A habitable planet orbits a white dwarf. Here the ghostly blue ring is a planetary nebula—hydrogen gas the star ejected as it evolved from a red giant to a white dwarf. Illustration by David A. Aguilar (CfA)

According to a new proposal from astronomers and professors Avi Loeb and Dan Maoz, signs of life may be awaiting detection in the shadows of death. Looking to the abundance of dying stars known as white dwarfs, Loeb and Maoz devised a simple way to search for oxygen in the atmosphere of exoplanets which orbit around white dwarfs much the way Earth orbits the sun. Loeb says the theory could yield results within the decade with the launch of NASA’s James Webb Telescope in 2018.

The pair published a paper in February, ”Detecting bio-markers in habitable-zone earths transiting white dwarfs,” outlining their theoretical research. In it, Loeb, chair of Harvard University’s department of Astronomy and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, explains that though a white dwarf is simply the cooling core of a dead star, its radiant heat and light can host life on orbiting planets for billions of years.

“We know of a few thousand of those planets by now and there must be many more out there. And a key question is, if a planet is quite similar to Earth in terms of its rocky material; and if it’s the right distance from the furnace, the central star that keeps it warm so that adequate water can exist on its surface; would the chemistry of life naturally arise, and would life exist the same way it does on Earth?” Loeb says it’s a difficult question to address with theory alone. “The best way to approach it,” he says, “would be to try and observe other planets, and search for indications of life.” And that rather than visiting those places, Loeb recommends searching “for signatures of molecules that are naturally produced by life and the most generic one is oxygen.”

Recent research suggests not only that there are plenty of exoplanets out there like our own, but that they are often paired with and orbiting white dwarfs. According to Loeb, “Somewhere between 15 to 30 percent of [white dwarfs] show evidence of rocky material on their surface, and such material would not be there unless there was rocky stuff around them,” meaning that these are the exoplanets that could potentially sustain life.

Signs of extraterrestrial life could be hiding in the shadow of dying white dwarf stars. Image courtesy of NASA and H. Richer (University of British Columbia)

With this in mind, Loeb and Maoz postulated that researchers could find oxygen by measuring the atmospheric transmission spectrum of these planets as it passes in front of a white dwarf. Unfortunately, the pair will have to wait until 2018, when the launch of the James Webb Telescope is scheduled. The measurements have to be taken outside the Earth’s atmosphere, where oxygen concentrations can alter the incoming light.

In the meantime, Loeb plans to use the results of an upcoming survey of stars to identify prime candidates for the space telescope to measure. “One can follow up on the sample of white dwarfs that is found by this survey and search for examples of where we see evidence of a planet transiting a white dwarf and, if it’s the right distance, that would be a very good candidate for JWST to look at.”

The researchers estimate that a sample size of some 500 white dwarfs will be needed, to account for a variety of alignments between planets and their stars, but he’s optimistic about the potential to find something.

“I think if we have the technology, we should do it,” he says. “There are several examples in the history of astronomy where people hesitated.” Most recently, he says, researchers were not given observation time to search for exoplanets. “Even though it was feasible technologically, they said no we won’t give the time for that because it’s speculative and the chance is very small that there would be a Jupiter close to a star.” Of course, “only a decade later these Jupiters were found by chance, and it opened completely this field of exoplanets.”

Loeb, who sprinkles his lectures with talk of religion and philosophy, says the lesson is to remain open-minded. “The way to make discoveries is not to have a prejudice and just to explore the universe because our imagination is quite limited.”

In the end, Loeb says his proposal is actually simple, a hallmark of his approach to physics that has earned him a Chambliss Astronomical Writing Award from the American Astronomical Society for his book, “How Did the First Stars and Galaxies Form?“

One of three telescopes to provide groundbreaking data on a distant black hole, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope sits atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Photo by Nik Szymanek

The point of no return has been discovered at last. Fifty million light-years from Earth, in the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, a black hole that is six billion times more massive than the Sun has provided scientists with the first measurement of what is known as an “event horizon,” the point beyond which matter is forever lost to the black hole.

“Once objects fall through the event horizon, they’re lost forever,” says Shep Doeleman, a research associate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author on the paper published in Science Express.

Black holes are the densest objects in the universe. “There’s such intense gravity there that it’s not just matter that can cross the event horizon and get sucked into the black hole but even a photon of light,” says co-author Jonathan Weintroub, also at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “There’s a bit of a paradox in claiming that we’ve measured a black hole, because black holes are black. We measure light, or in our case, radiowaves” from around the black hole, not the black hole itself.

The black hole in question is one of the two biggest in the sky, according to a September 2011 paper titled, “The size of the jet launching region in M87,” which outlined how measurements of the event horizon could be taken.

Described in the paper, “Jet-Launching Structure Resolved Near the Supermassive Black Hole in M87,” these jets are made of, “relativistic particles that can extend for hundreds of thousands of light-years, providing an important mechanism for redistributing matter and energy on large scales that affect galactic evolution.” Image by NASA and Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA

Beyond being fantastically, mind-bogglingly bizarre, black holes are also useful targets for study, explains Weintroub, particularly the ten percent that exhibit what are known as jets, or light-emitting bursts of matter being converted into energy as masses approach the event horizon. Supported by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, these jets provided the radiation Weintroub’s team needed to take its measurements.

Using the combined data from radio telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona and California, researchers created a “virtual” telescope capable of capturing 2,000 times more detail than the Hubble Space Telescope. At this level of detail, researchers were able to measure what is known as the “innermost stable circular orbit” of matter outside the black hole as well as M87′s event horizon. If the event horizon is the door into a black hole, then the innermost stable circular orbit is like the porch; past that point, bodies will begin to spiral toward the event horizon.

“We hope to add more telescopes,” says Weintroub. “That’s really what we need to do to start to make new images and understand what the hell is going on at the base of the jet.”

As a point of clarification on what the team has actually done, Weintroub says, “I’ve seen headlines saying we made an image of the black hole–we didn’t in fact make an image of anything, and if we made an image, it would be the pattern of radiation in the immediate neighborhood of the black hole, because the black hole is black.”

While the appearance of black holes may be simple to describe (they’re black), their behavior quickly gets weird and that’s precisely the scintillating promise waiting at the event horizon.

“Black holes are interesting,” says Weintroub, “because one of the things that Einstein predicts with his theory of general relativity is that radiation bends light.” In truth, Weintroub continues, Einstein posited that the gravity of massive objects (black holes included) actually bends the space through which light travels.

As Weintroub puts it, “Gravity bends the very fabric of space, and intense gravity bends the fabric of space intensely.”

As the virtual telescope expands to other sites in Chile, Europe, Mexico, Greenland and the South Pole, Weintroub says they’ll be able to create ever more detailed images within roughly five years. “When we start making images,” he says, “we’ll be able to see whether or not the radiation that a black hole admits is ‘lensed,’” or bent, as Einstein predicted.

Meanwhile, here in the Milky Way, things are equally exciting for different reasons. Though the black hole at the center of our galaxy is what Weintroub calls “quiet” and lacks a jet, this September researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discovered a gas cloud with planet-forming capabilities headed toward the Milky Way’s black hole.

Late at night, when Alex Parker is in the middle of an eight to ten-hour long calibration at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, he likes to listen to early Nine Inch Nails or Led Zeppelin to stay alert. To finish the evening, he says he switches to instrumental music. Parker was a musician long before he was an astronomer. He says music has a place in the study of the sky, particularly when creating visualizations.

“When getting into data visualization, it seemed that audio is an under-utilized resource which could enhance or, in some circumstances, replace visualization,” says Parker. To that end, he has created a series of musically rich animations that show everything from the orbits of the many potential planets captured by the Kepler mission to a patch of sky erupting with supernova each assigned a different note.

Turns out, the silent environment of outer-space lends itself quite well to a variety of musical selections. “Some astrophysical processes seem very serene and elegant, while others are sudden and phenomenally violent, and the music I would associate with each might have radically different character,” Parker explains. For his most recent project, Worlds: The Kepler Planet Candidates (at the top of the post), which shows potential planets picked up by the team’s measurements dancing around a single star, he went with the instrumental Nine Inch Nails song, “2 Ghosts 1.” Though the visualization is based on real data, Parker says, “The illustrated planet candidates orbit around 1770 unique stars, and packing that many planets into a single system would rapidly lead to extreme chaos.”

When creating the video for his Supernova Sonata (above), Parker began experimenting with percussive sounds, but found that coordinating the stars’ activity to generated notes provided a nice contrast to the violent detonations.

Kepler 11: A Six-Planet Sonata from Alex Parker on Vimeo.

In Kepler Sonata (above), Parker coordinated the motion of the six-planet system, Kepler 11, as detected by the Kepler observatory, to create not only a visual experience of a system’s dynamic movement but also an auditory representation.

Parker, whose father is a professional musician, says that, though he doesn’t instantly hear music in his mind when he contemplates the night sky, he is one of many observational astronomers who rely on an “Observing Playlist,” to provide a soundtrack to their work.

An artist's conception of a runaway hypervelocity planet. Image courtesy of David Aguilar, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

In 2005, Warren Brown of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory noticed something rather unusual in the sky: a star traveling out of the Milky Way galaxy at roughly 1.5 million miles per hour. The strange discovery could only be explained by an even stranger prediction, made nearly two decades earlier by an astronomer named J.G. Hills.

“He predicted that if you have two stars orbiting each other—a so-called binary system—and they get too close to the central black hole in the Milky Way, they will get ripped apart,” says SAO astrophysicist Avi Loeb. “One of the stars will go into a tighter orbit around the black hole, and the second one will be flung out of the galaxy.”

Since Brown’s 2005 discovery, at least 21 hypervelocity stars (as they’ve come to be called) have been observed speeding out of our galaxy. But only recently did anyone look to see if there might be hypervelocity planets, as well. “My collaborator Idan Ginsburg and I did some work on hypervelocity stars, and at some point, I was talking with him about perhaps looking into planets,” Loeb says. “One day, at lunch, it clicked: we could actually write a paper on them, because there is a method of finding them.”

Loeb had realized that a planet orbiting one of these hypervelocity stars could be observed by what’s called the transit method: when a distant planet crosses between its star and our telescope, the light of the star dims slightly, indicating the presence of the planet. First, though, he and Ginsburg had to determine whether these planets could theoretically exist in the first place. Their calculations, published last week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, went beyond even what he had suspected.

Hypervelocity planets can indeed exist—and according to the research team’s simulations, they may approach speeds as high as 30 million miles per hour, making them some of the fastest-moving objects in the known universe.

“We asked what would happen if there were planets around hypervelocity stars,” Loeb says. “So we started with a simulation of a binary system, and then sprinkled planets around each of the stars.” Their calculations showed that, if the binary star system was ripped apart by gravitational forces near the galaxy’s central black hole, a small percentage of the planets would stay bound to one of the stars, either following them on their journey out of the galaxy, or diving more closely into the depths of the black hole. The majority of planets, however, would be flung away from their parent stars, traveling even faster to the edges of the Milky Way.

“Their speed can reach up to ten thousands kilometers per second—a few percent of the speed of light,” says Loeb. “If you imagine a civilization living on such a planet, they would have a tremendous journey.” The voyage from the center of the galaxy to the edge of the observable universe, he says, would take 10 billion years.

The potential existence of hypervelocity planets is far more than a mere curiosity, since it would provide us information about conditions near the center of the galaxy, and if planets can even form there. “It’s a very unusual environment, because the density of stars there is more than a million times than the density near the sun,” Loeb says. “There is a very high temperature, and every now and then the black hole at the center gets fed with gas, so it shines very brightly, which could in principle disrupt a system that tries to make planets.” His team’s calculations showed that, if planets can indeed form in this area, they should be observable when bound to hypervelocity stars.

None of these planets has been spotted, but Loeb hopes that some will be found in coming years. Just as astronomers have recently discovered hundreds of extrasolar planets using the transit method as part of NASA’s Kepler Mission, they can scrutinize hypervelocity stars in much the same way to spot these runaway planets. And if things progress along the same time frame as J.G. Hills’ 1988 prediction of hypervelocity stars, Loeb can expect to have his predictions confirmed within his lifetime—sometime around the year 2029.

Readers questions continue this month with some really intriguing queries. Can you identify a bird just by its feather? The aptly named Carla Dove, a Smithsonian ornithologist weighs in on that one in the video above. And speaking of our fine feathered friends, another reader wonders why it is that birds all seem to want to hang out near electrical transformers? From dinosaurs to telescopes to gemstones, you asked and we found the answers.

Are there any paleontological discoveries, such as dinosaur bones, left to be made in the United States?
Susanne Ott, Bern, Switzerland

There sure are. This is such a large country, and there are so many areas yet to be searched, that we may not run out of finds for several lifetimes. Just think: We have found only about 2,000 species of dinosaurs for the 160 million years they were alive on Earth. Given that a species lasts only a few million years, we must be missing many thousands of dinosaur species. The most promising places are out West, where it’s drier and paleontologists can get access to fossil-bearing rocks.

Matthew Carrano, Paleontologist
Museum of Natural History

How much artistic license do scientists use when they portray astronomical features detected by radio telescopes?
Jeanne Long, Atlanta, Georgia

A lot, actually. Radio-telescope images differ from the images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope—while Hubble images are recorded in the visible wavelengths of light we see in rainbows, radio telescopes record electromagnetic radio waves sent out by distant galactic objects. They detect what our ears might pick up if we could hear the universe. (Luckily, we can’t, or the world would be a jumbled mess of rumbling sounds.) Based on the intensity of the radio waves, astronomers plot signal strengths and assign different colors to them.

Although it would be handy and logical, there is no set convention to those color assignments. Scientists choose different colors to bring out specific details or molecules found in the image. (If you do a quick Google image search for the Trifid Nebula, you’ll see images with different color representations of the same object.) Is it fair to randomly assign different colors to objects in space? To astronomers, that’s not an issue. They are simply trying to isolate data. And the truth is, the human eye is not sensitive enough to pick up the true colors of these objects anyway. So, the next time you see a breathtaking picture from space, thank a scientist for putting it all together.

David Aguilar, Astronomer and illustrator
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

Is it true that the Smithsonian is still cataloguing items from Charles Wilkes’ United States Exploring Expedition?
Kevin Ramsey, Washington, D.C.

That expedition returned from its four-year exploration of the Pacific in 1842 with an immense trove—hundreds of fish and mammal specimens, more than 2,000 bird specimens, 50,000 plant specimens, a thousand live plants, some 4,000 ethnographic objects, such as Fijian war clubs, Samoan fish hooks and New Zealand baskets. But no, the Smithsonian is not still cataloguing them. That job largely fell to the scientists who accompanied Wilkes, and they completed it, well, expeditiously. The collection was exhibited in the Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C. for several years, before it came to the Smithsonian.

Pamela M. Henson, Historian
Smithsonian Institution Archives

Did Mathew Brady really take all the Civil War photographs that are credited to him?
Patrick Ian, Bethesda, Maryland
No. By 1861, Mathew Brady was one of the best-known photographers in America, with portrait studios in New York City and Washington, D.C.  While his staff handled day-to-day operations, Brady provided the creative vision and marketing expertise that made his studios famous. When the Civil War began, he assembled and outfitted teams of photographers and sent them into the field to ensure that his cameras would be present to produce a visual record of the conflict. Although Brady traveled periodically to battlefields and encampments, the Civil War photographs that carry his credit line were typically made by his cameramen. The look of the portraits produced in Brady’s studios—such as those featured in the National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition, Mathew Brady’s Photographs of Union Generals (March 30, 2012-May 31, 2015)—reflected his aesthetic even when he was not present for the portrait session.
Ann M. Shumard, Curator of Photographs
National Portrait Gallery

Why do birds like to congregate around electric transformers?
Luis Tewes, Palm Beach Gardens, Florida

While the ever-growing electrical grid spells trouble for most species of birds, some have incorporated human structures into their lives. Power lines are a flight hazard to many species, but they also provide elevated perches, particularly in open country where there are few natural alternatives, for sit-and-wait predators, such as bluebirds, shrikes and small raptors. Many species use electric lines to rest or monitor their territories; and flocks of blackbirds and starlings and other birds gather on wires before they join large communal roosts. Power-line poles and towers and their attendant transformers provide additional support and protection for flocks and larger species, such as raptors. A few species even commandeer power poles and transformers as nesting sites. Transformers may produce some heat, which may explain why some birds like them. The monk parrakeet, introduced from Argentina, nests and roosts around transformers and has expanded into some pretty cold urban areas.

Birds’ use of power equipment illustrates their impressive adaptability, but awareness of high-voltage electric currents is not in their DNA.  While a bird can perch on a high-voltage line in complete safety, as soon as it makes secondary contact with a conductor that leads to a ground, it will be fried. Large birds taking flight or producing “streamers” of fecal material often complete the circuit to their demise. Fecal build-up, gnawing (by parrots) and nesting material can short out lines or transformers, leading to massive power outages.  Bird mortality might be reduced, and electrical service might be more reliable, if we had a better-designed grid.

Russell Greenberg, Wildlife Biologist,
Migratory Bird Center, National Zoo

In aserated (or “starred”) gemstones, such as the ruby and sapphire varieties of corundum, what is the average amount of rutile per square millimeter? And how many asterated gemstones does the Smithsonian Institution have?
Davis M. Upchurch, Fletcher, North Carolina

In synthetic asterated corundum, about 0.1 to 0.3 percent titanium oxide is typically mixed with the aluminum oxide. That gives you a ballpark idea as to the fraction of rutile (which is usually given as an amount per cubic millimeter). The Museum of Natural History has about 50 asterated gems in its collection, including, 21 specimens of corundum. We add new ones sporadically, and we’re always on the lookout for different or better examples.
Jeffrey Post, Curator of Gems and Minerals,
Museum of Natural History

We’re ready for still more questions. Please submit your queries here.

An artist's rendering of GJ1214b, orbiting a red dwarf star. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

You may remember learning the types of planets growing up: rocky planets, like Earth and Mars; gas giants, like Jupiter and Saturn; and ice giants, like Neptune and Uranus.

Now scientists at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) have discovered a new kind: a waterworld. The planet, named GJ1214b, is not merely covered with water like our oceans; most of it is water. “GJ1214b is like no planet we know of,” Zachory Berta, a graduate student at the SAO and lead author on the paper announcing the discovery, published online Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal. “A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water.”

Contrary to what you might imagine, the “water” on GJ1214b is quite different from anything you’ve ever seen.”The water there is in really weird forms that we’re not used to on Earth,” Berta says. “There are substances that are like ice, but at a very high temperature, because the pressure is so high that the molecules are squeezed together. There is also this superfluid state of water that is more gaseous than the water we’re used to.”

If you have trouble picturing such an exotic alien waterworld, you’re not alone. “Frankly, I too have a lot of difficulty imagining what this would actually be like in person,” Berta says.

Located in the direction of the Ophiuchus, the planet is just 40 light years from Earth, making it a close neighbor compared to most of the stars in our galaxy. GJ1214b is 2.7 times Earth’s diameter and weighs nearly 7 times as much. The planet closely orbits a red-dwarf star every 38 hours, and has an estimated average temperature of 450° Fahrenheit.

Planets that orbit a star so closely do not typically contain any water, says Berta, so scientists believe that GJ1214b must have had an unusual history. “It couldn’t have formed that close, because all of the water would have evaporated off due to the heat,” he says. “So this planet probably had to have formed farther out, and somehow came inward.” Gravitational interactions with other planets may have pulled the waterworld closer in.

Berta and his thesis advisor, David Charbonneau, found the planet back in 2009 as part of the MEarth Project, which uses ground-based telescopes at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory on Mount Hopkins in Arizona to discover habitable planets orbiting nearby red dwarf stars. “At the time, we had an inkling that this could be a waterworld,” Berta says. “We could measure the mass and the radius of the planet, so we knew its density, and the density was very low—too low to be explained by a big ball of rock.” The planet’s average density was calculated to be roughly 2 grams per cubic centimeter, far closer to water’s density of 1 g/cm³ than Earth’s average density of 5.5 g/cm³.

Still, with only limited information on the planet, the team couldn’t rule out other possibilities, such as a planet with a thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, which would similarly account for the low average density. But when the researchers were able to use the Hubble Telescope’s newly installed Wide Field Camera 3—specifically looking at light from the red dwarf star that traveled through the GJ1214b’s atmosphere before traveling towards us—they were able to rule out that possibility.

“If the big, puffy hydrogen envelope on the outside of the planet were there, we would see it, but we don’t,” says Berta. “So it looks like we’re dealing with the alternative—a planet with a whole bunch of water in it, and an atmosphere which is mostly water as well, which is consistent with what we see from the Hubble observations.” The research team describes the atmosphere hot and steamy.

Berta is less excited about finding the first of a new type of planet than the possibility of finding many more. “NASA’s Kepler telescope has found a number of planets that are the same size as this one, but they’re much more distant, so it’s hard to observe those planets in more detail,” he says. “This is interesting not because it’s something that we’ve never seen before and will never see again, but because it’s sort of a type specimen for all of these.”

He believes investments in telescopes and other observational equipment will continue to pay great dividends as we continue to search the galaxy for planets. “The James Webb Space Telescope [due to be launched in 2018] is NASA’s successor to Hubble. It will be great, because instead of just having a very rough picture of planets like these, we’ll be able to probe them more closely,” he says.

Berta is confident that within decades, astronomers will detect a smaller, cooler version of GJ1214b, which could theoretically harbor extraterrestrial life. “That’s the cool thing about astronomy,” he says. “As we continue to build better telescopes, we can find more and more.”

How much is the Hope Diamond worth? Ask Smithsonian.

Our inquisitive readers are rising to the challenge we gave them last month. The questions are pouring in and we’re ready for more. Do you have any questions for our curators? Submit your questions here.

How much is the Hope Diamond worth? — Marjorie Mathews, Silver Spring, Maryland

That’s the most popular question we get, but we don’t really satisfy people by giving them a number. There are a number of answers, but the best one is that we honestly don’t know. It’s a little bit like Liz Taylor’s jewels being sold in December—all kinds of people guessed at what they would sell for, but everybody I know was way off. Only when those pieces were opened up to bidding at a public auction could you find out what their values were. When they were sold, then at least for that day and that night you could say, well, they were worth that much. The Hope Diamond is kind of the same way, but more so. There’s simply nothing else like it. So how do you put a value on the history, on the fact it’s been here on display for over 50 years and a few hundred million people have seen it, and on that fact it’s a rare blue diamond on top of everything else? You don’t. – Jeffrey E. Post, mineralogist, National Museum of Natural History

What’s the worst impact of ocean acidification so far?- Nancy Schaefer, Virginia Beach, Virginia

The impacts of ocean acidification are really just starting to be felt, but two big reports that came out in 2011 show that it could have very serious effects on coral reefs. These studies did not measure the warming effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but rather its effect of making the ocean more acidic when it dissolves in the ocean. Places where large amounts of carbon dioxide seep into the water from the sea floor provide a natural experiment and show us how ocean waters might look, say, 50 or 100 years from now. Both studies showed branching, lacy, delicate coral forms are likely to disappear, and with them that kind of three-dimensional complexity so many species depend on. Also, other species that build a stony skeleton or shell, such as oysters or mussels, are likely to be affected. This happens because acidification makes carbonate ions, which these species need for their skeletons, less abundant.

Nancy Knowlton, marine biologist
National Museum of Natural History

Art and artifacts from ancient South Pacific and Pacific Northwest tribes have similarities in form and function. Is it possible that early Hawaiians caught part of the Kuroshio Current of the North Pacific Gyre to end up along the northwest coast of America from northern California to Alaska? — April Amy Croan, Maple Valley, Washington

Those similarities have given rise to various theories, including trans-Pacific navigation, independent drifts of floating artifacts, inadvertent crossings by ships that have lost their rudders or rigging, or whales harpooned in one area that died or were captured in a distant place. Some connections are well-known, like feather garment fragments found in an archaeological site in Southeast Alaska that appear to have been brought there by whaling ships that had stopped in the Hawaiian Islands, a regular route for 19th-century whalers. Before the period of European contact, the greatest similarities are with the southwest Pacific, not Hawaii. The Kushiro current would have facilitated Asian coastal contacts with northwestern North America, but would not have helped Hawaiians. The problem of identification is one of context, form and dating. Most of the reported similarities are either out of their original context (which can’t be reconstructed), or their form is not specific enough to relate to another area’s style, or the date of creation cannot be established. To date there is no acceptable proof for South Pacific-Northwest Coast historical connections that predates the European whaling era, except for links that follow the coastal region of the North Pacific into Alaska.

William Fitzhugh, archeologist
Natural History Museum

The Quadrantid meteor shower, as visible at twilight. Photo by Mila Zinkova

If you can drag yourself out of bed and into the chill of a early January morning, you might find yourself looking at a rare treat: the Quadrantid meteor shower. Early in the morning hours of January 4, from roughly 2 to 5 a.m. local time across the country, this annual meteor shower will be visible in the Northern hemisphere, peaking with an intensity that will approach 100 shooting meteors per hour.

“What’s going on is the earth is going through a debris trail,” says Timothy Spahr, astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “You’re dealing with very tiny particles, dust-sized in a lot of cases. When they enter the atmosphere, they burn up immediately, and that makes a meteor.” The particles that make up the Quadrantid shower originate from an asteroid named 2003 EH1, which many scientists believe was actually once part of a comet. Because the particles enter at speeds as high as 90,000 miles per hour, they burn up high in the atmosphere and leave a glowing streak across the sky.

The Quadrantid shower is unusual in that it continues for a relatively short duration—only a few hours, as compared to more famous showers, such as the Perseids, that last for several days—but with a high degree of activity. “Under a dark sky, we are talking about 100 visible meteors per hour, so that means a little more than one per minute,” Spahr says. “Many people assume that these showers have millions of meteors all over the sky, but you’ll see around one per minute. And that’s actually pretty cool, because you register when you see each one.”

With the moon projected to set at around 3 a.m. and clear forecasts for much of the country, tonight has the potential to be a rare chance to see the Quadrantids. Most years, because of their brief duration, moonlight or cloudy conditions obscure the show. This year, experts recommend going outside once the moon has set—and, of course, dressing warmly, with projected nighttime temperatures in the twenties or teens in many places. Because of the show’s timing, the best viewings are expected in the Eastern United States.

Meteor-gazers are advised to watch the Northeast part of the sky, and find as dark an area as possible. Give your eyes some time to adjust to the dark and be alert, as most meteors flash by in a second or less. A live feed of the skies above Huntsville, Alabama, is available on NASA’s web site.

One of the biggest factors that determine how many meteors will be seen is something that most people cannot control: location. For those stuck in big cities—like this reporter, based in Washington, D.C.—ambient lighting will reduce the visibility of the meteors significantly. ”A really dark sky makes a huge difference, and most people in the world never see a dark sky because they live in cities,” Spahr says. “If you drove two hours to the west of Washington, say, and got up in elevation a little bit, it would be very nice.”

Still, this is one meteor show that even city-dwellers can appreciate, if not as much as those in the country. “It will be a lot less in a city, but you will still see some meteors tonight,” says Spahr. “Some of these particles will end up, for just a few seconds, as bright as Venus, so those you’ll be able to see from pretty much anywhere.”

A budding star spits out jets of superheated gas and dust in the Carina Nebula. Photo courtesy of NASA/ESA/M.Livio/STScI

A tour of the Natural History Museum might lead you from an exhibition on dinosaurs to one about ocean creatures. You might read about how hominids evolved millions of years ago, how our planet’s continents have moved, or how early creatures evolved when the atmosphere was practically devoid of oxygen. The time scale of natural history, you realize, is almost unimaginably large.

But if you enter the museum’s new exhibition, “The Evolving Universe“—a show featuring photography from some of the most powerful telescopes ever created—you’ll find yourself even more astounded. Set against the backdrop of the known universe, the history of our dear planet seems nearly irrelevant. Hundreds of billions of stars like our sun are born out of supernovae several light years wide (each light year is longer than five trillion miles) and are destined to die, once again exploding into supernovas, billions of years later. Thousands of galaxies, some containing trillions of stars like our sun, are continuously being born and evolving.

Although these concepts can be difficult to comprehend and even harder to visualize, the stunning photos that make up the exhibition show the visitor just how awe-inspiring these astronomical events can be. They put the latest CGI graphics from 3-D blockbuster films to shame. “Part of our mission is sharing science with the public, and so we felt that doing this exhibit and showing these images is a great way to do that,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, which partnered with the museum in creating the exhibition. The large-scale photographs in the show were produced by a number of telescopes, both Earth and space-based, including the Hubble Space Telescope.

A black hole at the center of the Centaurus A galaxy spews jets of gas outward. Photo courtesy of NASA/CFX/CfA,MPiFR/ESO/APEX

“We’ve all seen the amazing pictures from NASA’s probes in our own solar system,” says McDowell. “I’m excited about bringing to the public the remarkable images of the broader universe that we astronomers have been exploring with our telescopes. I hope that with this exhibition visitors will take away an appreciation for our larger cosmic neighborhood.”

The show—and accompanying website—use these images to tell the story of our universe, from start to present. The Big Bang, the creation of galaxies, the birth of the Milky Way and the formation of our own solar system are represented in rich images so full of detail that they need to be observed for minutes at a time, like pieces of art hung on the wall.

What might be most remarkable is that the actual images created by the telescopes are themselves ancient history. Because light takes so long to travel from the far-flung reaches of space, when we photograph distant galaxies, the light that hits the camera’s lens to produce the image left its home galaxy billions of years ago. These pictures show some of the celestial objects as they were before humans even existed. And so we have a font-row seat to watch the earliest stages of the universe’s creation, if we look deep enough into space, more than 13 billion years later.

When wandering the exhibition, one might be overwhelmed by the torrent of information presented on scales that are downright otherworldly. How does our planet, so tiny and new, fit into all of this?

The best metaphor to understand earth’s place in the universe might be that of astrophysicist, author and recent Around the Mall blog subject Carl Sagan. In his book Pale Blue Dot, he describes a far-off view of the Earth from the outer reaches of the solar system:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

In the scheme of the known universe—of supernovae and galaxies and nebulas and black holes—our whole planet starts to look like a speck of dust, floating in the sunlight.

The Evolving Universe is on view at the Natural History Museum through July 7, 2013

A comparison of the two newly-discovered planets with Venus and Earth. Image courtesy of NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

Yesterday, scientists at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts made a major announcement. For the first time, after years of searching, Earth-sized planets had been detected outside of our solar system. Among the five planets in the distant Kepler-20 star system are Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f—two rocky orbs with diameters approximately 87 percent and 103 percent that of earth, respectively. The news has the scientific world in a state of excitement over the consequences of the find. We spoke with Smithsonian astrophysicist Francois Fressin, the lead author of the paper, about the discovery.

The Basics

Researchers have been using the Kepler space telescope since it launched in March of 2009 to search for exoplanets, or planets in other solar systems. “Kepler is staring at 200,000 stars, all located in the same area of the sky, and it just monitors the light it gets from each of the stars, continuously, for years,” says Fressin. “For a fraction of the stars, there’s a periodic dimming with the same duration and same depth of light.” This dimming can be caused by a small opaque body crossing between the star and the telescope—in this case, a pair of planets. The team first detected the telltale dimming more than a year ago, but had to make more calculations with custom-developed software to rule out the possibility that it was caused by other phenomena.

From the degree and frequency of the dimming, the scientists are able to make inferences about the planets. Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f are 6,900 miles and 8,200 miles in diameter, respectively, remarkably close to Earth’s 8,000 mile size. Because the two planets are so close to their host star—they orbit at 4.7 million miles and 10.3 million miles, both far closer in than Mercury is to the sun—they are believed to be extremely hot, with average temperatures of 1400 and 800 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively. “We know they’re both pure rock bodies,” Fressin says. “But we don’t have precise mass estimates, so we can’t say if they’re similar in composition to the Earth, or something denser with more iron, like Mercury.”

An artist's conception of Kepler-20e. Image courtesy of NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

What It Means For Astronomy

Exoplanet hunters began uncovering distant gas giants as early as 1992, but smaller, Earth-sized bodies had proved more difficult to detect. “We’ve crossed the threshold: this the first time that humanity is able to detect an Earth-sized object around another star,” Fressin says. ”That’s symbolically and technologically important.”

The discovery represents a historic milestone in astronomy. Now, scientists are convinced that they have the right tools to be able to detect Earth-sized planets that might support life. Researchers will continue using the Kepler space telescope to locate exoplanets in hope of finding such a world.

What It Means For Planetary Science

The discovery also turns upside-down much of what scientists believed about the formation of solar systems. The two Earth-size planets are interspersed with three gas giants, all extremely close to the host star, Kepler-20. “From the star, it goes in the order big, small, big, small, big, which seems completely weird,” says Fressin. “In our solar system, we have these four rocky small bodies, and then, farther away, these four large giant gaseous planets. So how did that happen, that we have all this mixing in the Kepler-20 system?”

Although we don’t currently have definitive answers, scientists suspect that the planets drifted into their current position over time. “They didn’t form at the place they are right now, there was not enough rocky material to build these five planets so close to their host star,” Fressin says. “So one solution would be that they formed farther out, and then migrated in.”

What It Means For Extraterrestrial Life

An artist's conception of Kepler-20f. Image courtesy of NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

The most tantalizing possibility of these discoveries is the potential that the exoplanets might harbor life. But both Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f are outside the habitable zone—often called the “Goldilocks” zone—that is neither too close nor too far from the host star, allowing for the evolution of living creatures. ”We don’t know a lot of things about life, but we know that one of the main ingredients of life on Earth is the presence of liquid water,” says Fressin. “Right now, at the temperatures estimated, water can’t be in a liquid state on either planet.”

Still, the hypothesis that the planets may have formed farther away, and then migrated to their current locations close to the star, means that life may have existed long ago. “It seems pretty clear that Kepler-20f once crossed the habitable zone of its host star, after its formation,” Fressin says. “It is the closest object in terms of size to the Earth in the known universe, and this means that it could have been habitable in its past.”

What It Means For Space Exploration

Although Kepler-20 is much too far to attempt as the target of a space probe mission—it’s about 950 light-years from Earth, which would require a journey of 36 million years by the space shuttle—Fressin feels that discoveries like this should stimulate interest in the very real possibility of exploring other, closer, star systems. “It would be challenging, and would require great international collaboration, maybe for one or two generations, but it would be feasible,” he says.

Such a mission would admittedly be very long-term, but the rewards are many. “I think the best location to send a probe would be to the closest sun-like star,” says Fressin. “So then imagine, in two generations, we’d have the probe coming back with pictures—real pictures—of another world.”

Dr. Pierre Comizzoli, one of the two Smithsonian scientists to receive the Presidential Award, at work in the lab. Photo courtesy Smithsonian's National Zoo

Earlier this week, President Obama announced the recipients of the annual Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Among those honored were two scientists who have conducted innovative research at the Smithsonian Institution: Dr. Justin Kasper, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Dr. Pierre Comizzoli, a biologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI).

The award is the highest honor the government confers on scientists in the early stages of their careers, and is given to researchers across a wide range of disciplines.

“I’m very honored to receive this,” says Comizzoli, who was nominated through his work with the National Institutes of Health. Throughout his career, he has been involved in researching reproductive biology within a variety of species, including domestic cats, cheetahs, deer and frogs. His current research seeks to find new ways to preserve eggs and sperm without freezing.

“The project I’m working on now is exploring drying techniques, so you can keep your samples at an ambient room temperature, instead of storing them in liquid nitrogen,” he says. “It’s way more flexible, and way less expensive. And in some parts of the world, liquid nitrogen is just not available.”

Comizzoli’s work is mainly intended to preserve animal sperm and eggs as a tool for species conservation. “It’s really important to preserve the fertility of any individuals from a rare population,” he says. “If the genomes of those animals are still available to be mixed in the current population, you can preserve the genetic diversity.”

But many are excited about the potential of this research to assist in human fertility, as well. “Fertility preservation is used a lot in human reproductive medicine, for people who need to preserve their fertility before any medical treatments that are detrimental to the reproductive tissue,” Comizzoli says. “We have this fantastic opportunity at the SCBI of working with many different species and generating this huge database of comparative data, that is then extremely useful for human reproductive medicine.”

Dr. Kasper studies the transfer of energy in astrophysical objects, including the solar corona and solar wind. He received the award for his current work on the Solar Probe Plus, which will be humankind’s first mission to send a probe to the sun’s outer atmosphere.

Kasper’s research has helped with the design of SWEAP (Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons) an instrument that will provide scientists with information on how the solar corona and upper atmosphere are heated. “I am honored to have received this recognition and encouragement to pursue the mysteries of our sun,” Kasper said in a press release. “By flying a spacecraft through the upper atmosphere of the sun, we will expose the fundamental physics responsible for the million-degree corona and help understand and forecast space weather.”

Kepler-16b, the first confirmed circumbinary planet. Photo courtesy of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Last week, the science world was abuzz with the news that scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics had discovered a distant planet with an unusual quality. Like the fictional Tatooine from Star Wars, the planet, known as Kepler-16b, is what scientists call a circumbinary: It orbits around two stars. It’s the first confirmed circumbinary planet astronomers have found.

The discovery comes from NASA’s Kepler Mission, which aims to gather information on habitable planets in the Milky Way. Josh Carter, who worked on the team that made this discovery, says they detect the presence of distant planets by a mechanism known as planetary transit. “What happens is a planet in its orbit passes in front of a star,” says Carter. “When it does that, it blocks a little light from it, just like an eclipse of the sun by the moon.”

“Of course, we can’t see the individual object, all we see is the total light coming from it,” Carter says. The light is detected by the Kepler space-based telescope. When a planet transits in front of the star during its orbit, says Carter, “you see a very small little dip in the total light from the system, and then we infer based upon its shape and basic properties that it’s an object transiting.”

This process has been used to find 21 confirmed planets so far, with thousands more potential planet candidates still being researched. But over the summer, the team noticed that one system showed dimming at irregular intervals. They realized that the multiple transits corresponded to a planet crossing in front of each star, as well as two stars crossing in front of each other. “When you see one transit in the light curve, you can guess it is the planet crossing one of the stars, but until we had three, we weren’t sure it was a circumbinary,” says Carter.

The attempt to find a circumbinary planet had been in the works for some time, Carter says. “Laurence Doyle had been looking through the collection of eclipsing stars in the catalog, and he was looking specifically for transits of a planet in a circumbinary,” says Carter. “We already had known this system had shown a single transit, but this summer with new data, we saw that there’s a total of three.”

The team further refined their understanding of Kepler-16b by using a trace spectrograph. Initially, just from studying the pattern of light emitted, they were able to establish the sizes of the stars and planet in the system, but only relative to each other. By using the spectrograph—a device that separates the light into a frequency spectrum—they could go further. “From the spectrograph, we see the velocity of the big star in the system,” says Carter. “That gives us an absolute scale with which we can learn the masses and the radii of all three objects in the system.”

Armed with this data, the researchers could then infer the planet’s composition. “We say, ‘well, it’s got this radius, it’s got this mass, what could it possibly be comprised of, what’s its structure?’” says Carter. The planet, roughly 200 light-years away from earth, is a gas giant, similar to Saturn in both size and mass.

Carter says he and his colleagues will continue searching for more circumbinary planets as they survey the wide diversity of planets in our galaxy. If they’re out there, the team will do their best to find them. “In fact,” Carter says, “we already have a few more candidate systems that we’re investigating right now.”

The Greensboro lunch counter. Photo courtesy of National Museum of American History

Friday June 17 Oh My Stars

Launch your Friday with a look into the outer limits. Thanks to the Public Observatory Project, you can view the skies at the Air and Space Museum‘s observatory between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m for your own galactic journey. After you are done exploring the wonders of the universe, participate in hands-on activities while learning about astronomy. This free event is family friendly and does not require a reservation but is weather permitting. Check with the museum’s welcome center first, but if the sky is bright come over to the Observatory, located outside the Southeast terrace near Independence Avenue and 4th Street, for an out of this world experience.

Saturday June 18 Splash Into Your Saturday

Why spend your Saturday doing the same old things when you can come to the National Portrait Gallery for a double feature that will really whet your appetite. This Saturday, Reel Portraits presents American Graffiti and Splash!.  Start your summer with a bang with American Graffiti , the film made by George Lucas before Star Wars, at 1 PM. This 1973 classic follows four young high school grads in 1962 California as they spend one last hurrah together before starting college. The film includes great cars, love stories, an amazing soundtrack and an all-star cast. Be sure not to miss Ron Howard, Harrison Ford, and Richard Dreyfuss in their Academy Award nominated performance Next up at 3 PM is the 1984 hit Splash! directed by Ron Howard. See Tom Hanks in his big screen debut as a wholesale fruit and vegetable dealer in New York. After being saved from drowning twice by a mysterious mermaid, Allen (Hanks) is called to the police station. There in the holding cell is a mysterious woman Madison, played by Darryl Hannah. Having sprouted legs for just six days Madison, Allen’s mermaid savior, is in a race against time. The film centers around the unlikely couple falling in love and the depths they go to stay together. This event is free but is on a first come, first served basis. The auditorium doors will open 30 minutes before the shows start so be sure to come early and grab your seat before it slips away.

Sunday June 19 A Greensboro Lunch

Take a few steps back in time this Sunday and join the American History Museum as they present to you the student sit-ins at the Greensboro Lunch Counter. Meet at the lunch counter on the 2nd floor of the museum’s East Wing at 1:30 Sunday afternoon to learn about a key moment in our nation’s history. Desegregation in the United States was won through many small battles, one of the most noted is the Greensboro Lunch Sit-Ins, and this Sunday you can participate in the landmark piece of history. On February 1, 1960, four male African American students from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina sat down at the lunch counter of  Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina. The Greensboro Four ordered coffee and doughnuts but were refused service at the whites only counter and were asked to leave. But the protestors – Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr. and David Richmond – stayed until the store closed. The next day they were joined by more students at the counter and the following day resulted in an even bigger turn out. By the next week the group had started a string of sit-ins at stores all over the southern states. These sit-ins resulted in desegregation of Woolworth stores throughout the South and now it is your turn. After you take part in a training session based on an actual 1960s manual, you can prepare yourself for your fist sit-in and find out if you have the courage and strength to fight for justice in the Civil Rights movement. This free 15-to-20 minute performance reveals the people featured in the exhibits on display and allows you to experience the emotion in their stories. The performances are held Sundays and Mondays at 11:30 AM, 1:30, 3 and 4 PM.

For a complete listing of Smithsonian events and exhibitions visit the GoSmithsonian Visitors Guide.

Norman Rockwell, "Children Dancing at a Party (Pardon Me)," 1918 oil on canvas Collection of Steven Spielberg © 1918 SEPS: Licensed by Curtis Publishing, Indpls, IN. All rights reserved.

Spielberg and Lucas on Rockwell: In honor of the American Art Museum’s current exhibit entitled “Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg,” filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau interviewed both movie moguls about the 20th century painter and illustrator who captured their imaginations as eager children awaiting his latest illustration in the Saturday Evening Post. Read the interviews on Eye Level to discover Lucas’ favorite paintings and why Spielberg considers Rockwell “one of the greatest Americans” since Mark Twain.

Speaking of the Movies: This week at Face to Face you can get up close and personal with one of Hollywood’s golden girls, Greta Garbo. Born in Sweden and cast in her first American film after appearing in Vanity Fair magazine, this Oscar-winning star was famous for her roles in Grand Hotel and Anna Karenina.

The Big 100: Congratulations to the Smithsonian Institution Archives blog, SIRIS, the collaborative blog written by Smithsonian archivists, for recently publishing their 100th blog post! Recently on SIRIS, we have learned all about Native American baseball players and how animals at the National Zoo get relief from the sweltering summer; we’ve seen sketches of post-World War II gardens and photographs of artists such as Diego Rivera hard at work. To celebrate reaching this blogging milestone, SIRIS has revisited their most popular posts, complete with bloggers’ reflections on their own work and readers’ comments from the original publication.

Where Stars are Being Born: Embedded within the constellation Perseus is a group of budding stars, still in the earliest stages of their lives. According to the Smithsonian Science Web site, a team of astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have been observing these “protostars” in order to learn more about their gravitational reach when they begin sucking in interstellar matter from their surroundings. This is the first study of it’s kind, and scientists hope that it will mark an important step towards proving existing theories on star formation.

It May Be Easy to Miss… But it would certainly be a shame to leave the National Museum of American History without seeing the Albert H. Small Documents Gallery. This lesser-known gallery packs a big historical punch—including the diary of Earl Schaffer on the Appalachian trail and Simeon De Witt’s 18th century map of the stars– as highlighted by the folks over at Oh Say Can You See.

What? Me worry? A ringtail cat, captured after having a little too much fun at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, awaits release. Image courtesy of Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

It seems the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory has been experiencing close encounters of the furred kind. Beginning in 2008, scientists noticed that a strange being—or beings—began paying repeat visits to the building that houses the MEarth project—a collective of eight robotic telescopes designed to search for distant planets—and eventually defaced the equipment. When paying a visit to the facility to shoot an episode of NOVA ScienceNOW, host Neil deGrasse Tyson remarked on the mysterious paw prints gracing MEarth.

Enough was enough. This thing had to be caught and, after rigging a live trap, the vandal was revealed to be a ring-tailed cat. A raccoon relative, the cat had likely entered the facility in search of an insect-centric meal. The animal was released at a spring some distance away from the mountaintop observatory. (Another ringtail cat was also trapped and released elsewhere, while a third has been observed at the nearby Whipple Observatory Base Camp. You can see some of this third visitor’s shenanigans here on YouTube.) In spite of the mild trouble they’ve caused, these creatures have endeared themselves to some of the staffers. “We’re considering making the ringtail cat the unofficial mascot of the MEarth project,” said project leader David Charbonneau. “With those big eyes, they’ve certainly got the night vision to be natural-born astronomers!”