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A multi-insitutional and multi-disciplinary team of astronomers, planetary scientists, chemists, and materials scientists has been selected by NASA for a 5-year-long 5.7 million dollar award to study how earth-like planets form and how they accrete the ingredients required for life. The team is led by Steward and LPL assistant professor Daniel Apai and will be part of NASA bold new program Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS). The UA-led team represents a large-scale and highly interdisciplinary effort and includes researchers from the National Optical Astronomical Observatory, the University of Chicago, Arizona State University, and the Planetary Science Institute. The group will combine astronomical observations and laboratory measurements with a new generation of planet formation simulation to model the origins of potentially life-bearing planets to help interpret exoplanet observations and to giude the development of NASA missions aiming to find life in planets around nearby stars.

The press release can be found HERE. You can find the Arizona Daily Star article HERE.

https://www.as.arizona.edu/ua-awarded-nasa-nexus-exoplanet-system-science-nexss-five-year-study
LEFT: HR 8799, MIDDLE: LBT, RIGHT: IO, taken from the linked articles.

The LBTI Leaps Forward

Professor Phil Hinz, the P.I. of the LBTI instrument, has reported progress on a variety of fronts (complete with some amazing scientific pictures). His words follow:

First, in late April the LBTI project was reviewed by an independent panel, convened by NASA, for readiness to proceed to nulling operations. The panel has given LBTI a "pass" with only minor items to address. As part of the review the LBTI team demonstrated the ability to detect dust around nearby stars with typical uncertainties of 12 times the zodiacal dust in our own solar system. In fact, LBTI has a positive detection on an example star where the level is ~90 +/-8 zodies. The performance is approximately 12 times more sensitive than the Keck Interferometric Nuller.

Again, in late April, the LBTI team released results of LBTI imaging interferometry of Io. This shows the capabilities of LBT with ELT-like resolution. As part of this we resolved the volcano Loki, on Io, detecting it as a ring of lava emission. You can read more about it HERE.

This release follows on two previous science results from this spring: one from a couple weeks ago for the planetary system around HR 8799, where the LBTI team constrains the presence of inner planets (and showcase a very impressive image of the system), and one from earlier this spring where they constrained the spatial location of the inner dust disk around η Crv, using early nulling results with LBTI.

 

10/23/15: Public Evening Lecture: Marc Aaronson Memorial

Date: 
Friday, October 23, 2015 - 7:30pm to 8:30pm
Room: 
SO N210

Vasily Belokurov, IOA Cambridge, UK

Title: Galactic Archaeology: A History of Violence; Trails of Dying Satellites; Invisible Galaxies; and Dark Matter

LBT's Multi-Institution LEECH Survey Pays Dividends

Taking advantage of the unprecedented sensitivity of the Large Binocular Telescope in southeastern Arizona, an international team of astronomers has obtained the first results from the LEECH exoplanet imaging survey. The findings reveal new insights into the architecture and dynamics of HR8799, a "scaled-up" version of our solar system 130 light-years from Earth.

LEECH is led by Andrew Skemer, a Hubble Fellow at the UA/Steward, and uses the Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer, which was built at the University of Arizona by Professor Philip Hinz.  By directly imaging extrasolar planets, LEECH will be able to characterize the atmospheres of gas-giant planets to determine their compositions, cloud structures and weather patterns.  LEECH will also discover new planetary systems by being able to see planets that are closer to their host stars than previous surveys. LEECH will also search for new planetary systems around 200 stars by being able to see planets that are closer to their host stars than previous surveys could.

The press release can be found HERE and the AZ Star article can be found HERE

/lbts-multi-institution-leech-survey-pays-dividends
Happy 25 Years in Space, Hubble Space Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched from Cape Canaveral on April 24, 1990. It was carried to orbit with STS-31, Discovery Space Shuttle. A UA instrument, NICMOS, with UA's Rodger Thompson as P.I.,was inserted into HST during Servicing Mission 2, in early 1997. The success of Hubble led the way to the upcoming 2018 launch of JWST, another mission with a major UA presence (and HERE and  HERE, too). The 25th anniversary is noted in this UANews press release and in this photo gallery in the Arizona Daily Star. The NASA press and image release can be found HERE. A NY Times photo set is found HERE, with an article HERE. Finally, an Apr 24 AzStar article is HERE. and to keep it going, here's a Sky&Telescope article that's a bit different from the rest.

/happy-25-years-space-hubble-space-telescope
UV Insights Into Two Classes of Type Ia Supernovae

[Note added April 19: Tom Beal of the Arizona Daily Star has written a nice article HERE with extensive quotations from Nick Suntzeff of Texas A&M, and others.]

Peter Milne of Steward Observatory, Gautham Narayan of NOAO and UA, and collaborators Ryan Foley and Peter Brown have discovered two types of nearby Type Ia supernovae. These sub-classes of Ia supernova mostly differ in their UV-light output. They are called UV-red and UB-blue: the UV-red objects dominate locally. At high redshift, the UV-blue objects dominate. The optical colors also subtly change, leading to a possible misinterpretation, using the regular analysis, of the reddening and distance to the supernova. This change of type of supernova with the age of the Universe at time of explosion has implications for the fundamental parameters of cosmology, since the identical objects are not being compared as astronomers look farther away into the Universe. There is a distance error as a function of redshift, which will change the derivation of the cosmological parameters. While the observational underpinnings of the need for dark energy will not disappear, the precise values of the cosmological parameters, including the amount of dark energy, will change, probably at a low level. Theoretical models of supernovae will need to explain these observations.

Milne's analysis depended heavily upon the use of the Swift space telescope for the discovery of the UV properties of supernovae, on spectra from the Keck, VLT, and Gemini telescopes for the medium redshift sample, and on imaging from HST. The UA Press Release can be found HERE, and the two papers can be found HERE and HERE.
/uv-insights-two-classes-type-ia-supernovae

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