Last night, graduating grad student, Jana Grcevich, kicked off our Spring lecture series by recapping the "Top 11 Astronomy Stories of 2011." Some of the highlights included: the most massive galaxy cluster found, a possible detection of the Higgs boson, a possible detection of a supermassive black hole devouring a star, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics going to three astronomers, and the discovery of over 3000 new exoplanets.
Jana ranked the new planet discoveries as number one on her list and many people would agree. Understanding and determining the available real estate for life to grab a foothold in our galaxy, let alone the rest of the Universe, ranks as one of the top 3 questions asked by humanity since humanity could ponder its own existence. Jana explained how the discoveries were made, by the Kepler space telescope, by stating that it measures the dimming of light from a star to determine the nature of the object causing the dimming due to occultation (the object passing in front of the star). She then focused on some of the gems from this exciting database of planets which included the discovery of a super earth-massed planet (roughly 2.5x) orbiting around its star in the habitable zone - an object known as Kepler 22b. Afterwards, she pointed out some planets orbit around binary stars, giving a shout out to the fans of Star Wars who recall Tatooine’s planetary system. Last, but not least, she displayed the best determination for many planetary systems’ orbits and configurations which showed us that planetary systems similar to our own are actually common place and not rare as previous thought based on the planetary systems discovered before the Kepler mission.
Many good questions were asked from the 140+ attendees last night, proving that a recap of the LAST year’s exciting discoveries was a great way to start off THIS year’s lecture series.
--Duane
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