Astronomy Picture of the Day . ... 31.01.1996 . ... Credit: E. Williams, G. Marcy, and L.-A. McConnaughey, ( UC Berkeley ), ( SFSU ) Explanation: Do many Sun -like stars have planets? ... The above plot summarizes the four known cases of normal stars having planets. ... The later two cases were discovered by astronomers led by Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler as part of a greater project inspecting 120 stars for orbiting planets. ... January 1996 . ... 1995 1996 . ... Publications with keywords: planets . ...

... January 31, 1996 . Planets Around Sun-Like Stars . ... The above plot summarizes the four known cases of normal stars having planets. ... The later two cases were discovered by astronomers led by Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler as part of a greater project inspecting 120 stars for orbiting planets. Interestingly enough, the planets around the later two stars have temperatures in the right range to allow liquid water - and hence may have conditions ripe for the development of life . ...

... Aurora from Space . ... Magnetic Storms . ... The "ring of fire" seen by satellite cameras around the polar caps (picture below) is probably created by electrons leaking from the tail's plasma sheet, whose magnetic field lines form a somewhat imperfect trap. ... One possible explanation involves the close association between auroral arcs and electric currents which flow along field lines between the ionosphere and distant space ( Birkeland currents ). ... Why no aurora at the magnetic poles? ...

... Image courtesy of Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute . ... There are already 29 multi-planet extrasolar planetary systems discovered (including this last one), so what makes this particular system unique? ... International Year of Astronomy, Ireland National Node . ...

... More on 51 Peg: . The discovery of a Jupiter--mass planet in orbit around the solar--type star 51Peg has been reported by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz (Geneva Observatory) on October 6th at the 9th Cambridge workshop on "cool stars, stellar systems, and the sun" held at Florence (Italy). ... Recall that the measurements of radial velocity only yield v sin i which in turn gives us M sin i. For most values of i, sin i will be greater than 0.5 and this gives a mass estimate of 0.5 Jupiter masses. ...

... Goldilocks and the Three Bears' is the tale of a picky little girl. ... She likes things in the middle, like mummy bear: just right . For this reason, we call the area around a star where the temperature is just right for water to exist, the Goldilocks Zone . ... These are just the right conditions for life to exist, too! ... If we can find this many Goldilocks planets around every star, then the number of possibly life-bearing planets in our galaxy is much larger than we thought. ...

... There has been a heated public discussion in the past few years about whether our ninth planet is really deserving of the name. Since Pluto orbits a star, and is much less luminous, it certainly satisfies the definition we have above. The problem is actually not with Pluto, but with a very large number of other bodies in our Solar System which also satisfy this definition, but which are not called planets. Perhaps the most notable of these is Ceres, the largest asteroid. ... Planet . ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Solar System . ... Planets . ... This bizarrely shrunken planetary system was found by NASAтАЩs Kepler mission, hence the parent star has been named Kepler-11. ... Planetary scientist and Kepler science team member Jack Lissauer said ?These six planets are mixtures of rock and gases, possibly including water.тАЭ €аNone of these strange new worlds are likely to be home to any form of life; their surface conditions are simply too extreme. ...

... Bad Astronomy . ... Also, a brief introduction: I'll state here I like the Star Wars movies (except Return of the Jedi, yikes!) and I liked the Phantom Menace (hereafter: tPM). There wasn't a whole lot of astronomy in it, actually, so there isn't much to review. There are a few things in it worth noting, though, keeping in mind that the whole purpose of reviewing the Bad Astronomy isn't to be picky, but to make you think about what you're seeing, and to show you how things really are. ...

Now that well over 100 planets have been discovered, we no longer need to ask the question "Are there planets out there?" ... The objective of XO is to find additional hot-Jupiters (like HD 209458b) that transit stars bright enough for detailed follow-up studies to be done with existing telescopes such as HST, Keck, and the VLT. ... Transit observations by themselves provide no information about the mass of the planet and radial velocity studies can yield only minimum masses. ...

... The planets differ greatly in size and properties, and their fields differ too. ... In 1959, after the Earth's radiation belt had been discovered, Frank Drake observed Jupiter and concluded from the relative intensities in a range of wavelengths that the signal was probably emitted by electrons trapped in a strong magnetic field. Then in 1973 the space probe Pioneer 10 passed by Jupiter and found there, sure enough, an enormous planetary magnetic field and a very intense radiation belt. ...

Next Previous Contents . This means that an interrupt happened that no driver expected. ... In many cases you can safely ignore this error message, especially if it only happens once or twice at boot-time. For boot-time messages, look at the messages which are nearby for a clue as to what is going on. For example, if probing is going on, perhaps a probe for a physical device caused that device to issue an interrupt that the driver didn't expect. ...

... Tonight's Sky . ... DISK т?? ... Sky this Month . ... Star Atlas . ... A planet is forming in an Earth-like orbit around a young star . New images reveal never-before-seen details in the planet-forming disk around a nearby Sun-like star, including a tantalizing gap at the same distance from the star as Earth is from the Sun. ... ALMA image of the planet-forming disk around the young Sun-like star TW Hydrae. ... Disks of dust and gas that surround young stars are the formation sites of planets. ...

... Posts tagged ?systematic error? ... Thanks to L. Lyons? work discussed in [ArXiv] Particle Physics , I found this paper, titled Systematic Errors describing the concept and statistical inference related to systematic errors in the field of particle physics. ... Continue reading ?systematic errors? Tags: coverage , Heinrich , likelihood , Lyons , nuisance parameter , objective priors , p-value , particle physics , statistical error , subjective priors , systematic error . ... Comment . ...

... 8, ``Celestial Mechanics'', 2002 Regularity and chaos for planetary orbits in binaries D. Benest Observatoire de Nice, Nice, France 1. ... Previous papers showed that stable planetary orbits, around either the lightest or the heaviest component of several nearby binary systems, exist up to distances from their primary of the order of more than half the binary's periastron sep­ aration. ... Chaos: bounded or sticky? It is now well­known that planetary dynamics may include some proportion of chaos. ...

... If an error occurred, the very last output of emchain will be something like emchain: BEWARE: One or more of the tasks ended in error ! You should then look into the log file for a specific message like emchain: BEWARE: That task ended in error ! ... If the error occurred in the last exposure, the intermediate files will not be erased, you may also inspect them (if they were erased, rerun emchain for the particular instrument and exposure where the error occurred, setting stoponerror =Y). ...

Next: Imaging by an Optimizing Method . ... A big advantage of this numerical integrator is its stability: the error in the semi-major axis and the eccentricity depends only on the step size and does not grow with an increasing number of time steps. ... As the integration time increases, the numerical results become more contaminated by various errors. ... A new symplectic integrator produces no secular truncation errors in the actions of a Hamiltonian system. ...

... An Automated Search for Extrasolar Planet Transits M. G. Hidas, J. K. Webb, M. C. B. Ashley, C. H. Lineweaver University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052 NSW, Australia J. Anderson University of California, Berkeley, USA arXiv:astro-ph/0209388 v1 19 Sep 2002 M. Irwin Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK Abstract. We are setting up a new search for transiting extra-solar planets using the 0.5m Automated Patrol Telescop e at Siding Spring Observatory, Australia. ... 2002; Mayor et al. 2002). ...

... The study of extra solar planets will be one of the most important areas of research in astronomy in this century. ... The first planets outside the solar system were found in 1992 around the millisecond pulsar PSR B1257+12 by Alex Wolszczan at the Arecibo Observatory . ... Three space missions based on this principle (MOST, COROT and Kepler ) have already been launched or approved, and have the last one at least has the potential to find Earth-sized planets. ... SIM ( NASA ) is one of such missions...

... Categories: calibration GPDOF estimates the likely error in a calibration solution, by calculating the errors in the "Degrees-of-Freedom" (dofs) of an interferometer. This is useful for calibration of high-precision circular polarization observations. ... Finally, GPDoF calculates the std and standard error of the derived dofs, which you can use to estimate the errors in the Stokes V of a target observation. ... GPDoF estimates the std and standard error in the dofs. ...