Intergalactic Education Revisited

Teachers often select young students to be the sun and planets. The student sun stands in the middle while the teacher helps students playing (and maybe dressed as) Mercury, Venus, Earth,  Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune walk in elliptical orbits around the sun. A moon also can be chosen to walk around Earth. Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, students can play roles as rocks in the asteroid belt that some scientists think might be the remains of a planet that exploded in the solar system. (And, of course, there is the fear that one of the large rocks from the asteroid belt might hit Earth and destroy life here.) There is much more to the universe.

    Sometime later in a student's education a teacher, or shows with Carl Sagan or someone like him, may mention Earth is part of a solar system located on one side of the Milky Way galaxy, which is filled with other planets and billions of stars in fixed positions. Like our sun, some stars have two or more planets that might sustain extraterrestrial life. Some stars are brighter than others and some have different colors depending if they are dying or just developing. The universe is filled with a spectrum of light not visible with the naked eye.

     The Milky Way is not the only galaxy in the universe; the Andromeda galaxy is the biggest one closest to the Milky Way. At some places on Earth that are free of man-made lights, it's possible to see the stars in the Milky Way and the entire Andromeda galaxy spiral. A black hole that sucks up light seems to be located near the center of galaxies where it might hold galaxies together like the sun's gravity attracts the planets. When galaxies crash into each other, they seem to send ripples throughout the universe.

    Beyond their solar system, students have much to research about the universe and many ways to demonstrate what they have learned. Perhaps a Milky Way of students dressed as different colored stars could surround student stars holding a large black garbage bag representing a black hole. The rotating solar system students would be positioned on one side among the stars. Classrooms could even act as separate galaxies, bump into each other in the hall, and set off a kind of wave like that performed by spectators at a ball game.

   

   

Calling All Space Sleuths

What is casting an enormous shadow on KIC8462852?

     Ever since 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope has been circling the Earth's sun once every 371 days. What it looks for is changes in the brightness of hundreds of thousands of sun-like stars in one part of the galaxy. Just as from Earth, we see an eclipse when the moon occasionally blocks our sun, Kepler looks for a dimming, or eclipse, caused by a planet moving in front of any of the suns it watches.

     On October 13, 2015, readers of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society saw that Yale University astronomer, Tabetha Boyajian, had spotted an irregularly shaped 20% dip in the brightness emitted by the sun, KIC8462852. Since the diameter of our sun is nearly a million miles, it would take something on the order of 200,000 miles by 200,000 miles to block out 20% of its brightness. Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, would dim KIC8462852 by only 1%. In short, whatever passed in front of this distant sun was enormous.

     Could this huge object be collecting KIC8462852's energy as Jason Wright, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University, theorized and like the Dyson sphere that appears in science fiction? Less exotic explanations include: matter that has yet to come together in a planet, a gas cloud, or a comet's head.

     And what if there is alien life on the object that ventured past KIC8462852? In eight countries, the NASA-funded Wisconsin Astrobiology Research consortium of 57 scientists in the fields of geology, microbiology, chemistry, and engineering is on the hunt. The consortium looks for the records the simplest organic life forms might leave in water and volcanic environments and the roles oxygen and methane play in microbial evolution.

     William Borucki, who helped design NASA's Kepler Space Telescope at the Ames Research Center in California, found that the Earth's sun is much younger and more intense than most other stars in the universe. Than's good news for young, intense scientists looking for future work in what Borucki is convinced is a "universe...much more wonderfully complex" than he ever imagined.

             (Also check out earlier posts: "Hunt for Moon Rocks, "Who Needs International
                                                Expertise?" and "Space Explorers.")