17-year-old discovers planet 6.9 times larger than Earth on third day of internship with NASA, Global : Today Indya

17-year-old discovers planet 6.9 times larger than Earth on third day of internship with NASA

Global

cnbc

During his junior year at Scarsdale High School in New York, Wolf Cukier landed a two-month internship with NASA. So during the summer of 2019, he traveled down to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

17-year-old discovers planet 6.9 times larger than Earth on third day of internship with NASA

His first assignment was to examine variations in star brightness captured by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, known as TESS, as a part of the Planet Hunters TESS citizen science project. (The citizen science project allows people who don't work for NASA to help with finding new planets.)

Just three days into his internship, Cukier discovered a new planet.

NASA announced the news on their website this week, after confirming the teenager's work, submitting a paper that Cukier co-authored for scientific review and announcing the discovery of the planet, now named "TOI 1338 b," at the 235th American Astronomical Society meeting.

"I was looking through the data for everything the volunteers had flagged as an eclipsing binary, a system where two stars circle around each other, and from our view eclipse each other every orbit," 17-year-old Cukier tells NASA. "About three days into my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338. At first I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was wrong. It turned out to be a planet."

"I noticed a dip, or a transit, from the TOI 1338 system, and that was the first signal of a planet," Cukier explains to NBC 4 New York. "I first saw the initial dip and thought, 'Oh that looked cool,' but then when I looked at the full data from the telescope at that star, I, and my mentor also noticed, three different dips in the system."

According to NASA, TOI 1338 b is 6.9 times larger than Earth (in between the size of Neptune and Saturn) and is located in the constellation Pictor, about 1,300 light-years away from Earth. For context, the Earth's sun is between seven and nine light-minutes away.

TOI 1338 b is the first planet captured by the TESS system that is considered a circumbinary planet, meaning it orbits two stars. The two stars orbit each other every 15 days, and one is 10% larger than the Sun.

Together, TOI 1338 b and its two stars make up what is called an "eclipsing binary."

In an interview with News 12, Cukier compared his discovery to "Star Wars." "I discovered a planet. It has two stars which it orbits around," he said. "So, if you think to Luke's homeworld, Tatooine, from 'Star Wars,' it's like that. Every sunset, there's gonna be two stars setting."

Cukier has several framed "Star Wars" posters and a telescope in his bedroom.

NASA states that circumbinary planets like TOI 1338 b are difficult to detect because typical software can confuse them for eclipses, which is why the help from interns like Cukier is valuable.

"These are the types of signals that algorithms really struggle with," Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at Goddard tells NASA. "The human eye is extremely good at finding patterns in data, especially non-periodic patterns like those we see in transits from these systems."

After making history, the high school senior is now thinking about his future in college, telling News 12 "my top three choices are Princeton, MIT and Stanford."

Article Original Source : https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/10/17-year-old-discovers-planet-on-third-day-o...

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No One Can Agree How Fast Universe Is Expanding. New Measure Makes Things Worse.

Global

livescience

We just might need new physics to get out of this mess.

HONOLULU — A crisis in physics may have just gotten deeper. By looking at how the light from distant bright objects is bent, researchers have increased the discrepancy between different methods for calculating the expansion rate of the universe.

"The measurements are consistent with indicating a crisis in cosmology," Geoff Chih-Fan Chen, a cosmologist at the University of California, Davis, said here during a news briefing on Wednesday (Jan. 8) at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu.

At issue is a number known as the Hubble constant. It was first calculated by American astronomer Edwin Hubble nearly a century ago, after he realized that every galaxy in the universe was zipping away from Earth at a rate proportional to that galaxy's distance from our planet.

This does not mean that Earth is at the center of the cosmos. Instead, the finding told scientists that the universe is expanding and that there is a direct relationship between how far apart two objects are and how fast they are receding from one another. The Hubble constant has a value that incorporates this speed-distance connection.

The problem is that, in recent years, different teams have disagreed over what exactly this constant's value is. Measurements made using the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a remnant from the Big Bang that provides a snapshot of the infant universe, suggest that the Hubble constant is 46,200 mph per million light-years (or, using cosmologists' units, 67.4 kilometers/second per megaparsec).

But by looking at pulsating stars known as Cepheid variables, a different group of astronomers has calculated the Hubble constant to be 50,400 mph per million light-years (73.4 km/s/Mpc).

The discrepancy seems small, but there is no overlap between the independent values and neither side has been willing to concede major mistakes in its methodology.

The new measurement, made by the H0 Lenses in COSMOGRAIL's Wellspring (H0LICOW) collaboration, was an attempt to calculate the Hubble constant in a completely novel way. (COSMOGRAIL is the acronym for Cosmological Monitoring of Gravitational Lenses.)

This measure uses the fact that massive objects in the universe will warp the fabric of space-time, meaning that light will bend as it travels past them. Superluminous, black-hole-powered entities called quasars are sometimes found behind large foreground galaxies, and their light gets warped by this bending process, which is known as gravitational lensing.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, the H0LiCOW team studied the light from six quasars between 3 billion and 6.5 billion light-years away from Earth. As the quasars' black holes gobbled material, their light would flicker.

The intervening gravitationally lensing galaxy bent each quasar's light, and so the quasar's flickering arrived at Earth at different times depending on what path it took around the foreground galaxy, Chen said. The length of the time delay provided a way to probe the expansion rate of the universe, he added.

H0LiCOW was able to derive a value of the Hubble constant of 50,331 mph per million light-years (73.3 km/s/Mpc), extremely close to that provided by Cepheid variables but quite far from the CMB measurement.

"The consequence is the tension is very well likely real," Chen said and probably not the result of errors in the methods of each approach.

It's worth noting that last year another independent measurement of the Hubble constant, made using giant red stars, came squarely between the two sides, calculating a value of 47,300 mph per million light-years (69.8 km/s/Mpc).

Nevertheless, Chen said, the different numbers are far enough apart that it's possible there is something wrong in our models of the universe. A growing number of physicists are acknowledging this, he added, because the independent measurements continue to disagree. Researchers might have to come up with new physics to explain what's going on.

Article Original Source : https://www.livescience.com/hubble-constant-crisis-deepens.html