Solar system Archives - The Sciku Project

March 12, 2023June 20, 2024

Planetarium by John Hawkhead

planetarium
she reaches across space
to find my hand
by John Hawkhead

In the 2008 USA presidential election, Senator John McCain criticised the value (and cost) of planetariums, as being little more than “overhead projectors”.

Yet planetariums, as well as being a unique form of entertainment, are valuable science communication tools: interactive and immersive pedagogic instruments for astronomical education.

For example, research by Plummer (2008) suggests that attending a planetarium program increased understanding of celestial motion in students aged 6 to 8 years old. Planetariums are also especially valuable for those living in large towns and cities, where light-pollution prevents most stars from being visible.

To celebrate the value and power of planetariums, the second Sunday of every March is International Day of Planetariums.

Further reading:

‘The Value of Education in the Planetarium’, The International Planetarium Society: https://www.ips-planetarium.org/page/planetariumeducationvalue

‘International Day of Planetariums’, AnydayGuide: https://anydayguide.com/calendar/3858

‘Early elementary students’ development of astronomy concepts in the planetarium’, Journal of Research in Science Teaching: https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.20280

Author bio:

John Hawkhead (@HawkheadJohn) has been writing haiku and illustrating for over 25 years. His work has been published all over the world and he has won a number of haiku competitions. John’s books of haiku and senryu, ‘Small Shadows’ and ‘Bone Moon’, are now available from Alba Publishing (http://www.albapublishing.com/). Read more of John’s sciku here!

‘Planetarium’ was previously published in Poetry Pea – podcast (June 2022); Journal 2:22 (Sept 2022).

February 23, 2023April 25, 2024

Young Star by petro c. k.

young star
accretion of dust
on a photo
By petro c. k.

When a star is just beginning to form, it collects a cloud of dust and particles that exist around it called a protoplanetary disk. It is thought the protoplanetary disk is connected to the star by a magnetic field, and the particles follow the field until they crash onto the surface of the growing star.

Studying and observing the phenomena of such dust in other stars gives new insights into how our own star, the sun – and our subsequent solar system – formed.

Further reading:

‘What Can a Young Star Teach Us about the Birth of Our Planet, Sun and Solar System?’, The Brink, Boston University: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/young-stars/

Author bio:

petro c. k. is a temporal being on a habitable rock spinning in space that tries to compress observations of an infinitesimally small section of the universe into haiku. You can catch up with petro on Twitter here: @petro_ck

Check out other sciku by petro c. k. here: ‘Saturn’s Moons’, ‘Marble’, and ‘Giggling’.

February 10, 2023April 25, 2024

Saturn’s Moons by petro c. k.

Saturn’s moons
enough thumbnails
to fill a jar
By petro c. k.

Saturn has the most moons of any planet in the solar system. As of now there are 83 confirmed moons that aren’t part of Saturn’s ring structure, of which 20 are still unnamed.

Saturn’s rings are made up of orbiting objects ranging in size from microscopic to moonlets hundreds of meters across. So far over 150 moonlets have been detected within the rings but the precise number of Saturnian moons cannot be determined since there is no objective boundary between the countless small anonymous objects that form Saturn’s rings and the larger objects that have been named as moons, but the moonlets that have been detected within the ring system are considered a small amount of the total amount actually there.

Current advances in the technology of telescopes as well as observations by unmanned spacecraft have lead to recent discoveries, with 20 new satellites discovered in 2019 alone, allowing Saturn to overtake Jupiter as the planet with the most known moons.

Postscript: In the interval between the writing of this verse and background information, more moons have been found around Jupiter, overtaking Saturn for the most moons:

Further reading:

‘Saturn’s moons: Facts about the weird and wonderful satellites of the ringed planet’, Space.com: https://www.space.com/20812-saturn-moons.html

‘Saturn Moons’, NASA: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/saturn-moons/overview/

‘Astronomers discover 12 new moons around Jupiter, putting count at record-breaking 92’, CBS News: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/astronomers-12-new-moons-record/

Author bio:

Check out other sciku by petro c. k. here: ‘Young Star’, ‘Marble’, and ‘Giggling’.

September 16, 2022September 17, 2022

Diamond Rain

Does Neptune ever
feel lonely, with a wall of
diamonds round it’s heart?

Diamonds might be precious but they’re composed of carbon, an element that’s common here on Earth and throughout the universe.

Under the right conditions (pressure and heat) carbon turns into diamonds. Marvin Ross predicted in 1981 that such conditions might be found in the mantels of the Solar System’s ice giants, Neptune and Uranus.

Recent research has supported this, with laser shock experiments on polystyrene performed by Kraus et al. (2017) replicating the conditions approximately 10,000km below the surfaces of Neptune and Uranus. Their experiments created nanodiamonds, supporting evidence that diamond precipitation occurs in the mantels of these planets.

Now further research has strengthened this evidence. The earlier studies used pure hyrdrocarbon systems (polystyrene is C₈H₈) but the interiors of Neptune and Uranus are more complex than that, consisting mainly of a dense fluid mixture of water (H₂O), methane (CH₄), and ammonia (NH₃).

To understand diamond formation under more complex conditions similar to those found on Neptune and Uranus, Zhiyu et al. (2022) investigated diamond formation using polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics (C₁₀H₈O₄). The researchers found that diamond formation is likely to be enhanced by the presence of oxygen, which in their research accelerated the splitting of the carbon and hydrogen.

Under the conditions found on Neptune and Uranus it’s likely that much larger diamonds would be formed, potentially millions of carats in weight. Over millennia these vast diamonds are predicted to sink slowly through the icy layers of the mantel before melting near the cores, creating an ever changing layer of diamonds around the cores of the planets.

The latest research may also explain another peculiarity about Neptune and Uranus: their unusual magnetic fields. Under the conditions that form diamonds in the mantel, the researchers also found evidence that superionic water might be created. Superionic water conducts electric current and is likely to impact the planets’ magnetic fields.

In addition to learning more about the Universe, there are practical implications for us on Earth resulting from the research too. Nanodiamonds have a range of important uses, including in medical sensors, non-invasive surgery, sustainable manufacturing, and quantum electronics. This latest research points the way towards a new way of fabricating nanodiamonds for such uses.

Dust

Iron-60 falls,
sprinkling stardust on pure snow.
Is this Philip’s Dust?

Particles of extraterrestrial dust enter the Earth’s atmosphere all the time, coming from asteroids or comets. Yet some is thought to come from supernova explosions and could help us understand the history of our solar neighbourhood. How can researchers detect these particles?

The key lies in a rare isotope, iron-60, that has no natural sources on Earth. But measuring abundance of iron-60 is easier said than done. One previous study has found iron-60 in deep sea sediment deposits but new research by Koll et al (2019) suggests that pure, untouched Antarctic snow is another viable source.

The team collected pure snow that was less than 20 years old, melted it, filtered out the solids and incinerated the residues. They then used mass spectrometry to measure the presence of iron-60 and manganese-53. By comparing the relative abundances of these two isotopes the researchers were able to demonstrate that the source of the iron-60 was interstellar dust, ruling out other potential sources such as cosmic radiation, nuclear weapons tests or reactor accidents.

The process opens the way for researchers to measure iron-60 abundance in older snow samples to get an idea of where and when the supernova occurred and when our Solar System entered the local interstellar cloud.

The final line of this sciku is a reference to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, in a scene near the very start of the trilogy where Lord Asriel shows images of Dust taken in the Arctic:

“And the streams of Dust…”
” – Come from the sky, and bathe him in what looks like light.”
Chapter 2, The Northern Lights by Philip Pullman.

Original research: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.072701

October 27, 2017October 27, 2017

Found: Beagle lander

Found: Beagle lander.

Solar panel malfunction

prevents contact home.

In 2003 the Beagle 2 Mars lander arrived at Mars and was expected to make its first communication from the surface on Christmas day. The lander remained silent. None of the 24 attempts to make contact with the lander were successful, and without a sighting of the lander it was difficult to know what had gone wrong.

Now, Bridges et al (2017) have identified the lander using a recalculation of the predicted landing area and Mars Orbiter imagery of the target area. The lander was found within 20 kilometres of the original landing target and the images suggest that not all of the solar panels deployed successfully. Without the panels properly deploying communication would have been impossible. These findings suggest that everything appeared to be going well with entry, descent and landing sequence until a final fault during solar panel deployment.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.170785