Travelers in the Night Eps. 861 & 862: Big Bear Observatory & New Planet 9 Search

It's the 365 days of Astronomy PodGa, coming in 3, 2, 1.

Big Bear Solar Observatory is a unique facility operated by the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Its 1.6 meter good solar telescope is located on the north side of Big Bear Lake at an elevation

of 6,760 feet above sea level in the San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California.

Being surrounded by cold water at high altitude provides a site with exceptional, atmospheric

stability and thus the possibility of extremely high quality solar images.

Recently an adaptive optics system called Kona started producing the first ever views of

interesting phenomena in the solar atmosphere.

In a recent article in Nature Astronomy entitled Observations of Fine Coronal Structures with

High Order Solar Adaptive Optics, Dr. Dirk Schmidt and his co-authors report some results

from data obtained with the 1.6 meter good telescope at the Big Bear Solar Observatory.

These states, we discovered a short-lived, fast-moving, finally twisted feature occurring

during the decay phase of a flare that quickly destabilized.

Continuing these states, these characteristics lead us to believe that the phenomenon might

be intricately linked to the continuing magnetic field reconnection within the current sheet

of the flare.

In another article, the same instrumentation was used to discover rain-like drops of high

temperature plasma in the light of hydrogen alpha.

It is hard to predict the value of basic research.

However work like this will eventually enable scientists to better understand how solar

flares and other activity in the Sun's atmosphere affect astronauts, communication systems,

geomagnetic storms, satellites, power grids, and much more on our home planet.

For travelers in the night, this is Dr. Al Grower, stay tuned.

In 1930, the news raced around the world that at Lowell Observatory in Arizona,

Clyde W. Tombaugh had discovered planet 9.

It was subsequently named Pluto.

In the 1990s, astronomers began to discover many distant solar system objects.

In 2006, Pluto was classified to be a dwarf planet, which is not massive enough to have

cleared its own neighborhood.

There are now five dwarf planets with more likely remaining undiscovered.

In a recent paper, Dr. Constantine Bettigen of the California Institute of Technology

and his co-authors report on their study of the orbits of objects which travel on a path

which takes them from inside the orbit of Neptune to great distances from the Sun and

back again.

They try to remove all observational biases and are left with data, which aligns closely

with the predictions of the existence of planet 9.

Optical searches for such an object are very difficult, since sunlight at such large distances

is very weak, and the amount reflected in our direction would be minuscule.

A better technique uses infrared emission from the object itself, recently using data

from the Japanese infrared telescope, Akira, Dr. Amos YHN, and his collaborators published

a paper in the publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, which predicts the

approximate position of two massive planet 9 candidates.

To arrive at their conclusions, this team carefully searched the Akira observations for objects

which over the course of months change their positions relative to distant stars and

galaxies.

Further observations are required to determine if either of these move like a planet 9,

or if instead they are some other type of distant astronomical object.

For travelers in the night, this is Dr. L. Grower.

Stay tuned.

You are listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast.

Cool.

The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute.

Audio post-production is by me, Richard Drum.

Project management is by Aviva Yamani, and hosting is donated by Libsyn.com.

This content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial 4.0 International

License.

Please share what you love, but don't sell what's free.

This show is made possible thanks to the generous donations of people like you.

Please consider supporting our show on patreon.com, forward slash CosmoQuestX, and get access

to bonus content.

Without your passion and contribution, we won't be able to share the stories and inspire

the worlds.

We invite you to join our community of storytellers and share your voice with the listeners worldwide.

As we wrap up today's episode, we're looking forward to unraveling more stories from

the universe.

With every new discovery from ground-based and space-based observatories, and each milestone

and space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within

it.

Until next time, let the stars guide your curiosity.