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Interstellar Travelers of the Future May be Helped by MU Physicist’s Calculations

By Guest PostOctober 12, 2012Scienceastrophysicists, bill clinton, expansion, future, gravity, heat, human expansion, interstellar travel, light, mechanical explanation, missouri, movement, newtonian law, photon, physics, pioneer spacecraft, puzzle, radio wave, research project, researcher, sergei kopeikin, Space, spaceship symposium, star system, theory, time, universe, university

University of Missouri’s Sergei Kopeikin may have solved the Pioneer anomaly

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Former President Bill Clinton recently expressed his support for interstellar travel at the 100 Year Spaceship Symposium, an international event advocating for human expansion into other star systems. Interstellar travel will depend upon extremely precise measurements of every factor involved in the mission. The knowledge of those factors may be improved by the solution a University of Missouri researcher found to a puzzle that has stumped astrophysicists for decades.

“The Pioneer spacecraft, two probes launched into space in the early 70s, seemed to violate the Newtonian law of gravity by decelerating anomalously as they traveled, but there was nothing in physics to explain why this happened,” said Sergei Kopeikin, professor of physics and astronomy in MU’s College of Arts and Science. “My study suggests that this so-called Pioneer anomaly was not anything strange. The confusion can be explained by the effect of the expansion of the universe on the movement of photons that make up light and radio waves.” (more…)

Searching for Planets in Clouds of Dust

By Guest PostFebruary 13, 2012Scienceamplitude apodized coronagraph, big particles, circumstellar dust, circumstellar environments, disk explorer, dust disks, earth-like planet, evolutionary process, excede, exoplanetary circumstellar environments, exoplanetary systems, explorer mission, george rieke, glenn schneider, habitable zone, kepler space telescope, laird close, michael lesser, NASA, olivier guyon, philip hinz, piaa coronagraph, roger angel, star system, stars, steward observatory, university of arizona

*A UA astronomy research team was awarded a $600,000 grant for technology development under NASA’s Explorer mission program. The mission would send a space telescope high above Earth’s surface to watch how planets around other stars form and evolve.*

There has been much talk about possible Earth-like planets discovered by the Kepler space telescope launched just two years ago in the search for life outside our solar system. So far, it has discovered more than 2,326 possible Earth-like planets, and the number keeps growing.

At the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, an astronomy research team is asking questions such as, “How do planets like those found by Kepler arise? What materials are present during their initial formation? How do they evolve?” (more…)

Giant Star Goes Supernova — and is Smothered by Its Own Dust

By Guest PostOctober 16, 20105 commentsScience10-meter keck telescope, active galactic nuclei, agn, astronomers, christopher kochanek, deep wide field survey, eta carinae, Galaxy, giant star, hawaii, homunculus nebula, hypernova, krzysztof stanek, light years, Milky Way, milky way galaxy, NASA, ohio state university, spitzer space telescope, star system, super-massive black holes, supernovae, szymon kozlowski, wide field infrared explorer, wise

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A giant star in a faraway galaxy recently ended its life with a dust-shrouded whimper instead of the more typical bang.

Ohio State University researchers suspect that this odd event — the first one of its kind ever viewed by astronomers – was more common early in the universe. (more…)

Tag Archives: star system

Interstellar Travelers of the Future May be Helped by MU Physicist’s Calculations

Searching for Planets in Clouds of Dust

Giant Star Goes Supernova — and is Smothered by Its Own Dust