Smithsonian.com

An artist's conception of the star LkCa 15 and the nearby protoplanet. (Credit: Karen L. Teramura, UH IfA)

Planets form from disks of swirling material that condense into solid bodies. Once only a theory, this formation has now been caught in the act by scientists using telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii (a site that should be familiar if you’ve read the Smithsonian story on black holes). The planet’s name is LkCa 15 b and researchers say it’s a protoplanet (below, in blue), still surrounded by cool dust and gas (in red). “We…found a planet, perhaps even a future solar system at its very beginning,” says the University of Hawaii’s Adam Kraus, lead author of the study that will appear soon in the Astrophysical Journal.

The planet LkCa 15 b appears in blue surrounded by cooler dust and gas in red, near the star LkCa 15. (Credit: Kraus & Ireland, 2011)

Kraus and his co-author, Michael Ireland of Australia’s Macquarie University, made their discovery by combining two techniques to cancel out the light from bright stars. The first is adaptive optics, which uses powerful computers to rapidly manipulate the telescope’s mirrors and adjust for distortions caused by Earth’s atmosphere. The second is aperture mask interferometry, and it further improves the resolution of the telescope. “We can manipulate the light and cancel out distortions,” Kraus says. They pointed the telescope at the star LkCa 15, canceled out the star’s light and there it was, a newly forming planet.

“LkCa 15 b is the youngest planet ever found,” Kraus says. “This young gas giant is being built out of the dust and gas….For the first time, we’ve been able to directly measure the planet itself as well as the dusty matter around it.”

Phil Plait, at Bad Astronomy, has more details:

The disk’s hole is about 8 billion km across. Disks like this are seen around other stars, and it’s generally thought that the hole is caused by a planet orbiting inside that region sweeping up material. In this case, that looks to be true! If the planet is in a circular orbit, it’s about 2.5 billion kilometers from its star, a little closer to its star than Uranus is from the Sun (it’s not known if the orbit is circular or elliptical; that’ll take a few years of observations as the planet physically moves around the star and the orbit can be calculated). The planet is much hotter than you might expect, but that’s because it’s so young: material is falling onto it, heating it up. That’s why it’s glowing in the infrared.

…Nothing like this has been seen before in a planet so young! That’s scientifically quite important. Our models of how planets form are complex, and we need detailed observations to see if the models are correct or not. Since planet formation is a process, we need observations of it at different stages, including very early on. That’s crucial, since it represents the transition period between the time before planets start to form in the disk, and the time when the planets are all finished and tidied up. We’ve seen both of those before, so this observation is a first.

Check out the entire collection of Surprising Science’s Pictures of the Week and get more science news from Smithsonian on our Facebook page.

What possesses some people to study the parenting skills of Atlantic puffins for decades? (credit: USFWS)

In my four years at Smithsonian magazine, freelance science writer Michelle Nijhuis has been on of my favorite writers to work with. She tells wonderful, deeply reported stories that give a peek into the world of science—for example, how ecologists use the work of Henry David Thoreau to study climate change. In addition to Smithsonian, Nijhuis’ work has appeared in many other publications (including High Country News, where she is a contributing editor) and several books. She is a 2011 Alicia Patterson fellow and also blogs at The Last Word on Nothing. Here’s what she had to say when I asked her why she liked science:

Like my fellow science writer Ann Finkbeiner, I was an English major—until, that is, the time came for me to actually major in English. In college, I discovered that studying literature was less about enjoying words on the page and much more about dissecting them. Worse, dissection led to more complications, not fewer. If I was going to pull something lovely apart, I thought, I wanted to find answers. So I fled to the biology building—where I found a few answers, a lot more questions and a new way of understanding the world.

I like science because it is a process, a journey, as we writers like to say. It’s not a list of facts but a method, honed over centuries, of asking questions, testing possible answers and asking yet more questions. Scientists are trained to doubt and criticize, habits that can make their company difficult, but never dull. So in study after study, they observe and analyze and report, picking away at their uncertainties. If they’re lucky, they satisfy themselves and their colleagues and some part of the world at large, and finally arrive at something close to an answer. If not, they pass their questions on to the next generation, and the one after that. It’s a tradition of discovery that, bit by bit, adds up to knowledge. Like anything else practiced by fallible humans, science isn’t a perfect process, but it is a very powerful one—our clearest view of nature’s true complexity.

I like science, but I’m not a scientist. I loved studying biology, and a biology degree gave me a chance to hike around in strange places and see amazing things. As I’ve described elsewhere, though, I found I was less interested in doing science and more interested in understanding how and why it got done. What possesses some people to, for instance, spend decades studying the sex life of snails, or the hibernation habits of cave-dwelling bats, or the parenting skills of Atlantic puffins? And what do their journeys mean for the rest of us? These days, as a journalist, I get to watch the process of science at work, and I get to tell its stories. And while my profession is much more art than science, I still practice the science habit: I ask questions, and question the answers.

Pandas munch on bamboo for most of the day (courtesy of flickr user clurr)

Giant pandas are weird. They have problems mating, for one. And second, though they are technically carnivores (members of Order Carnivora), with the gastrointestinal tract and gut enzymes to match, their diet consists of 80 percent bamboo. A grown panda consumes around 25 pounds of the fibrous plant each day, but it lacks the multiple stomachs and specialized enzymes that help other plant-eating animals, such as cows and sheep, digest cellulose. And cellulose—the fibrous material that makes plant cell walls strong—contains a lot of energy. “If fully degraded, cellulose can contribute nearly half the calories in bamboo,” Fuwen Wei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences told LiveScience.

Wei and his colleagues, thinking that the pandas might be getting a bit of help from some gut microbes, collected poop from seven wild and eight captive pandas in China and studied the genes of the bacteria in it to determine what kinds of bacteria were likely in the pandas’ guts. (Their findings appear in this week’s issue of PNAS.) They found signs of 85 different species of bacteria, but the ones that interested them the most were species in the genus Clostridium. It’s a genus that includes several bacteria that cause human diseases, but the ones from the pandas of a kind that are good at digesting cellulose. “It is highly possible that it is this kind of bacterium [that] plays an essential role in the degradation of cellulose of the giant panda,” Wei told LiveScience.

The pandas also have a few other adaptations that help them survive on their bamboo diet: They have pseudothumbs that help them grip branches, and strong teeth and jaws to help them chew. But the most helpful of all may be the large quantity of bamboo they eat and the large amount of time (15 hours a day) they spend eating it. Even if most of the cellulose and other fibrous material simply passes through their digestive systems (a 1982 study [PDF] of the National Zoo’s pandas found that 92 percent of the cellulose consumed ended up in the pandas’ poop), they are still able to consume enough calories daily to continue their leisurely lifestyle.

The Very Large Array in New Mexico (via wikimedia commons)

The Very Large Array, a collection of 27 radio antennas out in New Mexico, has a problem—it has a boring name. That hasn’t stopped the thousands of scientists who have used the array since 1980 from making observations of our universe. But with an expansion of the array on schedule to be completed next year, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which runs the array, has decided that it’s time for a change.

“Though the giant dish antennas, the unique machines that move them across the desert, and the buildings on New Mexico’s Plains of San Agustin may appear much the same, the VLA truly has become a new and different facility. We want a name that reflects this dramatically new status,” says NRAO director Fred K.Y. Lo. “The new name should clearly reflect the VLA’s leading role in the future of astronomy, while honoring its multitude of past achievements.”

Those achievements include: receiving radio communications from the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it flew past Neptune; key observations of Sgr A*, at the center of the Milky Way, now known to be a black hole; discovery of the first Einstein Ring; as well as contributions to many other investigations of stars, galaxies, black holes and other astronomical phenomena.

In addition, the Very Large Array has often appeared in pop culture, a perfect stand-in whenever a mysterious telescope might be needed in movies such as Contact, Armageddon and Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon. You may even have gotten the mistaken idea that the VLA conducted searches for SETI from the movie Independence Day.

There are several ways to go when naming a telescope. Name it after a famous person in astronomy, like the Hubble, or after a place, like Arecibo. Acronyms are always a favorite in science, like CARMA. Or you could be more creative and go in a different direction, perhaps making up something based on a future goal (the Planet Finder 9000?) or a dream.

If you’ve got an idea for what to rename the VLA, tell us in the comments below and also submit it here by 23:59 PST, December 1, 2011. The winning name will be announced at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas on January 10, 2012.

A storm rolls in above Bangkok (courtesy of flickr user Dennis Wong)

I’m kind of obsessed with weather. There’s a practical side to this—I don’t own a car and getting caught in a rain or snow storm can be a problem—but I also a have quite a bit of awe for the power of nature. I once lived on the edge of Tornado Alley, and I’ve experienced ice storms, torrential downpours, high winds, blizzards and hurricanes. I always keep an eye on the weather and have a plan when something bad is predicted or formulate a plan when something bad starts to happen. But I’m realizing that I may be in the minority.

Back in January, a huge ice storm headed towards Washington, D.C. A local weather blog recommended people be off the streets by 4 p.m., but few heeded the warning. They headed out as the ice started to fall and it took some people eight hours or more to get home. If they made it at all.

When a hurricane heads towards land, some people call the local television station to ask if they should be boarding up their houses. And they get angry when the forecast turns out to be wrong, which can easily happen even with all of our modern prediction tools. That is understandable when a storm turns out to be worse than expected, but it can also be dangerous when it goes the other way. How many people who evacuated from New York City prior to Hurricane Irene, which didn’t bring as much flooding to the area as had been predicted, will heed future warnings?

The death toll from the May tornado in Joplin, Missouri was so high, in part, because people didn’t heed the warnings. There had been so many false alarms in the past that they didn’t think it necessary to take shelter.

In August, five people died and dozens were injured when an outdoor stage collapsed at the Indiana State Fair due to high winds. The sky had turned black as a storm rolled in and but few people left.

We have more weather information than at any time in our past. NOAA’s predictions of the paths of hurricanes get better and better. We get warnings that a tornado is headed our way with plenty of time to take shelter. We can learn to make our own predictions from the plethora of raw data available online and even have instant access to weather information on our computers and smartphones.

But that hasn’t made us immune to the dangerous and costly effects of weather. A study earlier this year [PDF] estimated the cost of weather in the United States may be as high as $485 billion a year. “It’s clear that our economy isn’t weatherproof,” says NCAR scientist Jeffrey Lazo, the study’s lead author. “Even routine changes in the weather can add up to substantial impacts on the U.S. economy.”

I don’t mean to imply that all those costs are avoidable, but surely there’s room for improvement, especially when it comes to personal safety. I worry that many people have become so dependent on technology and the forecasts and advice from others (whether professional meteorologists or friends and family) that we don’t look at the skies anymore. The wind kicks up, the skies turn black, and we don’t do anything. We don’t take shelter. We don’t change our schedules. We don’t slow our cars. And it’s no wonder when bad things happen.

What’s to be done? Well, take the time to educate yourself about the warning signs of severe weather. Learn about hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or any other type of weather event that may strike your area before the threat becomes real. Heed the warnings of professionals, even if they later turn out to be false. Take shelter when the weather takes a turn for the worse. Go home early, before a storm begins. And err on the side of caution. Because it’s better to waste a little time and money than end up dead.