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The Brain

So true. It contains natural veggies and nutrients that your body NEEDS. Not processed junk that shouldn't be ingested.

Pure Awesomeness.

Thanks to Free Your Mind and Think.

How Do We Find Exoplanets?

With all of this talk about recently discovered exoplanets, some of you are probably wondering how we detect such planets when the light they emit is faint compared to its parent star. In addition to the difficulty presented in detecting such a faint light source, the light from the planet's parent star causes a glare that frequently washes the planet out. For those reasons, fewer than 5% of extrasolar planets have been directly detected and observed and most of the planets discovered have been gas or ice giants with the equivalent mass of a Jupiter-sized body. So, how exactly do we spot these planets out?!

In the olden days, we used measure a star's position in the sky and observe how it would change position over time. Usually, this was done visually (with hand written records), but thankfully, even though it's still used in some scenarios, it's typically a thing of the past. Now, we have a few different indirect methods that have a various degree of success when one of these planets can't be directly observed. Perhaps the most ideal method used to find extrasolar planets is the radial velocity method.

As with the Sun and the other planets in our solar system, other stars with orbiting planets will move in their own small orbit in response to the planet(s) gravity. This leads to variations in the speed that the star moves towards or away from Earth. The radial velocity can be deduced from displacement in the parent star's spectral lines due to the doppler effect, which is the change in frequency of a wave for an observer moving relative to the source of the wave. The radial velocity method measures these variations in order to confirm the presence of the planet. The method is distance dependent, but requires a high signal-to-noise ratio to achieve high precision.As such,this method is more applicable for stars located about 160 light-years from Earth. It can easily find massive planets that orbit their parent star from a short distance, but detection of those orbiting at great distances require many years of observation. Planets with orbits highly inclined to the line of sight from Earth produce smaller wobbles, and are thus more difficult to detect.

For stars that are farther away from us, we generally rely on the transit method. This isn't the ideal method since it doesn't supply us with any information about the planets mass, but it does give us information about the radius of any orbiting planets. This works by observing the planet as it passes in front of its parent stars' disk and our vantage point. When this happens, the planet will obstruct a small amount of the star's light. The amount of light that dims as this transit occurs is dependent upon the relative size of the star and any orbiting planet. Planetary transits are only observable for planets whose orbits happen to be perfectly aligned from our vantage point, so again, this is not the ideal method in planet hunting. However, its seemingly more successful when scanning large areas of the sky, where a multitude of stars may lurk. In principle, transit surveys can find extrasolar planets at a rate that generally will exceed the amount discovered by the radial-velocity method. Currently, the Kepler mission has detected over 2,000 candidates by using the transit method.

Another disadvantage to using this method is the difficulty it has in finding smaller, terrestrial planets. Since they are smaller than hot-Jupiters (the type that orbit close to their parent star), the light they obstruct is smaller and thus more difficult to detect.

Now, some of you have also asked how we obtain the planet's transmission spectrum, and thus the chemical composition of an extra-solar planet's atmosphere. We do so by taking the spectrum of the star when the planet is in front of it, and then we take a spectrum of the star when it isn't. If the planet has no atmosphere, it will block the same amount of light at all wavelengths, if it does have one, gasses in the atmosphere will absorb additional light. You then divide the two numbers and you get the planet's atmospheric transmission spectrum. This is no easy feat since the light blocked by the planet is a mere percentage of the star's total light output.

There are several more, which will we go into later, but those are the basics.

Further Reading:

"How Planet Hunting Works:"
http://www.howstuffworks.com/planet-hunting2.htm

"Transit Method:"
http://lcogt.net/spacebook/transit-method

Image Source: http://crab0.astr.nthu.edu.tw/~hchang/ga2/f0704-method1.JPG

The Search For Next Generation Interstellar Pioneers.

For more information, please visit: http://earth2hub.com/blog/black_sky_thinking_prize

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jENwSaQWk_8

The Black Sky Thinking Prize will be awarded to an individual who demonstrates originality and ingenuity in their approach to (directly, or indirectly), tackling concepts related to interstellar travel in groundbreaking ways.

This prize will seek out an individual whose work raises questions and demonstrates new ideas related to the way we may travel to the stars.

While advances in this realm are usually associated with national institutions that employ highly skilled engineers, the Black Sky Thinker may not be from a traditional ‘space’ industry background.

It is a prize that provokes new conversations about the future of humanity and is therefore open to any discipline, ideology, educational, or cultural origin.

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Potential role of 'love hormone' oxytocin in brain function revealed Researchers have deciphered how oxytocin, acting as a neurohormone in the brain, not only reduces background noise, but more importantly, increases the strength of desired signals. These findings may be relevant to autism, which affects one in 88 children in the United States.

Art by Jef Mallett: http://bit.ly/14wziod

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