To continue yeterday’s post, reporters in Austin and logging on to its streamed press conferences are spewing stories almost like a supernova sprays neutrinos.

Before I get to listing what I turn up, take a look at Wired where Mark Brown has assembled  his own, narrative account of several “epic announcements” that have paraded past so far.

Another somewhat big-picture summary is on the mega-circulation AP, where Seth Borenstein agglomerates several reports on extra-solar planets and comes to this conclusion: Most stars have planets, so many that planets “easily outnumber stars” and that astronomers find them in the “strangest of places.” It’s a theme several reporters jumped on, with results at AAS given a boost by publication in this week’s Nature of a study concluding, on average, every star has 1.6 planets:

1) More Planet bonanza stories:

• Wall Street Journal – Robert Lee Hotz:An Otherworldly Discovery: Billions of Other Planets ; It includes a video of Lee talking with, I dunno, some editors or something in the Journal’s news room, about the astronomers all agog over the billions – nay hundreds of billions – of planets just in our Milky Way (still none on the ledger with specs that closely match Earth’s temp, size, chemistry, and comfiness).
• Space.com – Charles Q. Choi: Two new ‘Tatooine’ planets with two suns discovered ;
• Nature.com – Ron Cowen: Three Tiny Exoplanets Suggest Solar System Not So Special; A Caltech-etc team announced detection, via data from the Kepler telescope on a teeny red dwarf star not much larger than Jupiter, of three planets boiling in tight orbit and each alas too hot for life we’d easily imagine. Cool angle on the role played by a well-known UK amateur astronomer, Kevin Apps. He told the pros that the red dwarf with the planets sure looks, spectroscopically, like a nearby one beloved by science fiction authors (e.g. A Hitchhiker’s Guide..) called Barnard’s Star.  That in turn led to size calibration for the planets.
• Bloomberg/Business Week – Elizabeth Lopatto: Three Smallest-Yet Planets Outside Solar System Found, NASA Says,
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Milky Way may be home to billions of planets ;
• BBC – Jason Palmer: Exoplanets are around every star, study suggests ; The lede: Every star twinkling in the night sky plays host to at least one planet, a new study suggests. This, one thinks, is not true. I haven’t read the paper behind the press release. But all signs are that the astronomers merely said that stars have on average more than one planet. That leaves room for some with zero planets, and others with many more. The assertion however is now spreading, as seen at an aggregator site, Global Post, in an item by Jessica Phelan that nods at BBC as one source. One could not help noticing when checking Phelan’s story that Global Post’s science coverage also includes a geographic world map of average human penis size. Uh huh.
• National Geographic – Victoria Jaggard: Smallest Exoplanets Found – Each Tinier than Earth ;
• Wired – Adam Mann: 3 Rocky Worlds are Smallest Exoplanets Found to Date ;
• Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger: Astronomers say Milky Way more crowded than thought;

 

Grist for the Mill: San Diego State Univ. Press Release on twin-sun planets ; Vanderbilt University Press Release (from old friend David Salisbury, nicely done too) on Barnard’s Star and another star’s little planets; Caltech Press Release with more on red dwarf planets; European Southern Observatory Press Release on more planets than stars ;

2) Galaxies – A close look at Andromeda and a long look at deepest space for glimpse of early galaxies

• Boulder Daily Camera – Laura Snider: CU-Boulder finds farthest galaxy cluster ever seen ; 13 billion light years away, as seen. In a universe 13.7 billion years old, imagine how far away it is now, and how young it was then.
• AstronomyNow – Nicola Guttridge: Hubble spies earliest galaxy cluster ever seen;
• Register (UK) Iain Thomson: Hubble shows images from record-breaking 13.1 billion light-years ;
• Mail (UK) Rob Waugh: Hubble captures the sharpest-ever picture of the heart of another galaxy ; a black hole with the mass of 100 million suns ; That other galaxy being M31, Andromeda.
• ScienceNOW – Govert Schilling: These Stars Were Born to Be Wild: On the mystery of young-looking blue stars in Andromeda’s ancient core. Turns out they are old but they are hotties. They’ve had plastic surgery.

Grist for the Mill: University of Colorado Press Release on farthest-yet galaxy cluster ; Hubble Press Release on blue stars near Andromeda’s core.

*UPDATE: Here’s one that, reports the author, is from the halls of the meeting itself and not a press conference. It’s about as arcane a topic as one can imagine, but also one that has majesty to it. It addresses a question very few in the world are equipped to ask and also can cope with the answer’s details. Is space-time not only quantized, but into lumps whose granularity, like a washboard road slowing cars of some tire sizes more than others (I made that up because I am among those unequipped to say anything beyond analogy in an effort to mask ignorance), ever so slightly alters the speed of light according to wavelength?

• NatureNEWS – Ron Cowen: Cosmic race ends in a tie / Result puts limit on how ‘lumpy’ space time can be. Cowen, as those who followed his work at ScienceNews before he went freelance and became a regular for Nature, is a most diligent reporter – often putting him ahead of the news pack and ahead of press releases and journal cycles as well. Too bad there was no way (I assume) to catch any neutrinos that started off at the same time as these photons. That could help settle argument whether last year’s superluminal-looking neutrino results were the real deal.

 

- Charlie Petit

 

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2012 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.