“Amateur” astronomers capture Jupiter, Charon

The definition of a professional astronomer is one who gets paid to do it. But the difference between that and an amateur, who technically does it for fun, is getting hard to tell.

Take this image of Pluto and its moon Charon taken by so-called amateur astronomers Antonello Medugno and Daniele Gasparri from Italy:

The bright blob on the right is Pluto, and Charon is on the left. The separation is 0.7 arcseconds, an incredible feat (the Moon is 2500 times wider than this in the sky). This is definitely Charon; it’s at the correct position, separation, and brightness. They nailed it.

Mind you, Charon wasn’t even discovered until 1978 by a pro, using a 61 inch telescope! The image above was using a 14″ telescope, and is in fact much better than the discovery image. In 30 years of progress, a much smaller commercial telescope can do better than a professional setup could. Wow.

Also, an amateur used an iPhone (and a telescope) to capture this image of Jupiter:

Sure, it’s not the best, but c’mon, it was taken with an iPhone.

We live in the future. Still no flying cars, but we live in the future.

Edited to add: I did not include any of the technical descriptions of the Charon image, and I should have.

Equipment: Meade L200GPS 14″ at f/25, with a Starlight Xpress SXV-H9 CCD
Image scale: 0.15″/pixel, unbinned
Exposure: 6 seconds/frame
Filters: R +Ir (Baader)
Final image: 21 frames, median combined, deconvolved to enhance sharpness

At the time, Pluto was 31 AU away, at a mag of 13.9 and Charon was mag 15.5. The images were taken on August 19, 2008.

Charon image credit: Coelum Astronomia, Daniele Gasparri, and Antonello Medugno

iJupiter credit: Mac Observer.

Tip o’ the dew shield to Davide De Martin and Anthony Bossuyt.

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Electricity Found on Saturn Moon--Could It Spark Life?

Rebecca Carroll
for National Geographic News

Recently identified electrical activity on Saturn's largest moon bolsters arguments that Titan is the kind of place that could harbor life. At a brisk -350 degrees Fahrenheit (-180 Celsius), Titan is currently much too cold to host anything close to life as we know it, scientists say.

But a new study reports faint signs of a natural electric field in Titan's thick cloud cover that are similar to the energy radiated by lightning on Earth.

Lightning is thought to have sparked the chemical reactions that led to the origin of life on our planet.

"As of now, lightning activity has not been observed in Titan's atmosphere," said lead author Juan Antonio Morente of the University of Granada in Spain.

But, he said, the signals that have been detected "are an irrefutable proof for the existence of electric activity."

Frozen, Prebiotic Casserole

Morente's team studied data returned from the European Space Agency's Huygens probe, which broke away from NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2005 to become the first probe to go below Titan's clouds. (Read "Voyage to Saturn" in National Geographic magazine.)

As soon as the probe entered the moon's atmosphere, a strong wind tilted the device about 30 degrees.

This accidental motion enabled Huygens to detect the Earthlike electrical resonances that it otherwise would have missed, which Morente and colleagues describe their study, published in a recent issue of the journal Icarus.

Jeffrey Bada, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, believes the process that allowed lightning to spark life on Earth is universal and could happen in many environments—including on Titan.

Confirmation earlier this year of Titan's hydrocarbon lakes makes the Saturnian moon the first place other than Earth where open bodies of liquid have been found.

Hydrocarbons are organic molecules, and the fact that they exist in large quantities on Titan suggests that life could take root there under the right conditions. "If you had lightning taking place in the atmosphere of Titan, you could make what we call precursor molecules," said Bada, who was not involved with Morente's study.

"To go any further than that," he said, "you need liquid water."

Titan's water is currently frozen into chunks as hard as granite. If those ice "rocks" were to melt, however, the environment could become more hospitable to the building blocks of life.

With liquid water, the planet could host the formation of amino acids and then full proteins, which drive all biochemistry and set the stage for more complex molecules.

"I look at Titan as a big, frozen, prebiotic casserole," Bada said, referring to the state before the emergence of life.

"The idea that life could be widespread in the universe, I think, is very credible."

A Field of Its Own

Advocates of theories about life on Titan note that various celestial events could temporarily warm up the moon enough to melt its ice into water.

Perhaps this happened in the past, they say—or it could happen in the future.

But study author Morente said it's impossible to precisely assess such possibilities with the scientific knowledge available today.

What astronomers do know is that Titan does not have its own magnetic field, he said. The moon instead orbits within Saturn's magnetosphere at differing distances from the planet.

This means that the strength of Titan's magnetic field is constantly changing, leaving its surface more vulnerable to damaging cosmic rays.

Without stable protection from radiation, Morente said, "the existence of life is very unlikely."

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Ice: the Cradle of Life?

Image: Jim’s outside photos

It is one of the most sought after answers in modern science: where did life come from? How did those first molecules put themselves together in such a way as to form molecular machinery capable of reproducing itself and thereby fueling the creation of the vast and amazing diversity we see on this planet today? Up until recently it was assumed that life first arose on this planet, and on any other where it might exist, in water. It’s a very sensible assumption. Water is critical to all forms of life and almost all the biological functioning that we know of would be impossible without it. But what if we were looking at the wrong type of water, what if life arose in solid ice?

This counterintuitive hypothesis has a small but growing representation in the scientific community. The notion that life may have formed in ice instead of liquid water is significant in that there is ice almost everywhere in the solar system, while water seems to be rare. Lots of planets and many of their moons have plenty of observable ice, and if solid H2O proves to be the most hospitable place for the formation of the precursors to modern life then our chances of encountering biology of some form or another somewhere else in our solar system increase significantly.

Image: justmakeit

To understand this theory we need to go back to basic chemistry. Solid water - ice - can be compared to a highly polished military unit on parade review, all the H2O molecules know exactly where and how to stand in relation to each other and they do their best not deviate from that pattern. Now imagine injecting impurities (say a bunch of drunks and anarchists) into that regiment of soldiers at attention; the drunks are probably going to have a hard time fitting in.

The sots and anarchists in this analogy are a mix of metals and organics and basically any molecule that isn’t good old H2O. What happens, in both ice and imaginary military units analogous to ice, is that all the impurities end up slowly trudging through the ranks until they run into other impurities. Eventually all of the interesting oddball molecules are forced together into millions of little pockets; this even causes some of the surrounding solid H2O to break ranks and turn into liquid water. What you then end up with is essentially millions of discrete test tubes surrounded by solid ice, stuffed chock full of every interesting atom in the vicinity. The close confines then constantly force the molecules to run into (react) with one another in ways not really possible in any other natural setting. On top of that you even have a supply of liquid water. Sounds like the perfect recipe for organic life if there ever was one.

Image: concertayouch

So far there have only been a few laboratory experiments testing the foundations of this hypothesis, but the results have been encouraging. While it will likely be a very long time before anybody figures out exactly how life first arose, if solid ice is where it first happened, alien life might be much closer than we think.

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