, Program Chief Scientist Eric Mamajek, Deputy Program Chief Scientist Exoplanet Exploration Program JPL CL#19-0790 JPL Document No: 1735632 ExEP Science Plan, Rev A JPL D: 1735632 Release Date: February 15, 2019 Page 2 of 61 Approved by: Dr. Gary Blackwood Date Program Manager, Exoplanet Exploration Program Office NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory Dr. Douglas Hudgins Date Program Scientist Exoplanet Exploration Program Science Mission Directorate NASA Headquarters Created by: Dr. Karl Stapelfeldt Chief Program Scientist Exoplanet Exploration Program Office NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology Dr. Eric Mamajek Deputy Program Chief Scientist Exoplanet Exploration Program Office NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology This research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. © 2018 California Institute of Technology. Government sponsorship acknowledged. Exoplanet Exploration Program JPL CL#19-0790 ExEP Science Plan, Rev A JPL D: 1735632 Release Date: February 15, 2019 Page 3 of 61 Table of Contents 1. -
Self-Intersection of the Fallback Stream in Tidal Disruption Events
Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 000, 000–000 (0000) Printed 11 December 2019 (MN LATEX style file v2.2) Self-intersection of the Fallback Stream in Tidal Disruption Events Wenbin Lu1? and Clement´ Bonnerot1y 1TAPIR, Mail Code 350-17, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA 11 December 2019 ABSTRACT We propose a semi-analytical model for the self-intersection of the fallback stream in tidal disruption events (TDEs). When the initial periapsis is less than about 15 gravitational radii, a large fraction of the shocked gas is unbound in the form of a collision-induced outflow (CIO). This is because large apsidal precession causes the stream to self-intersect near the local escape speed at radius much below the apocenter. The rest of the fallback gas is left in more tightly bound orbits and quickly joins the accretion flow. We propose that the CIO is responsible for reprocessing the hard emission from the accretion flow into the optical band. This picture naturally explains the large photospheric radius (or low blackbody temperature) and typical line widths for optical TDEs. We predict the CIO-reprocessed spectrum in the ∼0:5 infrared to be Lν / ν , shallower than a blackbody. The partial sky coverage of the CIO also provides a unification of the diverse X-ray behaviors of optical TDEs. According to this picture, optical surveys filter out a large fraction of TDEs with low-mass blackholes due to lack of a reprocessing layer, and the volumetric rate of optical TDEs is nearly flat wrt. the 7 blackhole mass in the range M . -
Abstracts Connecting to the Boston University Network
20th Cambridge Workshop: Cool Stars, Stellar Systems, and the Sun July 29 - Aug 3, 2018 Boston / Cambridge, USA Abstracts Connecting to the Boston University Network 1. Select network ”BU Guest (unencrypted)” 2. Once connected, open a web browser and try to navigate to a website. You should be redirected to https://safeconnect.bu.edu:9443 for registration. If the page does not automatically redirect, go to bu.edu to be brought to the login page. 3. Enter the login information: Guest Username: CoolStars20 Password: CoolStars20 Click to accept the conditions then log in. ii Foreword Our story starts on January 31, 1980 when a small group of about 50 astronomers came to- gether, organized by Andrea Dupree, to discuss the results from the new high-energy satel- lites IUE and Einstein. Called “Cool Stars, Stellar Systems, and the Sun,” the meeting empha- sized the solar stellar connection and focused discussion on “several topics … in which the similarity is manifest: the structures of chromospheres and coronae, stellar activity, and the phenomena of mass loss,” according to the preface of the resulting, “Special Report of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.” We could easily have chosen the same topics for this meeting. Over the summer of 1980, the group met again in Bonas, France and then back in Cambridge in 1981. Nearly 40 years on, I am comfortable saying these workshops have evolved to be the premier conference series for cool star research. Cool Stars has been held largely biennially, alternating between North America and Europe. Over that time, the field of stellar astro- physics has been upended several times, first by results from Hubble, then ROSAT, then Keck and other large aperture ground-based adaptive optics telescopes. -
Pre-Vetted False Positives for TESS
Swarthmore College Works Physics & Astronomy Faculty Works Physics & Astronomy 11-1-2018 The KELT Follow-Up Network And Transit False-Positive Catalog: Pre-Vetted False Positives For TESS K. A. Collins K. I. Collins FJ.ollow Pepper this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-physics J. Labadie-Bar Part of the Astrtz ophysics and Astronomy Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits ouy K. G. Stassun See next page for additional authors Recommended Citation K. A. Collins, K. I. Collins, J. Pepper, J. Labadie-Bartz, K. G. Stassun, B. S. Gaudi, D. Bayliss, J. Bento, K. D. Colón, D. Feliz, D. James, M. C. Johnson, R. B. Kuhn, M. B. Lund, M. T. Penny, J. E. Rodriguez, R. J. Siverd, D. J. Stevens, X. Yao, G. Zhou, M. Akshay, G. F. Aldi, C. Ashcraft, S. Awiphan, Ö. Baştürk, D. Baker, T. G. Beatty, P. Benni, P. Berlind, G. B. Berriman, Z. Berta-Thompson, A. Bieryla, V. Bozza, S. C. Novati, M. L. Calkins, J. M. Cann, D. R. Ciardi, W. D. Cochran, David H. Cohen, D. Conti, J. R. Crepp, I. A. Curtis, G. D'Ago, K. A. Diazeguigure, C. D. Dressing, F. Dubois, E. Ellington, T. G. Ellis, G. A. Esquerdo, P. Evans, A. Friedli, A. Fukui, B. J. Fulton, E. J. Gonzales, J. C. Good, J. Gregorio, T. Gumusayak, D. A. Hancock, C. K. Harada, R. Hart, E. G. Hintz, H. Jang-Condell, E. J. Jeffery, Eric L.N. Jensen, E. Jofré, M. D. Joner, A. Kar, D. H. Kasper, B. Keten, J. -
Astronomy 2015 Sample Test.Pdf
Science Olympiad Astronomy C Division Event Sample Exam Stellar Evolution: Star and Planet Formation 2014-2015 Team Number: Team Name: Instructions: 1) Please turn in all materials at the end of the event. 2) Do not forget to put your team name and team number at the top of all answer pages. 3) Write all answers on the answer pages. Any marks elsewhere will not be scored. 4) All quantitative answers are expected to have a precision of 3 or more significant figures. 5) Please do not access the internet during the event. If you do so, your team will be disqualified. 6) This test was downloaded from: www.aavso.org/science-olympiad-2015. 7) Good luck! And may the stars be with you! 1 Section A: Use Image/Illustration Set A to answer Questions 1-19. This section focuses on qualitative understanding of stellar evolution, specifically relating to star formation and planets. 1. A schematic of a T-Tauri star is shown in Image A1. (a) Which point (A-F) marks the location of the disk surrounding the protostar? (b) Which point (A-F) displays the bipolar outflow that may form Herbig-Haro objects? (c) Which point (A-F) shows the strongly variable hot spots on the protostar? 2. A color-magnitude diagram for a sample of brown dwarfs is shown in Image A2. The x-axis shows the J-K color index, while the y-axis displays J-band magnitude. The different colors represent different brown dwarf spectral types. (a) Which lettered region (A-D) corresponds approximately to a spectral type L2 brown dwarf? (b) Which lettered region (A-D) corresponds approximately to a spectral type T6 brown dwarf? (c) Which lettered region (A-D) corresponds approximately to the brown dwarf L-T type transition? 3. -
Exoplanet Community Report
JPL Publication 09‐3 Exoplanet Community Report Edited by: P. R. Lawson, W. A. Traub and S. C. Unwin National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California March 2009 The work described in this publication was performed at a number of organizations, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Publication was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Compiling and publication support was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not constitute or imply its endorsement by the United States Government, or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. © 2009. All rights reserved. The exoplanet community’s top priority is that a line of probeclass missions for exoplanets be established, leading to a flagship mission at the earliest opportunity. iii Contents 1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY.................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 INTRODUCTION...............................................................................................................................................1 1.2 EXOPLANET FORUM 2008: THE PROCESS OF CONSENSUS BEGINS.....................................................2 -
Stellar Distances Teacher Guide
Stars and Planets 1 TEACHER GUIDE Stellar Distances Our Star, the Sun In this Exploration, find out: ! How do the distances of stars compare to our scale model solar system?. ! What is a light year? ! How long would it take to reach the nearest star to our solar system? (Image Credit: NASA/Transition Region & Coronal Explorer) Note: The above image of the Sun is an X -ray view rather than a visible light image. Stellar Distances Teacher Guide In this exercise students will plan a scale model to explore the distances between stars, focusing on Alpha Centauri, the system of stars nearest to the Sun. This activity builds upon the activity Sizes of Stars, which should be done first, and upon the Scale in the Solar System activity, which is strongly recommended as a prerequisite. Stellar Distances is a math activity as well as a science activity. Necessary Prerequisite: Sizes of Stars activity Recommended Prerequisite: Scale Model Solar System activity Grade Level: 6-8 Curriculum Standards: The Stellar Distances lesson is matched to: ! National Science and Math Education Content Standards for grades 5-8. ! National Math Standards 5-8 ! Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (grades 6 and 8) ! Content Standards for California Public Schools (grade 8) Time Frame: The activity should take approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour to complete, including short introductions and follow-ups. Purpose: To aid students in understanding the distances between stars, how those distances compare with the sizes of stars, and the distances between objects in our own solar system. © 2007 Dr Mary Urquhart, University of Texas at Dallas Stars and Planets 2 TEACHER GUIDE Stellar Distances Key Concepts: o Distances between stars are immense compared with the sizes of stars.