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data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1SWASP_J093010.78+533859.5-0.md
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1SWASP J093010.78+533859.5 (abbreviated as J093010), also known as V441 Ursae Majoris and V442 Ursae Majoris is a quintuple star system located in the constellation Ursa Major. The star system is located approximately 250 light-years from Earth, and was discovered using data from the "Super Wide Angle Search for Planets" (SuperWASP) project in the Canary Islands.
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== Description ==
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1SWASP J093010.78+533859.5 consists of two pairs of stars, designated J093010A and J093010B respectively, as well as a fifth star. The first pair of stars, J093010A, is a detached eclipsing binary (an Algol variable). The two stars within J093010A orbit with a period of about 1.3 days and are separated by about 5.8 solar radii. The second pair of stars, J093010B is a W Ursae Majoris variable; in this pair the two stars are so close as to be touching each other. The two stars within J093010B take about 5.5 hours (0.2277 days) to orbit each other.
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The two pairs J093010A and J093010B are separated by about 1.89 arcseconds, so the separation between the two pairs is likely about 130 astronomical units. The fifth star was detected based on stationary spectral lines coming from the direction of 1SWASP J093010.78+533859.5. The fifth star likely orbits J093010A at a further distance than the eclipsing binary.
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== Variability ==
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J093010A is a detached (Algol-type) eclipsing binary. Its magnitude drops from a maximum of 9.44 to a primary minimum of 9.75 and a secondary minimum of 9.58 every 1.31 days. It has been given the variable star designation V441 Ursae Majoris.
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J093010B is a contact (W UMa-type) eclipsing binary. Its magnitude drops by 0.28 magnitudes at the primary eclipse and 0.25 magnitudes during the secondary eclipse from a maximum magnitude of 10.55. The period is 0.23 days. It has been given the variable star designation V442 Ursae Majoris.
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== See also ==
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V1400 Centauri
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== Notes ==
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== References ==
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data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_C._Cummings-0.md
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Alan Coffman Cummings (born in 1944) is an American astrophysicist and cosmic ray researcher who has served as a Senior Research Scientist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) since 1973. He is best known as an investigator of NASA's Voyager program's Cosmic Ray Subsystem and as a leading expert on galactic cosmic rays in interstellar space.
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== Biography ==
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Alan Coffman Cummings grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas. He was the youngest child, with two brothers and a sister. He had a competitive family where academic excellence was standard, his older brother was a state football champion and his sister a junior tennis champion. Cummings also played tennis. His father worked in a peanut distribution business after the Great Depression forced him out of teaching mathematics.
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Cummings attended Rice University when it had a free tuition period. Before that, he received a tennis scholarship from the University of Oklahoma, but his mother "shot that down" as it was not enough to cover the full tuition. After Rice, he spent a year at Cambridge University in England on a Winston Churchill Foundation Fellowship, where he first considered becoming an astronaut after corresponding with Alan Shepard by mail. Cummings spent two summers working at Los Alamos Laboratory on Project Vela, which detected nuclear tests.
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Cummings arrived at Caltech as a graduate student in 1967, joining the Space Radiation Laboratory under Rochus Eugen Vogt and Edward C. Stone. He earned his PhD in physics in 1973 with a thesis on cosmic ray positrons and electrons based on balloon-borne experiments launched from Fort Churchill, Manitoba, Canada.
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According to Cummings, his career took a decisive turn in mid-1973 when his PhD thesis experiment, a cosmic ray detector carried by balloon to the edge of the atmosphere, malfunctioned and drifted over the Soviet Union. He was able to retrieve the wreckage after a trip to Moscow, but the equipment was too damaged to rebuild. Cummings described the failure to be "fortunate in a way" because after it he was hired as a staff scientist to work on Voyager's Cosmic Ray Subsystem (CRS), led by Vogt and Stone, skipping a postdoc position. He took part in development and testing of the low-energy telescopes and electron telescope components.
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Cummings is the last person who physically touched both Voyager spacecraft before launch in 1977, performing final inspections of the telescope windows a few days before launch. Cummings has worked at Caltech and on the Voyager mission for more than 50 years. He became CRS's principal investigator after Ed Stone's retirement.
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As part of the CRS team, Cummings was involved in measuring the composition and energy spectra of galactic cosmic rays in interstellar space, what he calls "the holy grail of cosmic ray physics". When Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in 2012, it provided first direct measurements of cosmic rays beyond the solar system's influence.
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Beyond Voyager, Cummings worked on cosmic ray detectors for other spacecraft missions, including ISEE-3, ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer), STEREO (twin solar observatories), and Parker Solar Probe's EPI-Hi instrument. He has delivered three Theodore von Kármán Lectures at JPL (2007, 2012, and 2017).
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== Caltech Bird Walks ==
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In 1986, Cummings co-founded Caltech's weekly birdwatching group with Ernie Franzgrote. At that time, he had already been birdwatching for nearly 20 years; all of his siblings are also birdwatchers. As of 2023, the group has conducted over 1,700 walks, with Cummings meticulously documenting every sighting. He maintains detailed data of bird populations on campus, noting long-term trends and seasonal patterns. A newspaper article from 1998 claimed that Cummings "spotted 450 out of a total 750 U.S. species".
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== Personal life ==
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Cummings met his wife Suzette on her birthday in March 1973 while he was at Caltech delivering his thesis for printing. They had their first date six days later, on his birthday, and married in October 1973. Their son was born in 1975. Suzette worked in various administrative roles at Caltech for over 40 years. She was recognized as an honorary alumna in 2001.
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== Selected publications ==
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According to his Bibliography page Cummings has authored or coauthored 172 papers in peer-reviewed journals. According to his Google Scholar page, 57 of those have been cited more than 13,000 times as of 2025.
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== References ==
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== External links ==
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Personal website
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Bibliography
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Caltech biographical data
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Caltech Birding
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data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_cosmic_ray-0.md
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title: "Anomalous cosmic ray"
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Anomalous cosmic rays (ACRs), or the anomalous component of cosmic rays, are energetic ions of interstellar origin that are observed inside the heliosphere. Interstellar neutral atoms drift inward, become ionized by solar ultraviolet photons, electron impact, or charge exchange, are picked up by the solar wind, and are then accelerated—mainly near the solar-wind termination shock and throughout the heliosheath—by diffusive shock acceleration and related processes.
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== Discovery and name ==
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ACRs were first discovered as "an unusual enhancement in the low-energy end of the helium spectrum at 1 au over the solar quiet periods of May–July 1972, which cannot be explained by conventional solar modulation theory", by Garcia-Munoz, Mason & Simpson.
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The particles were called "anomalous" because their presence and characteristics didn't fit with the existing understanding of cosmic rays at the time. The enhancement was particularly notable in that "the GCR [galactic cosmic rays] intensity did not decrease with decreasing energy, as was expected based on our understanding that low-energy GCRs were unable to reach 1 AU due to their interaction with the solar wind". Giacalone et al. (2022) argue that "anomalous cosmic rays" is a confusing and not descriptive name, and propose to use "Heliospheric Energetic Particles" instead of it.
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Shortly after the discovery, in 1974, Fisk, Kozlovsky, and Ramaty proposed the theoretical explanation for ACRs' origin. They suggested that "these particles ultimately originate from interstellar neutral atoms that drift into the heliosphere", which then become ionized and accelerated to cosmic ray energies.
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== Origin and acceleration ==
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In the standard picture, pickup ions created from interstellar neutrals are accelerated at the termination shock; numerical models and transport calculations reproduce key ACR properties under this assumption. Voyager measurements and global modeling indicate that acceleration and transport continue in the heliosheath; analyses have proposed a heliosheath "reservoir" for ACRs. Recent work also discusses pre-acceleration of pickup ions in the inner heliosphere.
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Solar modulation theory explains how the intensity of cosmic rays changes as they travel through the heliosphere, influenced by the solar wind and magnetic field. Solar modulation is a quasiperiodical change in cosmic rays intensity caused by 11- and 22-year cycles of solar activity. ACRs are also modulated by the Sun; the mechanism of transport and modulation is complex, as described by Rankin et al.:
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the transport of cosmic rays throughout the heliosphere is highly complex and involves an interplay of many different physical phenomena, including (i) the outwardly expanding solar wind which contributes to adiabatic energy losses and convection, (ii) irregularities in the magnetic field which lead to diffusion, and (iii) the large-scale heliospheric magnetic field that is responsible for gradient and curvature drifts.
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Acceleration of ACRs can be approximated using the Parker transport equation.
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In 2002, Schwadron et al. proposed the existence of an outer source of ACRs: "sputtered atoms (subsequently ionized and picked up by the solar wind) from small grains generated via collisions of objects in the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt".
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== Composition and effects on the heliosphere ==
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ACRs are dominated by species most abundant of the neutral gas in the very local interstellar medium. Measurements show enhanced contributions from hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, oxygen, neon, and argon, with energies of ~5 to ~50 MeV/nucleon. "Unusual overabundance" in the range of MeV/n was observed for He, N, O and Fe. These particles start out as neutral atoms in interstellar space and are transported into the heliosphere by the incoming flow of the interstellar wind. Some particles are then ionized near the Sun, gain energy from the solar wind's electric field, and are carried outward with the ~1 keV solar wind flow. A small fraction of these pickup ions undergo acceleration to energies of tens to hundreds of MeV within a ~year, "producing "anomalous" enhancements in the low-energy end of cosmic ray spectra".
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ACR intensities and spectra vary with heliospheric conditions and the solar cycle. Modeling and observations of oxygen and helium show solar-cycle–dependent gradients and spectral changes, including differences between consecutive solar minima.
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Coupled MHD–particle simulations that include an ACR pressure component find that ACRs can modify large-scale solar-wind structures in the outer heliosphere, smoothing shock fronts and reducing shock speeds.
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== Observations ==
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ACRs were measured using multiple spacecraft. In 1990, Cummings et al. used data collected by Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform-8 (IMP-8) to derive gradients for oxygen and helium. ACR were also measured by WIND, Advanced Composition Explorer, Helios, Ulysses, SOHO, and other spacecraft.
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Recently, Parker Solar Probe measured ACRs at 1 au to 0.05 au from the Sun. Solar Orbiter measured ACRs from 1 to 0.3 au.
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== Voyager paradox ==
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Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 observed the termination shock at 94.0 AU (2004) and 83.7 AU (2007). In 2012, Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause at 121.6 au; in 2018, Voyager 2 crossed it at ~119 au. Voyagers detect cosmic rays using its Cosmic Ray Subsystem, under Edward C. Stone and Alan C. Cummings.
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Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock in 2004 without detecting the anticipated local ACR source peak, proposed by almost all models; it was called the Voyager paradox. A proposed resolution by McComas (2006) invokes a blunt, asymmetric termination shock, with more efficient acceleration along the flanks rather than near the nose, consistent with subsequent multi-spacecraft observations and modeling.
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Several alternative models were proposed: "compressive turbulence in the heliosheath", "magnetic reconnection near the heliopause", "second-order Fermi processes", and "the combination of shock and magnetic islands acceleration".
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According to McComas et al. (2019), the blunt termination shock is "a simple and natural extension of the previously accepted ACR acceleration mechanism", supported by observations:
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(1) variations of ACRs in response to transient events enabled reasonable estimations of the TS location prior to Voyager 1's crossing; (2) inner heliosheath parameters applied to simple shock acceleration models yield consistent acceleration times approaching 1 yr; (3) prior to each spacecraft's TS crossing, low-energy ACRs were observed to stream preferentially from the nearer side of the TS
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Using the blunt termination shock theory McComas & Schwadron (2006) predicted "the progressive unfolding of the ACR spectrum as each of the Voyagers moved out further beyond the TS into the surrounding heliosheath", which occurred as predicted.
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== Further reading ==
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Klecker, B. (1999). "Anomalous cosmic rays: Our present understanding and open questions". Advances in Space Research. 23 (3): 521. Bibcode:1999AdSpR..23..521K. doi:10.1016/S0273-1177(99)80006-4.
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== References ==
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== External links ==
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NASA Cosmocopia
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Carolyn C. Porco (born March 6, 1953) is an American planetary scientist who explores the outer Solar System, beginning with her imaging work on the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s. She led the imaging science team on the Cassini mission in orbit around Saturn. She is an expert on planetary rings and the Saturnian moon, Enceladus.
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She has co-authored more than 110 scientific papers on subjects ranging from the spectroscopy of Uranus and Neptune, the interstellar medium, the photometry of planetary rings, satellite/ring interactions, computer simulations of planetary rings, the thermal balance of Triton's polar caps, heat flow in the interior of Jupiter, and a suite of results on the atmosphere, satellites, and rings of Saturn from the Cassini imaging experiment. In 2013, Cassini data confirmed a 1993 prediction by Porco and Mark Marley that acoustic oscillations within the body of Saturn are responsible for creating particular features in the rings of Saturn.
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Porco was founder of The Day the Earth Smiled. She was also responsible for the epitaph and proposal to honor the renowned planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker by sending his cremains to the Moon aboard the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1998.
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A frequent public speaker, Porco has given two popular lectures at TED as well as the opening speech for Pangea Day, a May 2008 global broadcast coordinated from six cities around the world, in which she described the cosmic context for human existence. Porco has also won a number of awards and honors for her contributions to science and the public sphere; for instance, in 2009, New Statesman named her as one of 'The 50 People Who Matter Today.'
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In 2010, Porco was awarded the Carl Sagan Medal, presented by the American Astronomical Society for Excellence in the Communication of Science to the Public. In 2012, she was named one of the 25 most influential people in space by Time magazine.
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== Early life and education ==
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Porco was born in New York City. She graduated in 1970 from Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx, New York City.
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She earned a B.S. degree in Earth and Space Sciences from Stony Brook University in 1974. She received her Ph.D. degree in Planetary Sciences in 1983 from the California Institute of Technology in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. Supervised by dynamicist Peter Goldreich, she wrote her doctoral dissertation focused on Voyager discoveries in the rings of Saturn.
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== Career ==
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=== Voyager ===
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In the fall of 1983, Porco joined the faculty of the Department of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona; the same year she was made a member of the Voyager Imaging Team. In the latter capacity, she was an active participant in the Voyager 2 encounters with Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989, leading the Rings Working Group within the Voyager Imaging Team during the Neptune encounter.
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Porco was the first person to describe the behavior of the eccentric ringlets and the "spokes" discovered by Voyager within the rings of Saturn; to elucidate the mechanism by which the outer Uranian rings were being shepherded by the Voyager-discovered moons Cordelia and Ophelia; and to provide an explanation for the shepherding of the rings arcs of Neptune by the moon Galatea, also discovered by Voyager. She was a co-originator of the idea to take a 'portrait of the planets' with the Voyager 1 spacecraft, and participated in the planning, design, and execution of those images in 1990, including the famous Pale Blue Dot image of Earth.
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=== Cassini–Huygens ===
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In November 1990, Porco was selected as the leader of the Imaging Team for the Cassini-Huygens mission, an international mission that successfully placed a spacecraft in orbit around Saturn and deployed the atmospheric Huygens probe to Saturn's largest satellite, Titan. She is also the Director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS), which was the center of uplink and downlink operations for the Cassini imaging science experiment and the place where Cassini images are processed for release to the public. CICLOPS is part of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
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In the course of the ongoing mission, Porco and her team have discovered seven moons of Saturn: Methone and Pallene, Polydeuces, Daphnis, Anthe, Aegaeon, and a small moonlet in the outer B ring. They also found several new rings, such as rings coincident with the orbits of Atlas, Janus and Epimetheus (the Saturnian 'co-orbitals') and Pallene; a diffuse ring between Atlas and the F ring; and new rings within several of the gaps in Saturn's rings.
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In 2013, Cassini data confirmed a 1993 prediction by Porco and Mark Marley that acoustic oscillations within the body of Saturn are responsible for creating particular features in the rings of Saturn. This confirmation, the first to demonstrate that planetary rings can act like a seismograph in recording oscillatory motions within the host planet, should provide new constraints on the interior structure of Saturn. Such oscillations are known to exist in the sun as well as other stars.
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Porco's team was responsible for the first sighting of a hydrocarbon lake, as well as a lake district, in the south polar region of Titan in June 2005. (A group of similar – and larger – features were sighted in the north polar region in February 2007.) The possibility that these sea-sized features are either completely or partially filled with liquid hydrocarbons is significantly strengthened by subsequent observations by other Cassini instruments.
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Her team was also responsible for the first sighting of plumes erupting from Enceladus, Saturn's sixth largest moon. They first suggested, and provided detailed scientific arguments, that these jets might be geysers erupting from reservoirs of near-surface liquid water under the south pole of the small moon.
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=== New Horizons ===
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Porco was a member of the imaging team for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt through 2014. The probe made its Pluto flyby in 2015.
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=== The Day the Earth Smiled ===
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As the Cassini imaging team lead, Porco initiated and planned the capture of a picture of Saturn with the Earth in the distance on July 19, 2013, an image along the lines of the famous Pale Blue Dot photo. The taking of the image was part of a larger concept entitled The Day The Earth Smiled, in which people the world over were invited to celebrate humanity's place in the cosmos and life on Earth by smiling the moment the picture was taken.
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=== University positions ===
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Porco served in the faculty of the University of Arizona from 1983 to 2001, achieving tenured professorship in 1991. She taught both graduates and undergraduates and was one of five finalists for the University of Arizona Honors Center Five Star Faculty Award, a campus-wide student-nominated, student-judged award for outstanding undergraduate teaching.
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Porco is a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and she is an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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=== NASA advisor ===
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Porco has been an active participant in guiding the American planetary exploration program through membership on many important NASA advisory committees, including the Solar System Exploration Subcommittee, the Mars Observer Recovery Study Team, and the Solar System Road Map Development Team. In the mid-1990s, she served as the chairperson for a small NASA advisory working group to study and develop future outer Solar System missions and she served as the Vice Chairperson of the Steering Group for the first Solar System Decadal Survey, sponsored by NASA and the National Academy of Sciences.
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=== Public speaking ===
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Porco speaks frequently on the Cassini mission and planetary exploration in general, and has appeared at renowned conferences such as PopTech 2005 and TED (2007, 2009). She attended and was a speaker at the Beyond Belief symposium in November 2006.
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Porco's 2007 TED talk, "The Human Journey," detailed two major areas of discovery made by the Cassini mission: the exploration of the Saturnian moons Titan and Enceladus. In her introductory remarks, Porco explained:
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So the journey back to Saturn is really part of, and is also a metaphor for, a much larger human voyage.
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In describing the environment of Titan, with its molecular nitrogen atmosphere suffused with organic compounds, Porco invited her audience to imagine the scene on the moon's surface:
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Stop and think for a minute. Try to imagine what the surface of Titan might look like. It's dark: high noon on Titan is as dark as deep Earth twilight on the Earth. It's cold, it's eerie, it's misty, it might be raining, and you are standing on the shores of Lake Michigan brimming with paint thinner.
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That is the view that we had of the surface of Titan before we got there with Cassini. And I can tell you that what we have found on Titan, though not the same in detail, is every bit as fascinating as that story is, and for us, for Cassini people, it has been like a Jules Verne adventure come true.
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After describing various features discovered on Titan by Cassini, and presenting the historic first photograph of Titan's surface by the Huygens lander, Porco went on to describe Enceladus and the jets of "fine icy particles" which erupt from the moon's southern pole:
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...we have arrived at the conclusion that these jets may, they may, be erupting from pockets of liquid water near, under the surface of Enceladus. So we have, possibly, liquid water, organic materials and excess heat. In other words we have possibly stumbled upon the holy grail of modern-day planetary exploration, or in other words an environment that is potentially suitable for living organisms. And I don't think I need to tell you that the discovery of life elsewhere in our Solar system, whether it be on Enceladus or elsewhere, would have enormous cultural and scientific implications. Because if we could demonstrate that genesis had occurred – not once but twice, independently, in our Solar system – then that means by inference it has occurred a staggering number of times throughout our Universe in its 13.7 billion year history.
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Porco's 2009 TED Talk was "Could a Saturn moon harbor life?".
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She was a speaker at the 2016 Reason Rally.
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=== Television and film ===
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Porco has been a regular CNN guest analyst and consultant on astronomy, has made many radio and television appearances explaining science to the lay audience, including appearances on the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, CBS's 60 Minutes, Peter Jennings's The Century, and TV documentaries on planetary exploration such as The Planets on the Discovery Channel and the BBC, A Traveler's Guide to the Planets on the National Geographic Channel, Horizon on the BBC, and a Nova Cassini special on PBS. For the 2003 A&E special on the Voyager mission entitled Cosmic Journey: The Voyager Interstellar Mission and Message, Porco appeared onscreen and also served as the show's science advisor and animation director.
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Porco served as an adviser for the 1997 film Contact, which was based on the 1987 novel of the same name by the well-known astronomer Carl Sagan. The actress Jodie Foster portrayed the heroine in the movie, and Sagan reportedly suggested that she use Porco as a real-life model to guide her performance.
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Porco was also an adviser on the 2009 film Star Trek. The scene in which the Enterprise comes out of warp drive into the atmosphere of Titan, and rises submarine-style out of the haze, with Saturn and the rings in the background, was Porco's suggestion.
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Porco was a guest on the BBC's Stargazing Live Series 4 in January 2014. She also appeared in The Farthest, a 2017 documentary on the Voyager program.
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title: "Carolyn Porco"
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=== Interviews and articles ===
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Porco has given numerous interviews in print media on subjects ranging from planetary exploration to the conflict between science and religion (for example, Newsweek and the journal The Humanist).
|
||||
She has been profiled many times in print, beginning in the Boston Globe (October 1989), The New York Times (August 1999, September 2009), the Tucson Citizen (2001), Newsday (June 2004), for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (2006), in Astronomy Now (2006), in Discover Magazine (2007), and also online on CNN.com (2005) and Edge.org.
|
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Prior to Cassini's launch, she was a strong and visible defendant of the usage of radioactive materials on the Cassini spacecraft. She is a supporter of a plan for human spaceflight toward the Moon and Mars, and in an op-ed piece published in The New York Times, she highlighted the benefits of a deep-space-capable heavy launch vehicle for the robotic exploration of the Solar System. Porco has advocated for prioritizing the exploration of Enceladus over Europa.
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=== Other ===
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Popular science articles by Porco have been published in The Sunday Times, Astronomy, the Arizona Daily Star, Sky & Telescope, American Scientist, and Scientific American. She is active in the presentation of science to the public as the leader of the Cassini Imaging Team, as the creator/editor of the website where Cassini images are posted. She writes the site's homepage "Captain's Log" greeting to the public. She is an atheist.
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== Awards and honors ==
|
||||
In 1999, Porco was selected by The Sunday Times (London) as one of 18 scientific leaders of the 21st century, and by Industry Week as one of 50 Stars to Watch. In 2008 she was chosen to be on Wired magazine's inaugural 'Smart List: 15 People the Next President Should Listen To.'
|
||||
Her contributions to the exploration of the outer Solar System were recognized with the naming of Asteroid (7231) Porco which is "Named in honor of Carolyn C. Porco, a pioneer in the study of planetary ring systems...and a leader in spacecraft exploration of the outer solar system."
|
||||
In 2008, Porco was awarded the Isaac Asimov Science Award by the American Humanist Association.
|
||||
In May 2009, Porco received an Honorary D.Sc. degree from Stony Brook University, of which she is an alumna.
|
||||
In September 2009, Porco was awarded The Huntington Library's Science Writer Fellowship for 2010. That same month, New Statesman named her as one of 'The 50 People Who Matter Today.'
|
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In October 2009, she and Babak Amin Tafreshi were each awarded the 2009 Lennart Nilsson Award in recognition of their photographic work. The award panel's citation for Porco reads as follows:
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Carolyn Porco combines the finest techniques of planetary exploration and scientific research with aesthetic finesse and educational talent. While her images, which depict the heavenly bodies of the Saturn system with unique precision, serve as tools for the world's leading experts, they also reveal the beauty of the universe in a manner that is an inspiration to one and all.
|
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In October 2010, Porco was awarded the 2010 Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in the Communication of Science to the Public, presented by the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences.
|
||||
In 2011 she won the Distinguished Alumni Award from the California Institute of Technology, the highest honor regularly bestowed by Caltech.
|
||||
In 2012, Porco was named one of the 25 most influential people in space by Time magazine.
|
||||
Porco received the Sikkens Prize for her "exceptional contribution to a realistic and colourful image of the universe" in 2020, which was presented on October 2, 2022.
|
||||
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||||
== Musical interests ==
|
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||||
Porco is fascinated by the 1960s and The Beatles and has, at times, incorporated references to The Beatles and their music into her presentations, writings, and press releases. She visited 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool, Paul McCartney's teenage home, after it opened as a Beatles Museum in 1995. The first color image released by Cassini to the public was an image of Jupiter, taken during Cassini's approach to the giant planet and released on October 9, 2000, to honor John Lennon's 60th birthday. In 2006, she produced and directed a brief 8-minute movie of 64 of Cassini's most spectacular images, put to the music of the Beatles, in honor of Paul McCartney's 64th birthday. And in 2007, she produced a poster showing 64 scenes from Saturn.
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Porco is also interested in dance and fascinated with Michael Jackson. In August 2010, she won a Michael Jackson costume/dance contest held in Boulder, Colorado.
|
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Quotes of Porco's were used in the production of "The Poetry of Reality (An Anthem for Science)", "A Wave of Reason", "Children of Africa (The Story of Us)", and "Onward to the Edge!" by Symphony of Science.
|
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== See also ==
|
||||
List of women in leadership positions on astronomical instrumentation projects
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
|
||||
CarolynPorco.com – Official website
|
||||
Pangea Day opening speech by Carolyn Porco
|
||||
Scientist at Work: Carolyn Porco, 2009 profile by Dennis Overbye
|
||||
Carolyn Porco at TED
|
||||
"This is Saturn" (TED2007)
|
||||
"Could a Saturn moon harbor life?" (TED2009)
|
||||
Podcast on the Cassini mission by Carolyn Porco
|
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Sasha Sagan interviews Carolyn Porco Archived October 24, 2021, at the Wayback Machine
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title: "Contents of the Voyager Golden Record"
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The Voyager Golden Record contains 116 images and a variety of sounds. The items for the record, which is carried on both the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Included are natural sounds (including some made by animals), musical selections from different cultures and eras, spoken greetings in 55 languages, human sounds like footsteps and laughter, and printed messages from President Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.
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== Greetings ==
|
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The first audio section contains a spoken greeting in English from Secretary-General of the United Nations Kurt Waldheim.
|
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||||
The second audio section ("Greetings in 55 Languages") contains spoken greetings in 55 languages. The original plan was to use greetings made by United Nations delegates, but various problems with these recordings led to new recordings being made at Cornell University by people from the foreign-language departments. The number of native speakers of these 55 languages combined (excluding L2 speakers) is over 4.7 billion people, comprising over 65% of the world population. It includes four Chinese languages (marked with **), 12 South Asian languages (marked #) and five ancient languages (marked §), listed here in alphabetical order:
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This is a list of the recorded greetings in order of appearance.
|
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||||
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||||
== Sounds ==
|
||||
The next audio section is devoted to the "sounds of Earth" that include:
|
||||
|
||||
Included within the Sounds of Earth audio portion of the Golden Record is a track containing the inspirational message per aspera ad astra in Morse code. Translated from Latin, it means 'through hardships to the stars.'
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||||
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||||
=== Brainwaves ===
|
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The life signs included on the record were an hour-long recording of the heartbeat and brainwaves of Ann Druyan, who would later marry Carl Sagan. The hour-long recording was compressed into the span of a minute to be able to fit into the record. In the epilogue of the 1997 book Billions and Billions, she describes the experience:
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||||
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||||
Earlier I had asked Carl if those putative extraterrestrials of a billion years from now could conceivably interpret the brain waves of a meditator. Who knows? A billion years is a long, long time, was his reply. On the chance that it might be possible why don't we give it a try?
|
||||
Two days after our life-changing phone call, I entered a laboratory at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and was hooked up to a computer that turned all the data from my brain and heart into sound. I had a one-hour mental itinerary of the information I wished to convey. I began by thinking about the history of Earth and the life it sustains. To the best of my abilities I tried to think something of the history of ideas and human social organization. I thought about the predicament that our civilization finds itself in and about the violence and poverty that make this planet a hell for so many of its inhabitants. Toward the end I permitted myself a personal statement of what it was like to fall in love.
|
||||
On February 12, 2010, an interview with Ann Druyan was aired on NPR during which the above was explained in more detail.
|
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||||
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== Music ==
|
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Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music from many cultures, including Eastern and Western classics. The selections include:
|
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||||
It has been claimed that Sagan had originally asked for permission to include "Here Comes the Sun" from the Beatles' album Abbey Road; but while the Beatles favored it, EMI opposed it and the song was not included. However, this has been refuted by Timothy Ferris, who worked on the selection with Sagan; he said the song was never even considered for inclusion.
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== Images ==
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Along with the audio, the record contains a collection of 116 pictures (one of which is for calibration) detailing but not limited to human life on Earth and the planet itself. Many pictures are annotated with one or many indications of scales of time, size or mass. Some images also contain indications of chemical composition. All measures used on the pictures are first defined in the first few images using physical references.
|
||||
Following is a list of all the images contained in the Voyager Golden Record together with a description of the nature of the image and what annotations were included in them, and when copyright permits, the actual image.
|
||||
After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque (line drawings of a naked man and woman), the agency chose not to allow Sagan and his colleagues to include George Hester's photograph of a nude man and woman on the record. Instead, only a silhouette of the couple was included.
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||||
An official statement by President Jimmy Carter was included as images (positions 117, 118). It reads, in part:This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a global civilization.
|
||||
We cast this message into the cosmos ... It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some – perhaps many – may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.
|
||||
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||||
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== See also ==
|
||||
Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence
|
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||||
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== Notes ==
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||||
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||||
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== References ==
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||||
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||||
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||||
== External links ==
|
||||
|
||||
The Golden Record, the official NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory page about the record
|
||||
The Infinite Voyager : The Golden Record at the Wayback Machine (archived November 6, 2014), an MIT page of then-student Lily Bui comprising a collection of recordings included
|
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Voyager 1 audio on Internet Archive
|
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Golden Record: Sounds of Earth, an official NASA SoundCloud page with recordings
|
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voyager.damninteresting.com, an interactive multimedia presentation of the contents
|
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The 116 images NASA wants aliens to see, Vox
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Edward Carroll Stone Jr. (January 23, 1936 – June 9, 2024) was an American space physicist, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, and director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) from 1991 to 2001. He was the project scientist of the Voyager program, which sent two spacecraft to the outer Solar System's giant planets and became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space.
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Stone led the Voyager mission for 50 years, from 1972 until his retirement in 2022, overseeing the spacecraft's encounters with Jupiter (1979), Saturn (1980–1981), Uranus (1986) and Neptune (1989). Under his leadership, the mission discovered active volcanism on Jupiter's moon Io, new moons and ring systems. The Voyagers continued beyond the planets to cross the heliopause and enter the interstellar medium, with Voyager 1 becoming the first spacecraft to leave the Solar System in 2012, followed by Voyager 2 in 2018. The Voyager mission became the longest-running NASA mission, with Stone being its face and advocate.
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As JPL director, Stone oversaw the successful launches of Mars Pathfinder with the first Mars rover Sojourner, Mars Global Surveyor, Cassini–Huygens and other missions during NASA's "faster, better, cheaper" era. Throughout his career, he served as principal investigator on nine NASA spacecraft missions, including SAMPEX, the Advanced Composition Explorer and scientific instruments on the Galileo and STEREO missions.
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Stone's contributions to space science earned him the National Medal of Science (1991), the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal (2013), and the Shaw Prize in Astronomy (2019). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1984 and served key roles in establishing major astronomical facilities, including overseeing the creation of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) during his tenure as chair of Caltech's Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, and supervising the construction of the W. M. Keck Observatory.
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== Early life and education ==
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Edward Carroll Stone Jr. was born in Knoxville, Iowa, on January 23, 1936, to Edward Carroll Stone Sr., a construction superintendent, and Ferne Elizabeth Stone. He was the eldest of two sons. Stone grew up in Burlington. While at school, he worked at a J.C. Penney department store, and was a member of the Burlington Municipal Band playing French horn.
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Stone studied at Burlington Junior College in Iowa, and continued his education at the University of Chicago where he earned his M.S. (1959) and Ph.D. (1964) degrees in physics. Initially, he planned to study nuclear physics, but became interested in space physics after the launch of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957. Stone began astrophysics research in 1961, working on a cosmic-ray telescope carried by Discoverer 36 spy satellite. He worked on it under the cosmic rays researcher John A. Simpson's supervision. The experiment became his PhD thesis, titled Low energy cosmic-ray protons. While in Chicago, Stone also worked with Eugene Parker; he said later that "Parker taught me how to reduce a problem to its nuts and bolts, to a picture."
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== Caltech ==
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Stone moved to Caltech to work on space physics with Rochus Eugen Vogt in 1964, and helped him to establish the Space Radiation Laboratory. He became a full faculty member in 1967. In 1976, Stone was named professor of physics, later the David Morrisroe Professor of Physics, and was chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy from 1983 to 1988; during his tenure he oversaw the establishment of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). He had also served as director of the Caltech Space Radiation Laboratory, and as vice president for Astronomical Facilities. He was the vice-chair of the Thirty Meter Telescope Board of Directors. He also served on the board of the California Association for Research in Astronomy (CARA) for nearly 25 years, and oversaw the construction of the W. M. Keck Observatory. He was also a W. M. Keck Foundation director, and chaired the Keck Foundation's Science and Engineering Committee for 24 years.
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== Voyager program ==
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||||
In 1964, Gary Flandro, a summer student at JPL, found out that the rare planetary alignment of the giant planets allows a mission he called "the Grand Tour". Such alignment occurs every 175 years; Flandro calculated that the best option was to launch spacecraft in 1977. Gravity assist maneuvers were already known, but according to Flandro he was the first to notice the opportunity to visit the giant planets. NASA was reluctant to finance the proposed mission of four spacecraft, but it eventually transformed into the Voyager program.
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In 1972, Stone became the project scientist for the Voyager program that sent two space probes to the giant planets in the outer Solar System. He was invited for the position by Harris "Bud" Schurmeier, the mission's first project manager; according to Schurmeier, Stone was proposed as the project scientist by Rochus Vogt, who was involved into the Grand Tour mission planning from the start. Stone himself was reluctant at first: as a scientist, he didn't want to sacrifice a lot of time for administrative work. Stone was also the principal investigator for the Cosmic Ray Subsystem experiment on both Voyager spacecraft.
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Stone supervised the work of 11 teams of about 200 scientists; he organized "the clique-like teams" and work groups for key points of interest, "moons, rings, atmosphere and magnetosphere". Stone had the final word on observation target selection, instrument usage, and the spacecraft trajectories. A NASA official who was present at the first Voyager meeting, observed that "Stone knew more about every one of their instruments than the P.I.s themselves knew."
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Stone also became a spokesman for Voyager, and became well known to the public in the 1980s, after he held dozens of press conferences announcing Voyagers' discoveries. According to the Voyager project manager Norman Haynes, Stone "revolutionized the world of project science".
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Stone said that planetary encounters and the discovery of volcanism on Io were the most memorable events of the Voyager mission for him. He recounted the team's regular work process:
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There was a regular routine: In the afternoon we had a science meeting where individuals would say, "This is what we've seen" or "This is what we think" or "This is what we don't understand." Members from all 11 science teams participated, packing the conference room. These daily science meetings were a form of real time peer review that was also a way to choose which observations to report at the press conference the following morning. After the meeting, I would work with the investigators in outlining graphical illustrations that could be prepared overnight for use at the press conference at 10 a.m. In parallel, the imaging team would choose the images and prepare the captions for those that would be printed overnight for distribution to the reporters gathered at JPL. That afternoon, we would do it all over again with another day of observations and analyses.
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Stephen P. Synnott recounted how Stone let him name a moon of Jupiter that he discovered on Voyager photos in 1980, saying "it looks like you've found yourself a moon" after checking the calculations. Synnott chose Thebe from a list of names suggested by the IAU.
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Stone was the main advocate of the Voyagers. After the last planetary encounter he was able to receive funding for an extended mission, the Voyager Interstellar Mission. The Voyagers became the only spacecraft that left Solar System into interstellar space.
|
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Jamie Rankin became Stone's last PhD student. Her thesis was on the Voyagers' interstellar space data; she graduated in 2018 and became the Voyagers' deputy project scientist in 2022. Before Rankin, Stone refused to advise graduate students for about 25 years.
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The Voyager mission visited all four giant planets and is the only spacecraft that visited Uranus and Neptune. It is NASA's longest-running spacecraft mission. In 2022, Stone retired after holding the role of the Voyager project scientist for 50 years.
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== JPL ==
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Though Stone is better known as the Voyager's project scientist, he served as a principal investigator for multiple other missions. He was the PI of the Cosmic Ray Experiment on Orbiting Geophysical Observatory-6 (OGO-6, 1969), the PI of the Electrons and Hydrogen and Helium Isotopes experiments on Interplanetary Monitoring Platform 7 (IMP-7, 1972) and IMP-8 (1973), was involved into the cancelled ASTROMAG (1980s), was the PI of two instruments of the cancelled International Solar Polar Mission (1981), the PI of a heavy-ion counter on the Galileo mission to Jupiter (1989), the PI of SAMPEX (1992), the PI for the Advanced Composition Explorer (1997), and co-investigator of STEREO mission's High Energy Telescope (HET) and Low Energy Telescope (LET) (both part of the In-situ Measurements of Particles and CME Transients (IMPACT) instrument package) (2006). Stone also "oversaw the redesign of the cooling system" on the Spitzer Space Telescope (2003), and was an investigator on the Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun instrument on the Parker Solar Probe (2018).
|
||||
In 1991, Ed Stone–a well-known, enthusiastic and respectable scientist–was made the JPL director. His directorship was during the difficult period of the 90s: with the Cold War and the Space Race between the US and the USSR finished, NASA saw dwindling budgets and introduced the so-called "faster, better, cheaper" approach, that encouraged smaller, cheaper missions built with the help of third-party contractors, efficiently "commercializing" the research lab and forcing it to work with industry. Cost-cutting had to be done by Stone, who tried to adapt a new management culture at JPL, while at the same time trying not to hurt science. The plans were to downsize the lab and fire around 30% of JPL personnel by the end of the decade; Stone and Caltech leadership even feared that JPL could be closed.
|
||||
The "faster, better, cheaper" (FBC) approach was described as:
|
||||
|
||||
Faster applies to project development time, which for convenience can be defined as the period from project approval to launch. Rapid development cycles help control costs and enable the incorporation of the latest advances in technology, because the design freeze date is closer to the launch date. Better applies to the capability of the flight system as a scientific instrument, improvement here is based on the use of advanced technologies, and on better-focused science based on the knowledge gained
|
||||
from earlier exploration missions. Finally, cheaper denotes both lower cost per mission and, through clever design and use of technology, more effective use of available funds.
|
||||
JPL had little experience in small missions at the time: its "flagship" missions, like Voyager, Cassini, and Galileo, employed hundreds of people for decades. Cassini, for example, "directly supported maybe 500 work-years, about 10 percent of total lab staff [and] provided close to 20 percent of the lab budget". In order to comply with budget restrictions and save the mission, Cassini was downsized; to save $250 million, the scan platform had to be removed from the plans. Stone himself saw the "faster-better-cheaper" as a cultural change of the lab's engineering practices.
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||||
Stone also became a proponent of a management culture change at JPL, and installed Richard Laeser (former Voyager project manager) to apply total quality management (TQM) at all levels. Reorganization was required to meet NASA needs, and TQM "emphasized customer service", even though few people at JPL saw NASA as their customer. Many employees were against the new management practices.
|
||||
The most successful, "model" example of an FBC mission was the Mars Pathfinder lander and the first Mars rover, the Sojourner. The mission cost around 200 million dollars and was widely reported in the press, appearing on the covers of Time and Newsweek. Other missions were less fortunate: in 1998–1999, six missions were launched; four of them failed, including two Mars orbiters. Both JPL (Stone) and the NASA administration (Daniel Goldin) acknowledged that they pushed too far with the FBC; no project manager of the failed missions was fired.
|
||||
According to Peter J. Westwick, as the director of JPL, Stone was a "cautious revolutionary". He retired in 2001; his successor, Charles Elachi, "felt no need to change JPL's culture".
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== Retirement and death ==
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Stone retired from Voyager in 2022, after holding the role for 50 years, but remained professor emeritus at Caltech. He died in Pasadena, California, on June 9, 2024, at the age of 88.
|
||||
|
||||
== Personal life ==
|
||||
Stone was a shy man, and worked 100-hour weeks at times. Alan C. Cummings, the Cosmic Ray Subsystem co-investigator, who worked with Stone for fifty years, described him as "very calm ... the smartest guy I ever met. He was a multiplexer supreme." Stone was profiled in 1990 for The New York Times by Michael Norman:
|
||||
|
||||
A space scientist has to be a visionary, a poet in a white lab coat who can give voice to our collective craving for adventure, our fascination with a universe we have not been able to touch.
|
||||
At first sight, Ed Stone is not such a man. As he hurries through the luminous California morning, one hardly notices him, 5 feet 10 inches, 130 pounds, a wisp in gray—gray suit, gray shirt, gray felt shoes – lugging an ancient leather briefcase. He keeps to the shadows and side paths, terra incognita, a physicist so swept up in his daily occasions, so occupied by science, his life appears to turn on little else.
|
||||
|
||||
And yet, for the public, Ed Stone has been a kind of Cicero on space. As chief scientist on Project Voyager, he has participated in some 60 public briefings and news conferences over the 13 years of the project.
|
||||
|
||||
Stone met Alice Wickliffe on a blind date at a comedy club and married her in 1962. She died in December 2023. They had two daughters, Susan and Janet. Stone was described as a "shy man, sometimes diffident, often detached"; his younger daughter compared him to Star Trek's Mr. Spock. He had no close friends but "shared a long professional kinship with several scientists". He was a registered Democrat but not very interested in politics. Norman wrote that "He has no interest in sports, no hobbies ... His main recreation is to read a daily newspaper. His favorite food is raisin pie. He is not a man of faith."
|
||||
The Voyager mission became the longest NASA mission; Stone described it in 2012:
|
||||
|
||||
When I started on Voyager my two daughters were young. By the time they were in college we had passed Saturn and were on our way to Uranus. They got married and the Voyagers just kept going, and we had grandchildren and Voyager just kept going and our grandchildren are now aware of what's happening to the Voyagers just like our children were.
|
||||
He appeared in The Farthest, a 2017 documentary on the Voyager program.
|
||||
|
||||
== Awards and honors ==
|
||||
|
||||
In 2002, JPL established the Edward Stone Award for Outstanding Research Publication, which is awarded annually to JPL employees in both science and engineering.
|
||||
In 2012, a middle school was named in Stone's honor in Burlington, his hometown.
|
||||
In 2013, Stone was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest NASA award for non-governmental employees. NASA arranged the award ceremony to be performed during The Colbert Report night show, with the award presented by Stephen Colbert dressed in a retrofuturistic spacesuit. Stone was unaware of the award when he came to the show. It was given "for a lifetime of extraordinary scientific achievement and outstanding leadership of space science missions, and for his exemplary sharing of the exciting results with the public."
|
||||
In 2019, Stone won the Shaw Prize in Astronomy, "for his leadership in the Voyager project". The award included $1.2 million; Stone endowed a summer student program with this money "in return for the wonderful mission [Flandro] discovered".
|
||||
In 2023, the W. M. Keck Foundation endowed the Edward C. Stone Professorship at Caltech. Christopher Martin, director of Caltech Optical Observatories, became the first Stone Professor.
|
||||
In 2024, the Edward Stone Voyager Exploration Trail was unveiled at the JPL campus to commemorate Stone and his "penchant for walking". The trail starts at JPL Mall and consists of two paths, made similar to Voyager 1 and 2 trajectories. The trail features 24 memorial plaques, designed to "evoke the Golden Record" commemorating the mission's and Ed Stone's personal milestones.
|
||||
|
||||
List of awards
|
||||
1980 The Collier Trophy on behalf of the Voyager team
|
||||
1984 AIAA Space Science Award
|
||||
1984 Member of the National Academy of Sciences
|
||||
1986 NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal
|
||||
1991 National Medal of Science
|
||||
1992 COSPAR Award
|
||||
1992 Magellanic Premium
|
||||
1992 Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement
|
||||
1993 Member of the American Philosophical Society
|
||||
1996 Space Flight Award
|
||||
1999 Carl Sagan Memorial Award
|
||||
2006 NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal
|
||||
2007 Philip J. Klass Award for Lifetime Achievement
|
||||
2011 AIAA Goddard Astronautics Award
|
||||
2013 NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal
|
||||
2013 IAF World Space Award
|
||||
2013 Ó Ceallaigh Medal
|
||||
2014 Howard Hughes Memorial Award
|
||||
2014 a lifetime achievement award of the American Astronautical Society "for sustained and extraordinary contributions to America's space programs, including innovative planetary missions in support of unmanned exploration of the solar system"
|
||||
2015 The Alumni Medal of the University of Chicago
|
||||
2019 Shaw Prize in Astronomy
|
||||
2022 Benjamin Franklin Medal
|
||||
Minor planet 5841 Stone is named after him.
|
||||
|
||||
== Selected publications ==
|
||||
|
||||
== Notes ==
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
== Further reading ==
|
||||
Laufer, Alexander; Post, Todd; Hoffman, Edward J. (2005). Shared Voyage: Learning and Unlearning from Remarkable Projects (PDF). Washington, DC: NASA History Division.
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
|
||||
Williamson, Mark (December 6, 2012). "Voyager – a mission for life". Physics World.
|
||||
"Blue Dot: Profile of a legend: a look at the career of Voyager Project Scientist Edward C. Stone". NSPR.
|
||||
McDonald, Bob (June 14, 2024). "Ed Stone, head of the Voyager mission that introduced us to solar system's outer planets, has died". CBC Radio.
|
||||
"The Planetary Society remembers Ed Stone". The Planetary Society.
|
||||
"Questions and Answers with Dr. Ed Stone – NASA Science". March 12, 2024.
|
||||
Oral history interview with Suzy Dodd, Voyager project manager
|
||||
List of Stone's PhD students
|
||||
Videos
|
||||
The W.M. Keck Observatory: A Bold Beginning
|
||||
Celebrating Voyager's 40 Years in Space with Ed Stone
|
||||
The Voyager Journey to Interstellar Space
|
||||
Voyager's 1990 "Family Portrait" News Conference with Ed Stone and Carl Sagan
|
||||
"The Search for Life Elsewhere", Edward C. Stone presenting at the 33rd annual Nobel Conference
|
||||
33
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Portrait_(Voyager)-0.md
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||||
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|
||||
title: "Family Portrait (Voyager)"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Portrait_(Voyager)"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:27:39.617977+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Family Portrait, or sometimes Portrait of the Planets, is an image of the Solar System acquired by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990, from a distance of approximately 6 billion km (40 AU; 3.7 billion mi) from Earth. It features individual frames of six planets and a partial background indicating their relative positions. The picture is a mosaic of 60 frames. The frames used to compose the image were the last photographs taken by either Voyager spacecraft (which continued to relay other telemetry afterward). The frames were also the source of the famous Pale Blue Dot image of the Earth. Astronomer Carl Sagan, who was part of the Voyager imaging team, campaigned for many years to have the pictures taken.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Description ==
|
||||
|
||||
Six planets are visible in the mosaic, from left to right: Jupiter, Earth, Venus, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The Sun, also a point of light at this distance, is included in the image. Three (then) planets were missed. Mercury was too close to the Sun to be seen. Mars could not be detected by the Voyager cameras due to its position resulting in it only producing a thin crescent from the viewpoint of the spacecraft, and Pluto (which, in 1990, was still considered a planet) was not included because its small size and distance from the Sun left it too dim to image. Mars could have been imaged through a clear filter rather than the colored ones used, but by the time this was evident, the process was too far advanced to make the changes.
|
||||
The image does not have a unified appearance. The individual frames were acquired using various filters at varying exposures to bring out as much detail as possible in each. For example, the Sun was imaged with the darkest filter and shortest exposure available, to avoid damaging the Imaging Science System vidicon tubes. The majority of the frames were acquired in gray scale with the probe's Wide-Angle Camera, while the close-up views of each planet were acquired in color using the Narrow-Angle Camera.
|
||||
The image was acquired at a distance of approximately 40.11 AU (6.0 billion km; 3.7 billion mi) from Earth and approximately 32° above the ecliptic plane. Of the two Voyager spacecraft, Voyager 1 was chosen to create the mosaic because its trajectory had taken it above the plane of the Solar System. Also, unlike Voyager 2, Voyager 1 was in a position to view Jupiter free of light disturbances by the Sun's glare. In 2013, a reverse image was taken of Voyager 1, using radio telescopes. Voyager 1 cannot be seen in visible light, but its radio signal is very bright compared to most natural objects studied by radio telescopes.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== See also ==
|
||||
Family Portrait (MESSENGER)
|
||||
List of photographs considered the most important
|
||||
Pale Blue Dot
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
NASA: Visible Earth: Solar System Portrait
|
||||
Planetary Society: Voyager's Last View
|
||||
Voyager's 1990 "Family Portrait" News Conference with Ed Stone and Carl Sagan
|
||||
28
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_L._Scarf-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Frederick L. Scarf"
|
||||
chunk: 1/2
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_L._Scarf"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:02.754792+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Frederick Leonard Scarf (July 25, 1930 – July 17, 1988) was an American physicist known for his work in plasma wave physics and his leadership in developing space-based instruments to study the solar wind and planetary magnetospheres. After earning a PhD in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he switched to space science in the early 1960s, working for TRW. Scarf played a central role in advocating for and designing plasma wave instruments aboard numerous NASA and international missions, including OGO-5, Pioneer Venus Orbiter, Giotto, ISEE-3, and the Voyager program spacecraft, where he served as the principal investigator for the Plasma Wave Subsystem (PWS).
|
||||
His innovative conversion of plasma wave data from the Voyager's PWS into audio recordings, called the "sounds of space" by journalists, gained public and scientific attention. A strong proponent of international collaboration, Scarf worked on joint projects with European, Japanese, and Soviet space programs, even during periods of official US policy restrictions. He died suddenly while visiting the Soviet Space Research Institute in Moscow. In recognition of his contributions, he was awarded with two NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medals, and the American Geophysical Union established the Fred L. Scarf Award in his honor.
|
||||
|
||||
== Biography ==
|
||||
Frederick Leonard Scarf was born on July 25, 1930, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Jewish emigrants from Ukraine and Russia, Lene (Elkman) and Louis Scarf. He had a twin brother, mathematical economist Herbert Eli Scarf. He studied physics at Temple University (BSc 1951) and then in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD 1955); he used the Bethe–Salpeter equation to study the deuteron for his thesis. He then became a researcher at the University of Washington, studying theoretical quantum electrodynamics. Around 1959, he took sabbatical and went to CERN. At that time he became interested in space physics. While at CERN, he met a friend from MIT who arranged him a visit to TRW.
|
||||
|
||||
In 1962, Scarf left the university to become a researcher at TRW, and then a Chief Scientist for Space Research and Technology in the Applied Technology Division of the TRW Space and Technology Group. Scarf and his colleagues at TRW realized that plasma wave experiments were being overlooked by NASA; they pressed NASA to change it. Scarf was a principal investigator or co-investigator of plasma wave experiments for multiple NASA spacecraft, starting with a plasma wave instrument on OGO-5, which detected "electrostatic waves in a collisionless shock", and then on Pioneer 8, 9, and the Pioneer Venus Orbiter.
|
||||
|
||||
Scarf was an advocate of including the plasma wave detector on the Voyager program spacecraft. He became the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Plasma Wave Subsystem (PWS). He developed a way to transform plasma wave measurements into sound, called the "sounds of space" by journalists. M. Mitchell Waldrop described these sounds in a Science article:
|
||||
|
||||
Scarf's experiment measures oscillations in the electrically charged plasma surrounding the spacecraft, oscillations whose frequencies happen to fall in the acoustic range. By playing the signal back through a conventional loudspeaker, Scarf creates "the sounds of space," an eerie symphony of hisses, pops, and whistles. Voyager's transit of the bow shock, where the solar wind first encounters the magnetic field of the planet and is forced to flow around, erupts from the speakers as a hoarse roar like the breaking of waves on a beach.For the Voyager 2 encounter with Saturn, Scarf and his colleagues outdid themselves: they played their data, which were divided into 16 frequency channels, through a 16-channel music synthesizer. The fragment of music that results is fitting accompaniment to Voyager's journey past Saturn. Slowly, dreamily, the midlevel brasses surge and ebb against a deep roll of basses and a high, floating treble. The music lasts for only a minute. But it haunts the mind.
|
||||
The "sounds of space" were released on cassettes and CDs. After Scarf's death in 1988, Donald Gurnett became the PI of the PWS.
|
||||
|
||||
When NASA rejected a space probe mission to Halley's Comet, Scarf, with the help of NASA's Robert W. Farquhar, found a way to bypass bureaucracy "to gain control of an orbiting research satellite that had already outlived its usefulness". ISEE-3 was sent from its L1 point to the comet Giacobini-Zinner in September 1985; Scarf himself told the reporter: “We stole it [the satellite]”. The probe proved that the comet "sends out shock waves as it passes through space". ISEE-3 became the first space probe that studied a comet.
|
||||
Scarf's student Christopher T. Russell described some of his discoveries:
|
||||
|
||||
electrostatic waves at half-harmonics of the electron cyclotron frequency in the magnetospheres of both the Earth and the outer planets, and lightning-generated signals in both the magnetosphere of Jupiter and the ionosphere of Venus
|
||||
Scarf was known for his "generosity and openness" in sharing his observational data, as a good mentor, and as "a strong advocate of international cooperation in space". He was involved into European space probe missions, like ESA's Giotto mission to Halley's Comet, and played "a key role with the Japanese space program". Scarf also worked on multiple Soviet space missions, like the Soviet Phobos program. When NASA was prohibited to participate in joint Soviet-American space programs, Scarf was one of a few scientists who continued to work with Soviets despite this ruling. To do it, Scarf became a part-time employee of UCLA, that allowed him "to get a grant from NASA to continue his work with the Soviets". One time he attempted to make NASA donate a spare Voyager instrument to the Soviets to continue research, but NASA refused. Similar instrument was then transferred by ESA, which asked Scarf to be a co-investigator. He was a member of multiple groups and committees, including the interagency Consultative Group, on the Space Science Board and its Committee on Solar and Space Physics, in the committee of the National Academy of Sciences study of Space Science in the Twenty-First Century, a member of the Committee on Solar-Terrestrial Research of the National Research Council, for which he served as a chairman in 1974–79.
|
||||
30
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_L._Scarf-1.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Frederick L. Scarf"
|
||||
chunk: 2/2
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_L._Scarf"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:02.754792+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
== Personal life and death ==
|
||||
Scarf died suddenly on July 17, 1988, while visiting the Soviet Space Research Institute in Moscow. He had no health issues; a brain tumor was suspected but no official cause of death was published. In Moscow, Scarf was involved in planning of further Soviet Mars missions.
|
||||
Russell wrote that colleagues would miss Scarf's "openness, advice, perseverance, amiability, sound judgment, humor, and enthusiasm" and called him "a true romantic of the space age who loved space science with a rare passion".
|
||||
Scarf was married and had four children.
|
||||
|
||||
== Awards and recognition ==
|
||||
Scarf was "widely regarded as the world’s leading expert" in plasma wave physics and in solar wind. His obituary states that "Fred's name was synonymous, for a quarter century, with the most ubiquitous transient phenomena in solar system plasmas: electrostatic plasma waves".
|
||||
Scarf was awarded NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 1981 and 1986.
|
||||
The American Geophysical Union established the Fred L. Scarf Award annually "in recognition of an outstanding dissertation that contributes directly to solar-planetary science", which is given annually.
|
||||
|
||||
== Discography ==
|
||||
Sounds of Saturn, 1982
|
||||
Uranus Sounds From Space, 1986
|
||||
|
||||
== Selected publications ==
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
"Voyager PWS". space.physics.uiowa.edu.
|
||||
50
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program-0.md
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50
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Grand Tour program"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:27:44.927430+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Grand Tour is a NASA program that would have sent two groups of robotic probes to all the planets of the outer Solar System. It called for four spacecraft, two of which would visit Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto, while the other two would visit Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. The enormous cost of the project, around $1 billion, led to its cancellation and replacement with Mariner Jupiter-Saturn, which became the Voyager program.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Background ==
|
||||
The concept of the Grand Tour began in 1964, when Gary Flandro of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) noted that an alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune that would occur in the late 1970s would enable a single spacecraft to visit all of the outer planets by using gravity assists. The particular alignment occurs once every 175 years. By 1966, JPL was promoting the project, noting it would allow a complete survey of the outer planets in less time and for less money than sending individual probes to each planet.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Grand Tour ==
|
||||
In 1969, NASA created the Outer Planets Working Group, which favored the concept of two missions that would visit three planets each (including Pluto, which was considered a planet at the time). These missions were referred to as the Grand Tour. One would launch in 1977 and visit Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto, while the other would launch in 1979 and visit Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. This would reduce total mission time compared to a single Grand Tour from over thirteen years to seven and a half years. The Working Group also called for the development of a new spacecraft to carry out the flyby missions. These probes, called Thermoelectric Outer Planets Spacecraft (TOPS), were being designed at JPL and featured an operational life of over ten years.
|
||||
The plan was set out in a report by 23 scientists, released on August 3, 1969. The study panel was co-chaired by James A. Van Allen of the University of Iowa and Gordon J. F. MacDonald of the University of California, Santa Barbara. President Nixon gave White House support to the concept in a statement released on March 7, 1970.
|
||||
By 1971, the estimated cost of Grand Tour was $750 to $900 million, plus over $100 million to launch the spacecraft. Congressional pressure, combined with internal competition from the recently approved Space Shuttle program, led to the decision to cancel the project in December 1971. The Grand Tour and TOPS were replaced with a proposal to visit only two planets using a pair of Mariner-derived probes.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Mariner Jupiter-Saturn ==
|
||||
The Mariner Jupiter-Saturn project was approved in early 1972, with an estimated cost of less than $360 million for each of two probes. The probes would be built by JPL, with the intention that they would last long enough to complete the original Grand Tour of the four giant planets, but be advertised as missions to only Jupiter and Saturn to reduce estimated total project costs.
|
||||
The probes were to visit Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn's moon Titan. Titan was a valuable target, as it was the only moon known to have an atmosphere, and a flyby would gather information that would not otherwise be obtainable, including the density, composition, and temperature of the atmosphere.
|
||||
Two trajectories were selected. One was designated JST: its mission would take it to Jupiter, Saturn, and Titan, with the probe's trajectory designed to optimize the Titan flyby. The second was designated JSX: it would be launched on a trajectory that would preserve the option of a Grand Tour, while serving as backup for the first probe. It would arrive after JST, and if JST were successful, it could continue with the Grand Tour. If JST was unsuccessful, JSX could be diverted to perform the Titan flyby itself, which would eliminate the possibility of a Grand Tour.
|
||||
In March 1977, just a few months before launch, NASA held a competition to rename the project.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Voyager ==
|
||||
|
||||
The two spacecraft that launched retained the same mission concept. Voyager 1's course was optimized for the Titan flyby and Voyager 2 for the Grand Tour. Voyager 2 would reach Saturn nine months after Voyager 1, giving plenty of time to decide if it should proceed with the Grand Tour. Additionally, by launching Voyager 2 first, Voyager 1's launch could be re-targeted to perform the Grand Tour if Voyager 2 were lost in a launch failure. An option to skip Voyager 1's Titan flyby and proceed from Saturn to Pluto was identified, though Titan was still considered the more interesting target, especially after images from Pioneer 11 indicated a very substantial atmosphere.
|
||||
Though atmospheric haze obscured any images of Titan's surface, Voyager 1's flyby obtained valuable information about the moon, including data that offered compelling evidence for the existence of liquid hydrocarbon lakes on Titan's surface. With Voyager 1's mission complete, Voyager 2 was cleared for an extended mission to Uranus and Neptune, fulfilling the goal of a Grand Tour as proposed in 1964.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== The planets originally to be visited in the Grand Tour ==
|
||||
|
||||
Note: Pluto was still classified as a planet when the Grand Tour was proposed and at the time New Horizons was launched.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== See also ==
|
||||
Interplanetary Transport Network
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
The Outer Solar System: A Program for Exploration Report of a Study by the Space Science Board, June 1969
|
||||
21
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAT-P-27-0.md
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21
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAT-P-27-0.md
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@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "HAT-P-27"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAT-P-27"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:55.439609+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
HAT-P-27, also known as WASP-40, is the primary of a binary star system about 659 light-years away. It is a G-type main-sequence star. The star's age is similar to the Sun's at 4.4 billion years. HAT-P-27 is enriched in heavy elements, having a 195% concentration of iron compared to the Sun.
|
||||
A very dim stellar companion was detected in 2015 at a projected separation of 0.656″ and proven to be physically bound to the system in 2016.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2011 a transiting hot Jupiter type planet b was detected in a mildly eccentric orbit. The planetary equilibrium temperature is 1207±41 K. A survey in 2013 failed to find any Rossiter-McLaughlin effect and therefore was unable to constrain the inclination of planetary orbit to the equatorial plane of the parent star. No orbital decay was detected as of 2018, despite the close proximity of the planet to the star.
|
||||
The presence of an additional planet in the system has been suspected since 2015.
|
||||
In 2024, a detection of a possible Neptune-like planet was reported. It is expected to be an analog of Neptune in terms of radius, although much hotter due to the low orbital separation; one year on this planet lasts one day and five hours, causing the planetary equilibrium temperature to be 1,426 K (1,153 °C). More observations are needed to validate its existence.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
21
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAT-P-30-0.md
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21
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "HAT-P-30"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAT-P-30"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:29:09.122394+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
HAT-P-30, also known as WASP-51, is the primary of a binary star system about 679 light-years away in the constellation Hydra. It is a G-type main-sequence star. HAT-P-30 has a similar concentration of heavy elements compared to the Sun.
|
||||
The faint stellar companion was detected in 2013 at a projected separation of 3.842±0.007″.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2011 a transiting hot Jupiter planet, HAT-P-30b, was independently detected by two teams, the HATNet Project and the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP).
|
||||
The planetary orbit is strongly misaligned with the equatorial plane of the star, the misalignment angle being equal to 73.5±9.0°.
|
||||
Since 2022, an additional planet in the system is suspected based on transit timing variations.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
28
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_146389-0.md
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28
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_146389-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "HD 146389"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_146389"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
HD 146389, also known as WASP-38 and named Irena, is a star with a yellow-white hue in the northern constellation of Hercules. It is invisible to the naked eye with an apparent visual magnitude of 9.4 The star is located at a distance of approximately 445 light-years from the Sun based on parallax, but is drifting closer with a radial velocity of −9 km/s. The star is known to host one exoplanet, designated WASP-38b or formally named Iztok.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Nomenclature ==
|
||||
The designation HD 146389 comes from the Henry Draper Catalogue, while WASP-38 comes from the Wide Angle Search for Planets.
|
||||
This was one of the systems selected to be named in the 2019 NameExoWorlds campaign during the 100th anniversary of the IAU, which assigned each country a star and planet to be named. This system was assigned to Slovenia. The approved names were Irena for the star and Iztok for the planet, named after characters from the Slovenian novel Pod svobodnim soncem.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Characteristics ==
|
||||
The stellar classification of HD 146389 is F8, which is an F-type star of uncertain luminosity class. The age of the star is uncertain. It shows a low lithium abundance, which suggests an age of more than 5 billion years. However, the rotation rate indicates an age closer to one billion. The study in 2015 utilizing Chandra X-ray Observatory, have failed to detect any X-ray emissions from the star during planetary eclipse, which may indicate an unusually low coronal activity or the presence of absorbing gas ring formed by atmosphere escaping planet WASP-38 b. The star is 33% larger and 20% more massive than the Sun. It is radiating nearly three times the luminosity of the Sun at an effective temperature of 6,150 K.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
The hot Jupiter class planet WASP-38 b, later named Iztok, was discovered around HD 146389 in 2010. The planet is losing significant amounts of gas, estimated to be 0.023 Earth masses per billion years. In 2013, it was found the planetary orbit is surprisingly well aligned with the rotational axis of the parent star, despite the noticeable orbital eccentricity.
|
||||
A 2012 study, utilizing the Rossiter–McLaughlin effect, have determined the orbital plane of WASP-38b is poorly constrained but probably aligned with the equatorial plane of the star, misalignment equal to 15+33−43°.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
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||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
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||||
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|
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|
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|
||||
|
||||
HD 15082 (also known as WASP-33) is a star located 397 light years away in the northern constellation of Andromeda. The star is a Delta Scuti variable and a planetary transit variable. A hot Jupiter type extrasolar planet, named WASP-33b or HD 15082b, orbits this star with an orbital period of 1.22 days. It is the first Delta Scuti variable known to host a planet.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Properties ==
|
||||
HD 15082 is an Am star, which makes its stellar classification challenging to discern. The hydrogen lines and effective temperature of the star are similar to spectral type A8, however the calcium II K line resembles that of an A5 star, and the metallic lines are more similar to an F4 star. The spectral type is written kA5hA8mF4. The star is about 100 million years old and is spinning with a projected rotational velocity of 86 km/s. It has 1.55 times the mass of the Sun and 1.51 times the Sun's radius.
|
||||
The intrinsic variability of HD 15082 was discovered in 2011 by Enrique Herrero et al. Delta Scuti variables usually exhibit many pulsation modes, and HD 15082 is no exception, with 8 measured high frequency p-modes. Another proposed non-radial mode, which could be induced by tidal interactions with the planet, would make this star also a Gamma Doradus variable. This star has the GCVS variable star designation V807 Andromedae.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2010, the SuperWASP project announced the discovery of an exoplanet, designated WASP-33b, orbiting the star. The discovery was made by detecting the transit of the planet as it passes in front of its star, an event which occurs every 1.22 days. It had first been identified as a planetary candidate in 2006.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
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|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris_Schurmeier"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:14:56.237346+00:00"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:04.020480+00:00"
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|
||||
|
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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||||
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|
||||
|
||||
The heliosphere is the magnetosphere, astrosphere, and outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun. It takes the shape of a vast, tailed bubble-like region of space. In plasma physics terms, it is the cavity formed by the Sun in the surrounding interstellar medium. The "bubble" of the heliosphere is continuously "inflated" by plasma originating from the Sun, known as the solar wind. Outside the heliosphere, this solar plasma gives way to the interstellar plasma permeating the Milky Way. As part of the interplanetary magnetic field, the heliosphere shields the Solar System from significant amounts of cosmic ionizing radiation; uncharged gamma rays are, however, not affected. Its name was likely coined by Alexander J. Dessler, who is credited with the first use of the word in the scientific literature in 1967. The scientific study of the heliosphere is heliophysics, which includes space weather and space climate.
|
||||
Flowing unimpeded through the Solar System for billions of kilometers, the solar wind extends far beyond even the region of Pluto until it encounters the "termination shock", where its motion slows abruptly due to the outside pressure of the interstellar medium. The "heliosheath" is a broad transitional region between the termination shock and the heliosphere's outmost edge, the "heliopause". The overall shape of the heliosphere resembles that of a comet, being roughly spherical on one side to around 100 astronomical units (AU), and on the other side being tail shaped, known as the "heliotail", trailing for several thousands of AUs.
|
||||
Two Voyager program spacecraft explored the outer reaches of the heliosphere, passing through the termination shock and the heliosheath. Voyager 1 encountered the heliopause on 25 August 2012, when the spacecraft measured a sudden forty-fold increase in plasma density. Voyager 2 traversed the heliopause on 5 November 2018. Because the heliopause marks the boundary between matter originating from the Sun and matter originating from the rest of the galaxy, spacecraft that depart the heliosphere (such as the two Voyagers) are in interstellar space.
|
||||
|
||||
== History ==
|
||||
The heliosphere is affected by extrasolar effects, such as nearby supernovas or traversing interstellar mediums of different densities, and has significantly changed over the solar system's lifetime. Evidence suggests the heliosphere was shrunk to the Inner Solar System as recently as 3 million years ago, due to a nearby supernova, which exposed Earth to interstellar medium (which may have impacted Earth's climate and ecology).
|
||||
|
||||
== Structure ==
|
||||
|
||||
Despite its name, the heliosphere's shape is not a perfect sphere. Its shape is determined by three factors: the interstellar medium (ISM), the solar wind, and the overall motion of the Sun and heliosphere as it passes through the ISM. Because the solar wind and the ISM are both fluid, the heliosphere's shape and size are also fluid. Changes in the solar wind, however, more strongly alter the fluctuating position of the boundaries on short timescales (hours to a few years). The solar wind's pressure varies far more rapidly than the outside pressure of the ISM at any given location. In particular, the effect of the 11-year solar cycle, which sees a distinct maximum and minimum of solar wind activity, is thought to be significant.
|
||||
On a broader scale, the motion of the heliosphere through the fluid medium of the ISM results in an overall comet-like shape. The solar wind plasma which is moving roughly "upstream" (in the same direction as the Sun's motion through the galaxy) is compressed into a nearly-spherical form, whereas the plasma moving "downstream" (opposite the Sun's motion) flows out for a much greater distance before giving way to the ISM, defining the long, trailing shape of the heliotail.
|
||||
The limited data available and the unexplored nature of these structures have resulted in many theories as to their form. In 2020, Merav Opher led the team of researchers who determined that the shape of the heliosphere is a crescent that can be described as a deflated croissant.
|
||||
|
||||
=== Solar wind ===
|
||||
|
||||
The solar wind consists of particles (ionized atoms from the solar corona) and fields like the magnetic field that are produced from the Sun and stream out into space. Because the Sun rotates once approximately every 25 days, the heliospheric magnetic field transported by the solar wind gets wrapped into a spiral. The solar wind affects many other systems in the Solar System; for example, variations in the Sun's own magnetic field are carried outward by the solar wind, producing geomagnetic storms in the Earth's magnetosphere.
|
||||
|
||||
=== Heliospheric current sheet ===
|
||||
|
||||
The heliospheric current sheet is a ripple in the heliosphere created by the rotating magnetic field of the Sun. It marks the boundary between heliospheric magnetic field regions of opposite polarity. Extending throughout the heliosphere, the heliospheric current sheet could be considered the largest structure in the Solar System and is said to resemble a "ballerina's skirt".
|
||||
|
||||
== Edge structure ==
|
||||
The outer structure of the heliosphere is determined by the interactions between the solar wind and the winds of interstellar space. The solar wind streams away from the Sun in all directions at speeds of several hundred km/s in the Earth's vicinity. At some distance from the Sun, well beyond the orbit of Neptune, this supersonic wind slows down as it encounters the gases in the interstellar medium. This takes place in several stages:
|
||||
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|
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||||
The solar wind is traveling at supersonic speeds within the Solar System. At the termination shock, a standing shock wave, the solar wind falls below the speed of sound and becomes subsonic.
|
||||
It was previously thought that once subsonic, the solar wind would be shaped by the ambient flow of the interstellar medium, forming a blunt nose on one side and comet-like heliotail behind, a region called the heliosheath. However, observations in 2009 showed that this model is incorrect. As of 2011, it is thought to be filled with a magnetic bubble "foam".
|
||||
The outer surface of the heliosheath, where the heliosphere meets the interstellar medium, is called heliopause. This is the edge of the entire heliosphere. Observations in 2009 led to changes to this model.
|
||||
In theory, heliopause causes turbulence in the interstellar medium as the Sun orbits the Galactic Center. This turbulence results from the pressure of the advancing heliopause against the interstellar medium. However, the velocity of the solar wind relative to the interstellar medium may be too low for a bow shock.
|
||||
|
||||
=== Termination shock ===
|
||||
|
||||
The termination shock is the point in the heliosphere where the solar wind slows down to subsonic speed (relative to the Sun) because of interactions with the local interstellar medium. This causes compression, heating, and a change in the magnetic field. In the Solar System, the termination shock is believed to be 75 to 90 astronomical units from the Sun. In 2004, Voyager 1 crossed the Sun's termination shock, followed by Voyager 2 in 2007.
|
||||
The shock arises because solar wind particles are emitted from the Sun at about 400 km/s, while the speed of sound (in the interstellar medium) is about 100 km/s. The exact speed depends on the density, which fluctuates considerably. The interstellar medium, although very low in density, nonetheless has a relatively constant pressure associated with it; the pressure from the solar wind decreases with the square of the distance from the Sun. As one moves far enough away from the Sun, the pressure of the solar wind drops to where it can no longer maintain supersonic flow against the pressure of the interstellar medium, at which point the solar wind slows to below its speed of sound, causing a shock wave. Further from the Sun, the termination shock is followed by heliopause, where the two pressures become equal and solar wind particles are stopped by the interstellar medium.
|
||||
Other termination shocks can be seen in terrestrial systems; perhaps the easiest may be seen by simply running a water tap into a sink creating a hydraulic jump. Upon hitting the floor of the sink, the flowing water spreads out at a speed that is higher than the local wave speed, forming a disk of shallow, rapidly diverging flow (analogous to the tenuous, supersonic solar wind). Around the periphery of the disk, a shock front or wall of water forms; outside the shock front, the water moves slower than the local wave speed (analogous to the subsonic interstellar medium).
|
||||
Evidence presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in May 2005 by Ed Stone suggests that the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed the termination shock in December 2004, when it was about 94 AU from the Sun, by virtue of the change in magnetic readings taken from the craft. In contrast, Voyager 2 began detecting returning particles when it was only 76 AU from the Sun, in May 2006. This implies that the heliosphere may be irregularly shaped, bulging outwards in the Sun's northern hemisphere and pushed inward in the south.
|
||||
|
||||
=== Heliosheath ===
|
||||
The heliosheath is the region of the heliosphere beyond the termination shock. Here the wind is slowed, compressed, and made turbulent by its interaction with the interstellar medium. At its closest point, the inner edge of the heliosheath lies approximately 80 to 100 AU from the Sun. A proposed model hypothesizes that the heliosheath is shaped like the coma of a comet, and trails several times that distance in the direction opposite to the Sun's path through space. At its windward side, its thickness is estimated to be between 10 and 100 AU. Voyager project scientists have determined that the heliosheath is not "smooth" – it is rather a "foamy zone" filled with magnetic bubbles, each about 1 AU wide. These magnetic bubbles are created by the impact of the solar wind and the interstellar medium. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 began detecting evidence of the bubbles in 2007 and 2008, respectively. The probably sausage-shaped bubbles are formed by magnetic reconnection between oppositely oriented sectors of the solar magnetic field as the solar wind slows down. They probably represent self-contained structures that have detached from the interplanetary magnetic field.
|
||||
At a distance of about 113 AU, Voyager 1 detected a 'stagnation region' within the heliosheath. In this region, the solar wind slowed to zero, the magnetic field intensity doubled and high-energy electrons from the galaxy increased 100-fold. At about 122 AU, the spacecraft entered a new region that Voyager project scientists called the "magnetic highway", an area still under the influence of the Sun but with some dramatic differences.
|
||||
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||||
=== Heliopause ===
|
||||
The heliopause is the theoretical boundary where the Sun's solar wind is stopped by the interstellar medium; where the solar wind's strength is no longer great enough to push back the stellar winds of the surrounding stars. This is the boundary where the interstellar medium and solar wind pressures balance. The crossing of the heliopause should be signaled by a sharp drop in the temperature of solar wind-charged particles, a change in the direction of the magnetic field, and an increase in the number of galactic cosmic rays.
|
||||
In May 2012, Voyager 1 detected a rapid increase in such cosmic rays (a 9% increase in a month, following a more gradual increase of 25% from January 2009 to January 2012), suggesting it was approaching the heliopause. Between late August and early September 2012, Voyager 1 witnessed a sharp drop in protons from the Sun, from 25 particles per second in late August, to about 2 particles per second by early October. In September 2013, NASA announced that Voyager 1 had crossed the heliopause as of 25 August 2012. This was at a distance of 121 AU (1.81×1010 km) from the Sun. Contrary to predictions, data from Voyager 1 indicates the magnetic field of the galaxy is aligned with the solar magnetic field.
|
||||
On November 5, 2018, the Voyager 2 mission detected a sudden decrease in the flux of low-energy ions. At the same time, the level of cosmic rays increased. This demonstrated that the spacecraft crossed the heliopause at a distance of 119 AU (1.78×1010 km) from the Sun. Unlike Voyager 1, the Voyager 2 spacecraft did not detect interstellar flux tubes while crossing the heliosheath.
|
||||
NASA also collected data from the heliopause remotely during the suborbital SHIELDS mission in 2021.
|
||||
|
||||
=== Heliotail ===
|
||||
The heliotail is the several thousand astronomical units long tail of the heliosphere, and thus the Solar System's tail. It can be compared to the tail of a comet (however, a comet's tail does not stretch behind it as it moves; it is always pointing away from the Sun). The tail is a region where the Sun's solar wind slows down and ultimately escapes the heliosphere, slowly evaporating because of charge exchange.
|
||||
The shape of the heliotail (as found by NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer – IBEX) is that of a four-leaf clover. The particles in the tail do not shine, therefore it cannot be seen with conventional optical instruments. IBEX made the first observations of the heliotail by measuring the energy of "energetic neutral atoms", neutral particles created by collisions in the Solar System's boundary zone.
|
||||
The tail has been shown to contain fast and slow particles; the slow particles are on the side and the fast particles are encompassed in the center. The shape of the tail can be linked to the Sun sending out fast solar winds near its poles and slow solar winds near its equator more recently. The clover-shaped tail moves further away from the Sun, which makes the charged particles begin to morph into a new orientation.
|
||||
Cassini and IBEX data challenged the "heliotail" theory in 2009. In July 2013, IBEX results revealed a 4-lobed tail on the Solar System's heliosphere.
|
||||
|
||||
== Outside structures ==
|
||||
The heliopause is the final known boundary between the heliosphere and the interstellar space that is filled with material, especially plasma, not from the Earth's own star, the Sun, but from other stars. Even so, just outside the heliosphere (i.e. the "solar bubble") there is a transitional region, as detected by Voyager 1. Just as some interstellar pressure was detected as early as 2004, some of the Sun's material seeps into the interstellar medium. The heliosphere is thought to reside in the Local Interstellar Cloud inside the Local Bubble, which is a region in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.
|
||||
Outside the heliosphere, there is a forty-fold increase in plasma density. There is also a radical reduction in the detection of certain types of particles from the Sun, and a large increase in galactic cosmic rays.
|
||||
The flow of the interstellar medium (ISM) into the heliosphere has been measured by at least 11 different spacecraft as of 2013. By 2013, it was suspected that the direction of the flow had changed over time. The flow, coming from Earth's perspective from the constellation Scorpius, has probably changed direction by several degrees since the 1970s.
|
||||
|
||||
=== Hydrogen wall ===
|
||||
|
||||
Predicted to be a region of hot hydrogen, a structure called the "hydrogen wall" may be between the bow shock and the heliopause. The wall is composed of interstellar material interacting with the edge of the heliosphere. One paper released in 2013 studied the concept of a bow wave and hydrogen wall.
|
||||
Another hypothesis suggests that the heliopause could be smaller on the side of the Solar System facing the Sun's orbital motion through the galaxy. It may also vary depending on the current velocity of the solar wind and the local density of the interstellar medium. It is known to lie far outside the orbit of Neptune. The mission of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft is to find and study the termination shock, heliosheath, and heliopause. Meanwhile, the IBEX mission is attempting to image the heliopause from Earth orbit within two years of its 2008 launch. Initial results (October 2009) from IBEX suggest that previous assumptions are insufficiently cognizant of the true complexities of the heliopause.
|
||||
In August 2018, long-term studies about the hydrogen wall by the New Horizons spacecraft confirmed results first detected in 1992 by the two Voyager spacecraft. Although the hydrogen is detected by extra ultraviolet light (which may come from another source), the detection by New Horizons corroborates the earlier detections by Voyager at a much higher level of sensitivity.
|
||||
|
||||
=== Bow shock ===
|
||||
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|
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||||
It was long hypothesized that the Sun produces a "shock wave" in its travels within the interstellar medium. It would occur if the interstellar medium is moving supersonically "toward" the Sun, since its solar wind moves "away" from the Sun supersonically. When the interstellar wind hits the heliosphere it slows and creates a region of turbulence. A bow shock was thought to possibly occur at about 230 AU, but in 2012 it was determined it probably does not exist. This conclusion resulted from new measurements: The velocity of the LISM (local interstellar medium) relative to the Sun's was previously measured to be 26.3 km/s by Ulysses, whereas IBEX measured it at 23.2 km/s.
|
||||
This phenomenon has been observed outside the Solar System, around stars other than the Sun, by NASA's now retired orbital GALEX telescope. The red giant star Mira in the constellation Cetus has been shown to have both a debris tail of ejecta from the star and a distinct shock in the direction of its movement through space (at over 130 kilometers per second).
|
||||
|
||||
== Observational methods ==
|
||||
|
||||
=== Detection by spacecraft ===
|
||||
The precise distance to and shape of the heliopause are still uncertain. Interplanetary/interstellar spacecraft such as Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11 and New Horizons are traveling outward through the Solar System and will eventually pass through the heliopause. Contact to Pioneer 10 and 11 has been lost.
|
||||
|
||||
==== Cassini results ====
|
||||
Rather than a comet-like shape, the heliosphere appears to be bubble-shaped according to data from Cassini's Ion and Neutral Camera (MIMI / INCA). Rather than being dominated by the collisions between the solar wind and the interstellar medium, the INCA (ENA) maps suggest that the interaction is controlled more by particle pressure and magnetic field energy density.
|
||||
|
||||
==== IBEX results ====
|
||||
|
||||
Initial data from Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), launched in October 2008, revealed a previously unpredicted "very narrow ribbon that is two to three times brighter than anything else in the sky", now known as the IBEX ribbon. Initial interpretations suggest that "the interstellar environment has far more influence on structuring the heliosphere than anyone previously believed"
|
||||
"No one knows what is creating the ENA (energetic neutral atoms) ribbon, ..."
|
||||
"The IBEX results are truly remarkable! What we are seeing in these maps does not match with any of the previous theoretical models of this region. It will be exciting for scientists to review these (ENA) maps and revise the way we understand our heliosphere and how it interacts with the galaxy." In October 2010, significant changes were detected in the ribbon after 6 months, based on the second set of IBEX observations. IBEX data did not support the existence of a bow shock, but there might be a 'bow wave' according to one study.
|
||||
|
||||
=== Locally ===
|
||||
|
||||
Examples of missions that have or continue to collect data related to the heliosphere include:
|
||||
|
||||
Solar Anomalous and Magnetospheric Particle Explorer
|
||||
Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
|
||||
Solar Dynamics Observatory
|
||||
STEREO
|
||||
Ulysses spacecraft
|
||||
Parker Solar Probe
|
||||
Solar Orbiter
|
||||
During a total eclipse the high-temperature corona can be more readily observed from Earth solar observatories. During the Apollo program the Solar wind was measured on the Moon via the Solar Wind Composition Experiment. Some examples of Earth surface based Solar observatories include the McMath–Pierce solar telescope or the newer GREGOR Solar Telescope, and the refurbished Big Bear Solar Observatory.
|
||||
|
||||
== Exploration history ==
|
||||
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||||
The heliosphere is the area under the influence of the Sun; the two major components to determining its edge are the heliospheric magnetic field and the solar wind from the Sun. Three major sections from the beginning of the heliosphere to its edge are the termination shock, the heliosheath, and the heliopause. Five spacecraft have returned much of the data about its furthest reaches, including Pioneer 10 (1972–1997; data to 67 AU), Pioneer 11 (1973–1995; 44 AU), Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 (launched 1977, ongoing), and New Horizons (launched 2006). A type of particle called an energetic neutral atom (ENA) has also been observed to have been produced from its edges.
|
||||
Except for regions near obstacles such as planets or comets, the heliosphere is dominated by material emanating from the Sun, although cosmic rays, fast-moving neutral atoms, and cosmic dust can penetrate the heliosphere from the outside. Originating at the extremely hot surface of the corona, solar wind particles reach escape velocity, streaming outwards at 300 to 800 km/s (671 thousand to 1.79 million mph or 1 to 2.9 million km/h). As it begins to interact with the interstellar medium, its velocity slows to a stop. The point where the solar wind becomes slower than the speed of sound is called the termination shock; the solar wind continues to slow as it passes through the heliosheath leading to a boundary called the heliopause, where the interstellar medium and solar wind pressures balance. The termination shock was traversed by Voyager 1 in 2004, and Voyager 2 in 2007.
|
||||
It was thought that beyond the heliopause there was a bow shock, but data from Interstellar Boundary Explorer suggested the velocity of the Sun through the interstellar medium is too low for it to form. It may be a more gentle "bow wave".
|
||||
Voyager data led to a new theory that the heliosheath has "magnetic bubbles" and a stagnation zone. Also, there were reports of a "stagnation region" within the heliosheath, starting around 113 au (1.69×1010 km; 1.05×1010 mi), detected by Voyager 1 in 2010. There, the solar wind velocity drops to zero, the magnetic field intensity doubles, and high-energy electrons from the galaxy increase 100-fold.
|
||||
Starting in May 2012 at 120 au (1.8×1010 km; 1.1×1010 mi), Voyager 1 detected a sudden increase in cosmic rays, an apparent sign of approach to the heliopause. In the summer of 2013, NASA announced that Voyager 1 had reached interstellar space as of 25 August 2012.
|
||||
In December 2012, NASA announced that in late August 2012, Voyager 1, at about 122 au (1.83×1010 km; 1.13×1010 mi) from the Sun, entered a new region they called the "magnetic highway", an area still under the influence of the Sun but with some dramatic differences.
|
||||
Pioneer 10 was launched in March 1972, and within 10 hours passed by the Moon; over the next 35 years or so the mission would be the first out, laying out many firsts of discoveries about the nature of heliosphere as well as Jupiter's impact on it. Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to detect sodium and aluminum ions in the solar wind, as well as helium in the inner Solar System. In November 1972, Pioneer 10 encountered Jupiter's enormous (compared to Earth) magnetosphere and would pass in and out of it and its heliosphere 17 times charting its interaction with the solar wind. Pioneer 10 returned scientific data until March 1997, including data on the solar wind out to about 67 AU. It was also contacted in 2003 when it was a distance of 7.6 billion miles from Earth (82 AU), but no instrument data about the solar wind was returned then.
|
||||
Voyager 1 surpassed the radial distance from the Sun of Pioneer 10 at 69.4 AU on 17 February 1998, because it was traveling faster, gaining about 1.02 AU per year. On July 18, 2023, Voyager 2 overtook Pioneer 10 as the second most distant human-made object from the Sun. Pioneer 11, launched a year after Pioneer 10, took similar data as Pioneer out to 44.7 AU in 1995 when that mission was concluded. Pioneer 11 had a similar instrument suite as 10 but also had a flux-gate magnetometer. Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft were on different trajectories and thus recorded data on the heliosphere in different overall directions away from the Sun. Data obtained from Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft helped corroborate the detection of a hydrogen wall.
|
||||
In 2012 Voyager 1 is thought to have passed through heliopause, and Voyager 2 did the same in 2018.
|
||||
The twin Voyagers are the only man-made objects to have entered interstellar space. However, while they have left the heliosphere, they have not yet left the boundary of the Solar System which is considered to be the outer edge of the Oort Cloud. Upon passing the heliopause, Voyager 2's Plasma Science Experiment (PLS) observed a sharp decline in the speed of solar wind particles on 5 November and there has been no sign of it since. The three other instruments on board measuring cosmic rays, low-energy charged particles, and magnetic fields also recorded the transition. The observations complement data from NASA's IBEX mission. In 2025, NASA launched Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) to capitalize on Voyager's observations.
|
||||
49
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:27:47.547602+00:00"
|
||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
== Timeline of exploration and detection ==
|
||||
1904: Astronomers using the Potsdam Great Refractor with a spectrograph find evidence of the interstellar medium while observing the binary star Mintaka in Orion.
|
||||
1958: Eugene Parker published a paper that predicted solar wind; his theory was initially rejected by scientific community.
|
||||
January 1959: Luna 1 becomes the first spacecraft to observe the solar wind.
|
||||
1962: Mariner 2 detects the solar wind.
|
||||
1972–1973: Pioneer 10 becomes the first spacecraft to explore the heliosphere past Mars, flying by Jupiter on 4 December 1973 and continuing to return solar wind data out to a distance of 67 AU.
|
||||
February 1992: After flying by Jupiter, the Ulysses spacecraft becomes the first to explore the mid and high latitudes of the heliosphere.
|
||||
1992: Pioneer and Voyager probes detected Ly-α radiation resonantly scattered by heliospheric hydrogen.
|
||||
2004: Voyager 1 becomes the first spacecraft to reach the termination shock.
|
||||
2005: SOHO observations of the solar wind show that the shape of the heliosphere is not axisymmetrical, but distorted, very likely under the effect of the local galactic magnetic field.
|
||||
2009: IBEX project scientists discover and map a ribbon-shaped region of intense energetic neutral atom emission. These neutral atoms are thought to be originating from the heliopause.
|
||||
October 2009: the heliosphere may be bubble, not comet shaped.
|
||||
October 2010: significant changes were detected in the ribbon after six months, based on the second set of IBEX observations.
|
||||
May 2012: IBEX data implies there is probably not a bow "shock".
|
||||
June 2012: At 119 AU, Voyager 1 detected an increase in cosmic rays.
|
||||
25 August 2012: Voyager 1 crosses the heliopause, becoming the first human-made object to depart the heliosphere.
|
||||
August 2018: long-term studies about the hydrogen wall by the New Horizons spacecraft confirmed results first detected in 1992 by the two Voyager spacecraft.
|
||||
5 November 2018: Voyager 2 crosses the heliopause, departing the heliosphere.
|
||||
|
||||
== See also ==
|
||||
Coronal mass ejection
|
||||
Fermi glow
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Sources ==
|
||||
"Heliopause Seems to Be 23 Billion Kilometres". Universe Today. 9 December 2003. Retrieved 8 August 2007.
|
||||
"Space probes reveal Solar System's bullet shape". COSMOS magazine. 11 May 2007. Archived from the original on 13 May 2007. Retrieved 12 May 2007.
|
||||
|
||||
== Further reading ==
|
||||
Schwadron, Nathan A.; et al. (September 2011). "Does the space environment affect the ecosphere?". Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union. 92 (36): 297–298. Bibcode:2011EOSTr..92..297S. doi:10.1029/2011EO360001. ISSN 0096-3941.
|
||||
Gough, Evan (7 August 2020). "This is What the Solar System Really Looks Like". Universe Today. Retrieved 8 September 2024.
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
|
||||
Voyager Interstellar Mission Objectives
|
||||
NASA GALEX (Galaxy evolution Explorer) homepage at Caltech
|
||||
A Big Surprise from the Edge of the Solar System Archived 17 June 2016 at the Wayback Machine (NASA 06.09.11)
|
||||
41
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|
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|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
Herbert Sage Bridge (1919-1995) was an American physicist who developed the first instruments to measure plasma in interplanetary space and made significant contributions to cosmic ray research. He earned his PhD in physics from MIT in 1950 under Bruno Rossi's supervision after working on wartime projects at Princeton and Los Alamos Laboratory. His early research focused on cosmic rays. Beginning in 1958, Bridge developed the modulated-grid Faraday cup with Rossi, creating the first instrument capable of detecting dilute space plasma. The instrument flew aboard Explorer 10 in 1961 and was adapted for plasma science experiments on multiple spacecraft, including the Voyager program and Parker Solar Probe.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Biography ==
|
||||
Bridge was born in Berkeley, California, in 1919. He studied chemistry at the University of Maryland (BSc, 1941), and then worked at the National Defense Research Council Separation Project at Princeton and the Los Alamos Laboratory during the war. He got a PhD in physics from MIT, working on cosmic ray research under Bruno Rossi's supervision (1950) (before MIT, Bridge worked with Rossi at Los Alamos). He was a researcher at the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science, and became a professor there at 1966. In 1957, he went for a year to Switzerland, to work at CERN. He also worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. His research "focused on nuclear interactions produced by cosmic ray particles and on the new, unstable particles that result". Among his results was the "discovery of the positive K-meson and the cloud chamber observation of a cosmic-ray event interpreted tentatively as the annihilation of a heavy antiparticle". In 1965, he became an associate director of the MIT's Center for Space Research, became its director in 1978, and retired in 1984.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Bridge started to work on space plasma in 1958; together with Rossi, he designed and tested a plasma probe based on the classical Faraday cup. To enhance the instrument's response to positively charged protons and to suppress its response to photoelectrons produced by sunlight, four grids were deployed within the cup. A key innovation was a modulating voltage applied to one of the grids, which converted the signal into an alternating current, proportional to the proton flux and uncontaminated by any contribution of photoelectrons.
|
||||
|
||||
The modulated-grid Faraday cup for the Explorer 10 (1961) was the first of Bridge's spacecraft instruments. It was the first instrument that detected dilute plasma in interplanetary space. It was further developed into Plasma Science Experiment for the Voyager program (1977) and Parker Solar Probe, among others. According to his colleague John W. Belcher, "Bridge was the principal investigator for plasma probes on spacecraft which visited the sun and every major planetary body in the solar system."
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Personal life ==
|
||||
Bridge had two sons and a daughter. He enjoyed "cars, photography, mountaineering and the out-of-doors", and visited many high-altitude laboratories through his interest in cosmic rays and mountains.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Awards ==
|
||||
member of the American Geophysical Society
|
||||
Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
|
||||
member of Phi Beta Kappa
|
||||
1974 NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Selected publications ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
Herbert Bridge with Voyager's Plasma Science Instrument, MIT Museum photo
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:45:03.977246+00:00"
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|
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|
||||
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|
||||
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||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
James Walter Warwick (1924–2013) was an American astronomer, a pioneer of low frequency radio astronomy.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Biography ==
|
||||
Warwick was born on May 22, 1924 in Toledo, Ohio. During the war, he served in the U.S. Army Air Corp as a Boeing B-29 Superfortress radar bombardier in the South Pacific. After the war he studied at Harvard University, and got his BA, MA, and PhD (1951) there. After graduation he worked on solar flares at Harvard College Observatory's Sacramento Peak Station in New Mexico, and the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado. In 1955, he moved to University of Colorado Boulder, where he founded the Department of Astrogeophysics. He retired in 1989.
|
||||
Warwick was the principal investigator for Voyager program's Planetary Radio Astronomy instrument. He then left the University of Colorado Boulder, and founded Radiophysics, Inc.
|
||||
Warwick participated in IAU commissions on Radio Astronomy and on Solar Radiation.
|
||||
Warwick played clarinet in an army band during the war. At 39, he took cello lessons. He played cello and clarinet for the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra and played at a local church. He was married three times.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Selected publications ==
|
||||
Warwick, James W. (1 May 1967). "Radiophysics of Jupiter". Space Science Reviews. 6 (6): 841–891. Bibcode:1967SSRv....6..841W. doi:10.1007/BF00222408. ISSN 1572-9672.
|
||||
Warwick, J. W.; Pearce, J. B.; Peltzer, R. G.; Riddle, A. C. (1 December 1977). "Planetary radio astronomy experiment for Voyager missions". Space Science Reviews. 21 (3): 309–327. Bibcode:1977SSRv...21..309W. doi:10.1007/BF00211544. ISSN 1572-9672.
|
||||
Kaiser, M. L.; Desch, M. D.; Warwick, J. W.; Pearce, J. B. (12 September 1980). "Voyager Detection of Nonthermal Radio Emission from Saturn". Science. 209 (4462): 1238–1240. Bibcode:1980Sci...209.1238K. doi:10.1126/science.209.4462.1238. PMID 17811197.
|
||||
Warwick, James W.; Stoker, Carol; Meyer, Thomas R. (10 April 1982). "Radio emission associated with rock fracture: Possible application to the Great Chilean Earthquake of May 22, 1960". Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth. 87 (B4): 2851–2859. Bibcode:1982JGR....87.2851W. doi:10.1029/JB087iB04p02851.
|
||||
Hayenga, Craig O.; Warwick, James W. (20 August 1981). "Two-dimensional interferometric positions of VHF lightning sources". Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans. 86 (C8): 7451–7462. Bibcode:1981JGR....86.7451H. doi:10.1029/JC086iC08p07451.
|
||||
Warwick, James W.; et al. (4 July 1986). "Voyager 2 Radio Observations of Uranus". Science. 233 (4759): 102–106. Bibcode:1986Sci...233..102W. doi:10.1126/science.233.4759.102. PMID 17812898.
|
||||
Warwick, James W.; et al. (15 December 1989). "Voyager Planetary Radio Astronomy at Neptune". Science. 246 (4936): 1498–1501. Bibcode:1989Sci...246.1498W. doi:10.1126/science.246.4936.1498. PMID 17756007.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
59
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Blinn-0.md
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||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
James F. Blinn (born 1949) is an American computer scientist who first became widely known for his work as a computer graphics expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), particularly his work on the pre-encounter animations for the Voyager project, his work on the 1980 Carl Sagan documentary series Cosmos, and the research of the Blinn–Phong shading model.
|
||||
In 2000, Blinn was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the technology of educational use of computer graphics and for expository articles.
|
||||
He is credited with formulating Blinn's Law, which asserts that rendering time tends to remain constant, even as computers get faster. Animators prefer to improve quality, rendering more complex scenes with more sophisticated algorithms, rather than using less time to do the same work as before.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Biography ==
|
||||
In 1970, he received his bachelor's degree in physics and communications science, and later a master's degree in engineering from the University of Michigan. In 1978 he received a Ph.D. in computer science from the College of Engineering at the University of Utah.
|
||||
Blinn devised new methods to represent how objects and light interact in a three-dimensional virtual world, like environment mapping and bump mapping. He is well known for creating animation for three television series: Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage; Project MATHEMATICS!; and the pioneering instructional graphics in The Mechanical Universe. His simulations of the Voyager spacecraft visiting Jupiter and Saturn have been seen widely.
|
||||
Blinn was affiliated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology until 1995. Thereafter, he joined Microsoft Research, where he was a graphics fellow until his retirement in 2009. Blinn also worked at the New York Institute of Technology.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Jim Blinn's Corner ==
|
||||
From 1987 to 2007, Blinn wrote a column for IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications called "Jim Blinn's Corner". He wrote a total of 83 columns, most of which were reprinted in these books:
|
||||
|
||||
Blinn, James F.: Jim Blinn's Corner: Dirty Pixels, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., ISBN 1-55860-455-3
|
||||
Blinn, James F.: Jim Blinn's Corner: A Trip Down The Graphics Pipeline, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., ISBN 1-55860-387-5
|
||||
Blinn, James F.: Jim Blinn's Corner: Notation, Notation, Notation, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., ISBN 1-55860-860-5
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Select publications ==
|
||||
Blinn, James F.: Simulation of Wrinkled Surfaces, Computer Graphics, Vol. 12 (3), pp. 286–292 SIGGRAPH-ACM (August 1978)
|
||||
Blinn, James F.: Texture and Reflection In Computer Generated Images, CACM, 19(10), October 1976, pp 542–547.
|
||||
Blinn, James F.: Models of Light Reflection for Computer Synthesized Pictures, SIGGRAPH 77, pp 192–198.
|
||||
Blinn, James F.: A Generalization of Algebraic Surface Drawing, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 1(3), July 1982, pp 235–256.
|
||||
Blinn, James F.: Light Reflection Functions for the Simulation of Clouds and Dusty Surfaces, SIGGRAPH 82, pp 21–29.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Awards ==
|
||||
1983, NASA Exceptional Service medal for Voyager Fly-by animation.
|
||||
1983, SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award.
|
||||
1989, IEEE Outstanding Contribution Award for Jim Blinn's Corner.
|
||||
1991, MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of and to allow continuation of his work in educational animation.
|
||||
1995, Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Parsons School of Design for contributions to computer graphics.
|
||||
1999, Steven A. Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to Computer Graphics.
|
||||
2000, Elected to the National Academy of Engineering
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== See also ==
|
||||
Metaballs
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
Official website
|
||||
First Environment Mapping Images
|
||||
What Microsoft has to say about Blinn Bridging the Gap Between Art and Science at the Wayback Machine (archived June 4, 2011)
|
||||
SIGGRAPH 98 Keynote Address
|
||||
52
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:27:31.679497+00:00"
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
John Richard Casani (September 17, 1932 – June 19, 2025) was an American engineer. He worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on NASA projects, where he managed the Voyager, Galileo, Cassini and Prometheus projects.
|
||||
Casani was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1989 for pioneering systems engineering of planetary spacecraft and for leadership of spacecraft engineering and science teams.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Early life ==
|
||||
John R. Casani was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 17, 1932, to Jack and Julia Casani. He attended St. Joseph's Preparatory School, where he studied no scientific technical subjects. He then entered the University of Pennsylvania with the intention of becoming a liberal arts major. During his sophomore year, he decided that the employment prospects for liberal arts majors were unpromising and decided to join the United States Air Force. When his father objected, he decided instead to major in electrical engineering like his college roommate. The roommate eventually dropped out, but Casani received his Bachelor of Science degree in the discipline in 1955.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Jet Propulsion Laboratory ==
|
||||
After graduation, Casani worked at the Rome Air Development Center in New York state. In 1956, he moved to Southern California, where he lived in his fraternity's house at the University of Southern California while looking for work. He was offered a position at North American Aviation working its Navaho missile project, but Jack James convinced him to join the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where he worked on the guidance system for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency's Jupiter missile until the Sputnik crisis resulted in a change of priorities.
|
||||
|
||||
From 1958 to 1959, Casani was a payload engineer working on Pioneer 3 and Pioneer 4. These spacecraft were so small that he carried them in a suitcase to the University of Iowa to have their instruments calibrated. He worked as a spacecraft systems engineer on Ranger 1 and Ranger 2 from 1959 to 1962, and then on the Mariner 3 and Mariner 4 Mars probes from 1962 to 1965. He became the Chief Engineer of the Mariner Mars project in 1965, Deputy Spacecraft System Manager in 1966, Spacecraft System Manager in 1969, and Project Manager in 1970. Early missions to Mars were dogged by failures, which a reporter attributed to the Great Galactic Ghoul. After a hiatus, the Ghoul returned on Mariner 7, and Casani received drawing and paintings of the Ghoul.
|
||||
|
||||
After Mariners, Casani was assigned as a deputy and successor to Mariner Jupiter-Saturn '77 project manager Harris Schurmeier, who was reassigned from the project to head a new program. MJS'77 was a mission developed from the Grand Tour to outer planets mission concept, though NASA approved only flybys of Jupiter and Saturn. Despite it, the MJS'77 team planned the mission to be extended. Casani worked on guidance and control systems, and instructed his team to build the hardware that would work "beyond Uranus and Neptune". Casani thought that the name − MJS'77 − was not suitable for the mission, and proposed to change it, even though the official insignia was already chosen. In the spring of 1976, he held a contest for a new name, with a case of champagne as a prize. Soon, "Voyager" became a winner. Casani also got the idea of an artifact attached to the spacecraft, "a message representing humanity to any alien civilization that might encounter humanity’s first interstellar emissaries." He asked astronomer Carl Sagan to think about it, and the idea evolved into the Voyager Golden Record. Casani served as project manager for the Voyager program from 1975 to 1977, and after its successful launches was promptly reassigned to the Galileo, for which he worked from 1977 to 1988. This project was troubled by multiple delays and changes in configuration due to uncertainty as to how it should be launched on its way to Jupiter, and delays caused by the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. It was finally launched by the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1989, and reached Jupiter by a roundabout route in 1995. It remained in orbit around Jupiter until 2003. He became the Deputy Assistant Laboratory Director for Flight Projects in 1988, and Assistant Laboratory Director for Flight Projects in 1989. In 1994, he became Project Manager of the Cassini project. He became Chief Engineer at JPL in 1994.
|
||||
Casani was described as a "good-natured" man, but was an autocratic project manager, nicknamed "Ayatollah Casani" by his colleagues.
|
||||
Casani retired in 1999, but the retirement was a brief one; he was recalled two weeks later to work with the Johnson Space Center on a problem that could have caused the loss of the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. He then headed up an internal JPL investigation of the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 probes, launched under cost-reduced "faster, better, cheaper" period, and was project manager for Project Prometheus until its termination in 2005. In 2000, he was invited to lead an independent commission for the British-European Beagle 2 Mars lander program. Casani retired from JPL in 2012.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Personal life and death ==
|
||||
Casani was married for 39 years to Lynn Casani; she died in 2008. They had five sons. He died on June 19, 2025, at the age of 92. His papers are held by the Jet Propulsion Library and Archives.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Awards ==
|
||||
Over a long career at JPL, Casani received many awards, including the NASA Distinguished Service Medal in 1991, the NASA Exceptional Service Medal in 1965, the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal in 1999 and 2000, and the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal in 1974 and 1981. He received the Management Improvement Award for the Mariner Venus Mercury mission in 1974, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Space Systems Award in 1979, and the National Aerospace Club's Astronautics Engineer Award in 1981 for the Galileo project. He was also awarded the von Karman Lectureship in 1990, the American Astronautical Society Space Flight Award in 1989 and William Randolph Lovelace II Award in 2005, and the National Air and Space Museum Trophy for Lifetime Achievement in 2009. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000, and from the University of Rome La Sapienza in 2000 for his work on Voyager, Galileo and Cassini.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Selected publications ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Further reading ==
|
||||
Gallentine, Jay (2025). Born to Explore: John Casani's Grand Tour of the Solar System. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-1496206657.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Notes ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
|
||||
"John Casani advice on the 3 Eras of Space Exploration". YouTube. NASA APPEL. November 24, 2009.
|
||||
"John Casani advice on what it takes to manage space projects". YouTube. NASA APPEL. November 24, 2009.
|
||||
"John Casani on Three Important Ingredients". YouTube. NASA APPEL. November 24, 2009.
|
||||
"Dr. John Casani − The Golden Age of Planetary Exploration". YouTube. Old Bold Pilots. July 2, 2017.
|
||||
27
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|
||||
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|
||||
title: "MHW-RTG"
|
||||
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|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHW-RTG"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:27:55.204301+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The Multihundred-watt radioisotope thermoelectric generator (MHW RTG) is a type of US radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) developed for the Voyager spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. The Voyager generators continue to function nearly 50 years into the mission.
|
||||
|
||||
Each RTG has a total weight of 37.7 kg, including about 4.5 kg of Pu-238 and uses 24 pressed plutonium-238 oxide spheres to provide enough heat to generate approximately 157 watts of electrical power initially – halving every 87.7 years.
|
||||
Each RTG initially generated about 2400 watts of thermal power.
|
||||
Conversion of the decay heat of the plutonium to electrical power uses 312 silicon-germanium
|
||||
(SiGe) thermoelectric couples. The initial thermoelectric couple hot junction temperature was 1273 K (1000 °C, 1832 °F) with a cold junction temperature of 573 K (300 °C, 572 °F).
|
||||
Each Voyager spacecraft has 3 RTGs. Collectively, the RTGs supply each Voyager spacecraft with 470 watts at launch.
|
||||
MHW-RTGs were used on the Lincoln Experimental Satellites 8 and 9.
|
||||
Subsequent US spacecraft used the GPHS-RTG, which used similar SiGe thermoelectric devices but a different packaging of the fuel.
|
||||
The MMRTG is a newer RTG type, used on the Curiosity rover.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== See also ==
|
||||
Nuclear power in space
|
||||
24
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune_All_Night-0.md
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|
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|
||||
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|
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|
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|
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tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:27:56.465839+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Neptune All Night was an overnight TV program providing live coverage of the Voyager 2 fly-by of the planet Neptune. Produced by PBS affiliate WHYY-TV, the show was broadcast between midnight and 9:00 AM EDT on August 25, 1989, as Voyager 2 passed close by Neptune and its largest moon, Triton, after a 12-year flight. Carried by nearly 100 PBS stations under various titles—including Voyager All Night and Red Eye to Neptune—the broadcast featured live images from the spacecraft, subject to a four-hour signal delay due to the 4.3 billion km distance from Earth.
|
||||
Programming included live images from the probe (subject to a four-hour propagation delay) interspersed with panel discussions, expert commentary, and scientific analysis. Notable participants included the astronomers Carl Sagan and Clyde Tombaugh, the science fiction author Ray Bradbury, and Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart. Viewers could engage with the program via a toll-free call-in line. Reaction to the program was positive, with several commentators noting that coverage exceeded that of the commercial networks. In parallel with the show, the Planetary Society coordinated a number of live events at public venues.
|
||||
|
||||
== Program description ==
|
||||
|
||||
Neptune All Night was a nine-hour TV program providing live coverage of the Voyager 2 space probe's fly-by of the planet Neptune. The show, produced by the Philadelphia-area PBS affiliate WHYY-TV, was broadcast between midnight and 9:00 AM EDT on August 25, 1989, as Voyager 2 passed within 4,950 kilometres (3,080 mi) of the planet Neptune and within 40,000 kilometres (25,000 mi) of Neptune's largest moon, Triton. Triton is unique in the solar system as being the largest satellite with retrograde motion.
|
||||
The journey from the Earth to Neptune had taken 12 years. Carried by nearly 100 PBS stations, the program was aired under several different titles. Some stations used Voyager All Night; KAET in Phoenix, Arizona, ran it as Red Eye to Neptune. David Othmer, the show's executive producer, favored "Beyond Uranus" as a working title, but was "voted down". Five years later, WHYY would follow this up with live coverage of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 impacting Jupiter, as seen from the Hubble Space Telescope.
|
||||
The show provided live coverage of black-and-white images transmitted from the spacecraft's two cameras interspersed with color images which had been digitally composited from data previously transmitted by Voyager. Due to Voyager's 4.3 billion km (2.7 billion mi) distance from the Earth, the images were subject to a four-hour and six minute delay, with the signal relayed through tracking stations in Australia, Spain, and the Mojave Desert in California. The program's format included 20-minute segments with NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) scientists commenting on the most recent images alternating with 40 minutes of other material originating from the WHYY studio: a panel discussion with experts; commentary from science-fiction authors and well-known figures; analysis of Voyager's earlier encounters with Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus; and "a frivolous look at space travel in movies and science-fiction literature". Viewers could call in with questions on a toll-free line, 1-800-FLY-OVER. WHYY had to settle for that number after being told by the phone company that 1-800-NEPTUNE, 1-800-VOYAGER, and 1-800-FLYBY89 were all taken; 1-800-FLYBYBY was available and received consideration, but was ultimately rejected.
|
||||
Panelists included Jack Horkheimer, Judith Moffett, and Jesco von Puttkamer with Sedge Thomson hosting the show. Other well-known people scheduled to appear included Ira Flatow, who would be conducting interviews from JPL; science writer Timothy Ferris; astronomer Carl Sagan; science fiction author Ray Bradbury; astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the planet Pluto in 1930; and Apollo 9 crew member Rusty Schweickart. At the time, Tombaugh was the only person alive who had discovered a planet. Astronomer Derrick Pitts of Philadelphia's Franklin Institute compared the show's importance to watching the first manned lunar landings and said the show would be of interest to "scientific insomniacs". The evening before the broadcast, Pitts talked about the upcoming show:
|
||||
|
||||
Most of our observation will be directed to what Neptune's atmosphere looks like ... Mostly we'll look at the atmosphere and turbulence. Voyager 2's pictures help us understand how planets like this come into existence, what are [the] characteristics of planets at that distance from the sun, and what we can find in other solar systems ... The atmosphere of Earth is driven by energy from the sun. More of Neptune's energy is created by the planet itself than it receives from the sun. How is energy being generated and how is it being transferred? These are some questions we have.
|
||||
Funding for the show included a $35,000 (equivalent to $90,900 in 2025) grant from PBS, offsetting production costs of $50,000. In 1989, real-time dissemination of scientific data was a rarity; the live program was designed to address this, in conjunction with daily press conferences the Voyager team gave around the time of the fly-by. In a 2019 interview, Voyager project scientist Ed Stone said:
|
||||
|
||||
One of the things that made the Voyager planetary encounters different from missions today is that there was no internet that would have allowed the whole team and the whole world to see the pictures at the same time ... The images were available in real time at a limited number of locations.
|
||||
32
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|
||||
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|
||||
title: "Neptune All Night"
|
||||
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|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune_All_Night"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
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|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:27:56.465839+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
== Reaction ==
|
||||
Although commercial broadcasters, along with CNN on cable, had provided major reports in the week leading up to the fly-by, Broadcasting described the noncommercial WHYY program as "the most dramatic coverage". C-SPAN also provided coverage. Kenneth R. Clark of the Chicago Tribune noted the coverage from commercial broadcasters, but said that "PBS's continuous coverage is by far the most ambitious". Astronomer Christian Ready wrote in his blog that his attention that night was distracted from his observational work on Villanova University's 15-inch (380 mm) telescope by a TV set he had brought into the observatory to watch "image after raw, grainy image appear on the screen revealing an alien world as seen by the spacecraft".
|
||||
David Paquet, who worked for a TV station in Vermont, wrote in the White River Junction Herald that the program was "a bit in the style of a telethon". Paquet noted that the archives of Vermont PBS did not contain an intact copy of the complete program. He believes that no complete professional recording was ever made, although multiple partial recordings can be found on YouTube.
|
||||
|
||||
== Other coverage ==
|
||||
Additional live coverage of the Neptune and Triton fly-bys was provided by a series of Voyager Watch programs coordinated by the Planetary Society. The idea for these events may have originated when Davenport, Iowa, amateur astronomer Barry Ward enquired of JPL how private citizens could obtain access to a real-time feed of images from Voyager. JPL was amenable to the idea, which eventually grew into events open to the public at venues around the world. In the Davenport area, for example, presentations were made at the John Deere Planetarium at Augustana College, the Bettendorf campus of Scott Community College, and at St. Ambrose University. Ward said:
|
||||
|
||||
We want to show people that [the common man] can get in touch with NASA ... It's our tax dollars that support NASA, and we want to show that there's plenty of information (from NASA) that can be used in business and to improve our daily lives ... The completion of the grand tour of the solar system is one of the most important events in the history of mankind ... To me, the most exciting part will be when Voyager 2 goes behind the planet; If it emerges and we have a signal, that's the time to celebrate"
|
||||
In Pasadena, California (where JPL is located), Planetfest '89 was presented at the Pasadena Convention Center, running for five days and including lectures, films, and other exhibits. The event featured speakers including Carl Sagan and former JPL director Bruce Murray. Live coverage was also available at the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles. WTBS had announced that it would rebroadcast Destination Neptune from the National Geographic Explorer series in the early evening followed by Voyager 2: Rendezvous with Neptune later that night. CNN ran daily reports hosted by Carl Sagan in the month leading up to the flyby, and the Learning Channel ran a one-hour special.
|
||||
|
||||
== Voyager spacecraft ==
|
||||
|
||||
Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977, with its sister craft, Voyager 1, being launched two weeks later. The original mission plan, exploring Jupiter and Saturn, was extended for Voyager 2 to explore Uranus and Neptune, a so-called grand tour of the outer planets, after the spacecraft were en-route and it was seen how well they were performing.
|
||||
A few days before the flyby, it was reported Voyager 2's cameras were "somewhat worn and in need of repair". Both spacecraft were predicted to have enough power to operate until about 2015, at which point it was expected that radio contact would be lost. NASA, however, has been able to send commands and receive scientific data and telemetry well beyond that. Although contact with Voyager 2 was lost in July 2023 due to an incorrect command, communication was restored in August of that year. In September 2024, the plasma science instrument was powered down to help preserve the remaining power.
|
||||
|
||||
== Further reading ==
|
||||
Koberlein, Brian (April 2, 2014). "Neptune All Night". Retrieved February 9, 2025.
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
Neptune All Night on YouTube, Rochester TV Archive
|
||||
32
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot-0.md
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|
||||
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|
||||
title: "Pale Blue Dot"
|
||||
chunk: 1/2
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:27:57.682052+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from an unprecedented distance of over 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU), as part of that day's Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System.
|
||||
In the photograph, Earth's apparent size is less than a pixel; the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of space, among bands of sunlight reflected by the camera. Commissioned by NASA and resulting from the advocacy of astronomer and author Carl Sagan, the photograph was interpreted in Sagan's 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot, as representing humanity's minuscule and ephemeral place amidst the cosmos.
|
||||
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, with the initial purpose of studying the outer Solar System. After fulfilling its primary mission and as it ventured out of the Solar System, the decision was made to turn its camera around and capture one last image of Earth emerged, in part due to Sagan's proposition.
|
||||
Over the years, the photograph has been revisited and celebrated on multiple occasions, with NASA acknowledging its anniversaries and presenting updated versions, enhancing its clarity and detail.
|
||||
|
||||
== Background ==
|
||||
Voyager 1 is a 722-kilogram (1,592 lb) robotic spacecraft on a mission to study the outer Solar System and eventually interstellar space. After encountering the Jovian system in 1979 and the Saturnian system in 1980, the primary mission was declared complete in November of the same year. Voyager 1 was the first space probe to provide detailed images of the two largest planets and their major moons.
|
||||
|
||||
The spacecraft, still traveling at 64,000 km/h (40,000 mph), is the most distant human-made object from Earth and the first to leave the Solar System. Its mission has been extended and continues, with the aim of investigating the boundaries of the Solar System, including the Kuiper belt, the heliosphere and interstellar space. Since its launch, it receives routine commands and transmits data back to the Deep Space Network.
|
||||
Voyager 1 was expected to communicate only through the Saturn encounter. When the spacecraft passed the planet in 1980, Sagan proposed the idea of the space probe taking one last picture of Earth. He acknowledged that such a picture would not have much scientific value, as the Earth would appear too small for Voyager's cameras to make out any detail, but it would be meaningful as a perspective on humanity's place in the universe.
|
||||
Many in NASA's Voyager program were already supportive of the idea. Unaware of Sagan's proposal, University of Arizona's planetary scientist Carolyn Porco had a similar idea after becoming a member of the program in 1983, and had been inquiring openly about its possibility as early as 1985. However, there were concerns that taking a picture of Earth so close to the Sun risked damaging the spacecraft's imaging system irreparably. It was not until 1989 that the idea was put in motion, but then instrument calibrations delayed the operation further, and the personnel who devised and transmitted the radio commands to Voyager 1 were also being laid off or transferred to other projects. Richard Truly, then the NASA Administrator, interceded to ensure that the photograph was taken. A proposal to continue to photograph Earth as it orbited the Sun was rejected.
|
||||
|
||||
== Camera ==
|
||||
Voyager 1's Imaging Science Subsystem consists of two cameras: a low-resolution wide-angle camera used for spatially extended imaging, and a high-resolution narrow-angle camera intended for detailed imaging of specific targets. Both cameras are slow-scan vidicon tubes with a selenium sulphur storage surface, and are fitted with eight colored filters mounted on a filter wheel in front of the tube. Pale Blue Dot was taken with the narrow-angle camera, a 1500 mm f/8.5 catadioptric cassegrain telescope whose design was based on the 1973 Mariner mission.
|
||||
The challenge was that, as the mission progressed, the objects to be photographed would increasingly be farther away and would appear fainter, requiring longer exposures and slewing (panning) of the cameras to achieve acceptable quality. The telecommunication capability also diminished with distance, limiting the number of data modes that could be used by the imaging system.
|
||||
After taking the Family Portrait series of images, which included Pale Blue Dot, NASA mission managers commanded Voyager 1 to power its cameras down, as the spacecraft was not going to fly near anything else of significance for the rest of its mission, while other instruments that were still collecting data needed power for the long journey to interstellar space.
|
||||
|
||||
== Photograph ==
|
||||
|
||||
The design of the command sequence to be relayed to the spacecraft and the calculations for each photograph's exposure time were developed by Porco and space scientist Candy Hansen of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The command sequence was then compiled and sent to Voyager 1, with the images taken at 04:48 GMT on February 14, 1990. At that time, the distance between the spacecraft and Earth was 40.47 astronomical units (6,055 million kilometers, 3,762 million miles).
|
||||
The data from the camera was stored initially in an on-board tape recorder. Transmission to Earth was also delayed by the Magellan and Galileo missions being given priority use of the Deep Space Network. Then, between March and May 1990, Voyager 1 returned 60 frames back to Earth, with the radio signal traveling at the speed of light for nearly five and a half hours to cover the distance.
|
||||
Three of the frames received showed the Earth as a tiny point of light in empty space. Each frame had been taken using a different color filter: blue, green and violet, with exposure times of 0.72, 0.48 and 0.72 seconds respectively. The three frames were then recombined to produce the image that became Pale Blue Dot.
|
||||
50
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot-1.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Pale Blue Dot"
|
||||
chunk: 2/2
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:27:57.682052+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Of the 640,000 individual pixels that compose each frame, Earth takes up less than one (0.12 of a pixel, according to NASA). The light bands across the photograph are an artifact, the result of sunlight reflecting off parts of the camera and its sunshade, due to the relative proximity between the Sun and the Earth. Voyager's point of view was approximately 32° above the ecliptic. Detailed analysis suggested that the camera also detected the Moon, although it is too faint to be visible without special processing.
|
||||
Pale Blue Dot, which was taken with the narrow-angle camera, was also published as part of a composite picture created from a wide-angle camera photograph showing the Sun and the region of space containing the Earth and Venus. The wide-angle image was inset with two narrow-angle pictures: Pale Blue Dot and a similar photograph of Venus. The wide-angle photograph was taken with the darkest filter (a methane absorption band) and the shortest possible exposure (5 milliseconds), to avoid saturating the camera's vidicon tube with scattered sunlight. Even so, the result was a bright burned-out image with multiple reflections from the optics in the camera and the Sun that appears far larger than the actual dimension of the solar disk. The rays around the Sun are a diffraction pattern of the calibration lamp which is mounted in front of the wide-angle lens.
|
||||
|
||||
== Pale blue color ==
|
||||
Earth appears as a blue dot in the photograph primarily because of Rayleigh scattering of sunlight in its atmosphere. In Earth's air, short-wavelength visible light such as blue light is scattered to a greater extent than longer wavelength light such as red light, which is the reason why the sky appears blue from Earth. (The ocean also contributes to Earth's blueness, but to a lesser degree than scattering.) Earth is a pale blue dot, rather than dark blue, because white light reflected by clouds combines with the scattered blue light.
|
||||
Earth's reflectance spectrum from the far-ultraviolet to the near-infrared is unlike that of any other observed planet and is partially due to the presence of life on Earth. Rayleigh scattering, which causes Earth's blueness, is enhanced in an atmosphere that does not substantially absorb visible light, unlike, for example, the orange-brown color of Titan, where organic haze particles absorb strongly at blue visible wavelengths. Earth's plentiful atmospheric oxygen, which is produced by photosynthetic life forms, oxidizes organics in the atmosphere and converts them to water and carbon dioxide, causing the atmosphere to be transparent to visible light and allowing for substantial Rayleigh scattering and hence stronger reflectance of blue light.
|
||||
|
||||
== Reflections ==
|
||||
In his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan comments on what he sees as the greater significance of the photograph, writing:
|
||||
|
||||
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again 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.
|
||||
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
|
||||
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
|
||||
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
|
||||
|
||||
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
|
||||
|
||||
== Anniversaries ==
|
||||
|
||||
In 2015, NASA acknowledged the 25th anniversary of the photograph. Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist, commented: "Twenty-five years ago, Voyager 1 looked back toward Earth and saw a "pale blue dot", an image that continues to inspire wonderment about the spot we call home."
|
||||
In 2020, for the image's 30th anniversary, NASA published a new version of the original Voyager photo: Pale Blue Dot Revisited, obtained using modern image processing techniques "while attempting to respect the original data and intent of those who planned the images." Brightness levels and colors were rebalanced to enhance the area containing the Earth, and the image was enlarged, appearing brighter and less grainy than the original. The direction of the Sun is toward the bottom, where the image is brightest.
|
||||
To celebrate the same occasion, the Carl Sagan Institute released a video with several noted astronomers reciting Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" speech.
|
||||
|
||||
== See also ==
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
== Further reading ==
|
||||
|
||||
Sagan, Carl; Head, Tom (2006). Conversations with Carl Sagan (1st ed.). United States: The University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 1-57806-736-7.
|
||||
Sagan, Carl; Dyson, Freeman; Agel, Jerome (2000). Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective. Cambridge University Press. pp. XV, 302. ISBN 0-521-78303-8.
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
|
||||
Audio recording of Carl Sagan reading from Pale Blue Dot (US Library of Congress)
|
||||
Sagan's rationale for human spaceflight – Article in The Space Review
|
||||
Video produced for Pangea Day with Sagan reading from Pale Blue Dot
|
||||
Video (3:30) – Carl Sagan reading – original version on YouTube
|
||||
Video (3:26) – Carl Sagan reading – official version on YouTube
|
||||
Cassini's Pale Blue Dot – European Space Agency
|
||||
30
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pele_(volcano)-0.md
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30
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|
||||
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|
||||
title: "Pele (volcano)"
|
||||
chunk: 1/2
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pele_(volcano)"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:27:58.943788+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Pele is an active volcano on the surface of Jupiter's moon Io. It is located on Io's trailing hemisphere at A large, 300-kilometer (190 mi) tall volcanic plume has been observed at Pele by various spacecraft starting with Voyager 1 in 1979, though it has not been persistent. The discovery of the Pele plume on March 8, 1979, confirmed the existence of active volcanism on Io. The plume is associated with a lava lake at the northern end of the mountain Danube Planum. Pele is also notable for a persistent, large red ring circling the volcano resulting from sulfurous fallout from the volcanic plume.
|
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== Observations ==
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=== Voyager ===
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As Voyager 1 approached the Jupiter system in March 1979, it acquired numerous images of the planet and its four largest satellites, including Io. One of the most distinctive features of these distant images of Io was a large, elliptical, footprint-shaped ring on the satellite's trailing hemisphere (the side facing away from the direction of motion in a synchronously rotating satellite like Io). During the encounter itself on March 5, 1979, Voyager 1 acquired high-resolution images of the footprint-shaped region. At the center of bow tie-shaped dark region in the middle of the ring was a depression partially filled with dark material, 30 km (19 mi) by 20 km (12 mi) in size. This depression, later found to be the source of the Pele volcano, is at the northern base of a rifted mountain later named Danube Planum. With the other dramatic evidence for volcanic activity on the surface of Io from this encounter, researchers hypothesized that Pele was likely a caldera.
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On March 8, 1979, three days after passing Jupiter, Voyager 1 took images of Jupiter's moons to help mission controllers determine the spacecraft's exact location, a process called optical navigation. While processing images of Io to enhance the visibility of background stars, navigation engineer Linda Morabito found a 300-kilometre (190 mi) tall cloud along the moon's limb. At first, she suspected the cloud to be a moon behind Io, but no suitably sized body would have been in that location. The feature was determined to be a volcanic plume 300 km (190 mi) tall and 1,200 km (750 mi) wide, generated by active volcanism at Pele. Based on the size of the plume observed at Pele, the ring of reddish (or dark as it appeared to Voyager's cameras, which were insensitive to red-wavelengths) material was determined to be a deposit of plume material. Following this discovery, seven other plumes were located in earlier Voyager images of Io. Thermal emission from Pele detected by the Voyager 1 Infrared Interferometer Spectrometer (IRIS) detected a thermal hotspot at Pele, indicative of cooling lava, further indicating that volcanic activity at the surface was linked to the plumes observed by Voyager 1.
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When Voyager 2 flew through the Jupiter system in July 1979, its imaging campaign was modified to observe Io's plumes in action and to look for surface changes. Pele's plume, designated Plume 1 at the time as it was the first of Io's volcanic plumes to be discovered, was not seen by Voyager 2 four months later. Surface monitoring observations revealed changes with the red ring surrounding Pele. While it was heart- or hoofprint-shaped during the Voyager 1 encounter, it was now more elliptical with the notch in the southern part of the plume deposit now filled in, possibly due to changes in the distribution of plume sources within the Pele patera.
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Following the Voyager encounters, the International Astronomical Union officially named the volcano after the Hawaiian volcano goddess, Pele, in 1979.
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=== Galileo and beyond ===
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Galileo arrived at the Jupiter system in 1995 and, from 1996 to 2001, regularly monitored volcanic activity on Io through observations of Io's thermal emission at near-infrared wavelengths, imaging Io while it was in the Jupiter's shadow in order to look for thermal hotspots at visible and near-infrared wavelengths, and imaging Io during most orbit in order to detect changes in the appearance of diffuse material and lava flows on the surface. Thermal emission from Pele was detected in nearly every occasion Io's trailing hemisphere was imaged while the moon was in the shadow of Jupiter. The volcanic plume at Pele was found to be intermittent or primarily composed of gas with occasional bursts of increased dust content. It was detected only twice by Galileo in December 1996 and December 2000. In these two detections, the plume height varied from 300 km (190 mi) to 426 km (265 mi). The plume was also detected by the Hubble Space Telescope in October 1999 while Galileo was conducting a flyby of the moon. The Hubble observations allowed for the detection of diatomic sulfur (S2) for the first time on Io in Pele's plume. Subtle changes in the shape and intensity of the large red-ring plume deposit surrounding Pele were observed in daylight images of the volcano, with the most notable change seen in September 1997 when dark pyroclastic material from an eruption of Pillan Patera covered up a portion of Pele's plume deposit.
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During Galileo's encounters with Io between October 1999 and October 2001, the spacecraft observed Pele on three occasions using its camera and infrared spectrometers while the volcano was on Io's night-side. The cameras revealed a curved line of bright spots along the margin of the Pele patera (a term used for volcanic depressions on Io, akin to calderas). Within the east–west dark band along the southeastern portion of the patera, a large amount of thermal emission was observed, with temperatures and distribution consistent with a large, basaltic lava lake.
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Thermal emission at Pele was also seen in December 2000 by the Cassini spacecraft, in December 2001 from the Keck Telescope in Hawaii, and by the New Horizons spacecraft in February 2007.
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== Physical characteristics ==
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=== Lava lake ===
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Pele has a volcanic crater, also known as a patera, 30 km (19 mi) by 20 km (12 mi) in size, which lies at the base of the northern tip of the mountain Danube Planum. The patera has multiple floor levels, with a higher north-eastern section and a lower section that consists of an east–west-trending graben. Volcanic activity at Pele, as seen in images taken by Galileo in October 2001 while Pele was on Io's night side, appears to be limited to small thermal "hot-spots" along the margins of the patera and a more intense thermal emission source within a dark area in the southeast portion of the patera floor. This distribution of activity, combined with Pele's stability as a hotspot in terms of temperature and power emitted, suggests that Pele is a large, active lava lake, a combination of eruption style and intensity of activity not seen elsewhere on Io. The small hotspots seen in the Galileo data represent areas where the crust of the lava lake breaks up along the margins of the patera, allowing fresh lava to become exposed at the surface. The southeastern portion of the patera, an area of dark terrain in Voyager 1 imagery, is the most active region of the Pele volcano, with the most extensive region of hot lava at Pele. This area is thought to be a vigorously overturning lava lake, suggestive of a combination of a large mass flux of lava to the lake from a magma reservoir below the surface and a large mass fraction of dissolved volatiles like sulfur dioxide and diatomic sulfur. Given Pele's brightness at near-infrared wavelengths, activity at this portion of the lava lake may also result in lava fountaining.
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Lava temperatures measured using the near-infrared emission spectrum of thermal hotspots observed at Pele are consistent with silicate basaltic lava erupting at the lava lake. The measurements from Galileo and Cassini images of Pele suggest peak temperatures of at least 1250–1350 °C, while the near-infrared spectrometer on Galileo found peak temperatures of 1250–1280 °C. While Pele's energy output and temperature remained consistent on the timescale of months to years throughout much of the Galileo missions, measurements of Pele's brightness using Cassini data taken during an eclipse of Io by Jupiter found considerable variations on the timescale of minutes. This is consistent with variations in the distribution and size of lava fountains at Pele over that timeframe.
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=== Plume ===
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Pele's plume is the archetypal Pele-type plume: 300 km (190 mi) tall, producing a large reddish deposit that is concentric around the source vent. The plume is created from the degassing of sulfur (S2) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) from erupting lava in the Pele lava lake. The persistence of degassed sulfurous compounds to Pele's plume is likely from a stable and consistent magma supply to its lava lake, which could be the largest magma chamber of Io's volcanoes. Images of the plume taken by Voyager 1 revealed a large structure without a central column like the smaller, Prometheus-type plumes, but instead having a filamentary structure. This morphology is consistent with a plume that is formed by sulfurous gases erupted skyward from the Pele lava lake, which then condense into solid S2 and SO2 when they reach the shock canopy along the outer edge of the umbrella-shaped plume. These condensed materials then are deposited onto the surface, forming a large, red, oval-shaped ring around the Pele volcano. The oval shape of the deposits, elongated in roughly the north–south direction, may be the result of an east–west, linear source region, consistent with the shape and orientation of the graben that forms the southern and more active portion of the Pele patera. Variable activity in different portions of the Pele lava lake may also result in the changes in brightness and shape of the plume deposit over time observed by various spacecraft.
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== References ==
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== External links ==
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Media related to Pele (volcano) at Wikimedia Commons
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18.7°S 255.3°W / -18.7; -255.3.
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Raymond L. Heacock (January 9, 1928 – December 20, 2016) was an American engineer who spent his career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he worked on the Ranger program in the 1960s and on the Voyager program in the 1970s and 1980s. A Caltech engineering graduate, he was the winner of the James Watt International Medal for 1979.
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== Education and work ==
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Heacock joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1953, after receiving his Master of Science Degree in Engineering from the California Institute of Technology. Prior to joining the Voyager Project in 1972 as Spacecraft Systems Manager he had advanced through various positions of responsibility at the Laboratory. In October 1977, he was appointed Deputy Manager of the Voyager Project and became Manager in 1979. He was a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and has served as Secretary, Treasurer, Vice-President and President of the Board of Directors of the Caltech Alumni Association. Heacock is a native of Santa Ana, California and lived in La Crescenta.
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Since the inception of the Voyager Project in 1972, Heacock was deeply involved in guiding and shaping the successful development and operation of the sophisticated craft. The scientific data from the flight experiments carried aboard them have yielded startling new information on Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Heacock was a leader in the design, development and flight operations of these craft as well as of their scientific instruments complement. As Spacecraft System Manager, Deputy Project Manager, and Project Manager he contributed personally to the development of various advanced design features leading to the Project's outstanding success.
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NASA's two robot spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, were launched in the Summer of 1977 on their journeys to Jupiter of more than 625 million miles. Voyager 1 reached Saturn in November 1981, and then left the Solar System. Nearly 10 years later Voyager 1 turned around to point its cameras towards Earth and took the famous Pale Blue Dot image. Voyager 2 reached Saturn in August 1981, then went on to Uranus in 1986, and Neptune in 1989. The spacecraft reached interstellar space, becoming the first probes to do so.
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== James Watt International Medal ==
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The presentation of the 1979 James Watt International Medal was made on Wednesday, June 25, 1980 at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers in London. The Medal was presented to Heacock by the President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Bryan Hildrew.
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The James Watt International Medal is awarded biennially to an engineer of any nationality who is deemed worthy of this, the highest award which the Institution of Mechanical Engineers can bestow. The Council awarded the 1979 Medal to Heacock for his outstanding achievements as leader of the team responsible for shaping the development and execution of the technically advanced spacecraft used by the United States of America in the exploration of the outer planets of the Solar System.
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== References ==
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Stamatios (Tom) Mike Krimigis (Greek: Σταμάτιος Κριμιζής; born September 10, 1938) is a Greek-American space physicist, who contributed to multiple space probe missions. He has contributed to exploration missions to almost every planet of the Solar System. In 1999, the International Astronomical Union named the asteroid 8323 Krimigis (previously 1979 UH) in his honor.
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||||
== Biography ==
|
||||
Stamatios Krimigis was born September 10, 1938 in Vrontados, Chios, Greece, where he completed his early education. He then moved to the United States to further his studies. Krimigis studied physics at the University of Minnesota (BSc 1961) and at the University of Iowa (MSc 1963, Ph.D. 1965). His PhD advisor was renowned space scientist James Van Allen.
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He is Head Emeritus of the Space Department at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. He holds the Chair of Science of Space at the Academy of Athens, Greece, and serves as the President of the Greek National Council for Research and Technology.
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Krimigis led or participated in space physics experiments on space probe mission to all nine classical planets. He worked on 21 instruments for various NASA and European Space Agency missions. His Low Energy Charged Particle Experiment (LECP) instrument flies aboard both Voyager spacecraft; on Voyager 1, LECP data was essential to determining that a spacecraft had left the solar system for the first time in 2012. Krimigis also participated in establishing NASA's Discovery Program of low-cost planetary missions, as well as the New Frontiers program, for which the APL-built New Horizons to Pluto was the first mission. He is also a co-investigator on the Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018.
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He is co-investigator for LAN/HI-SCALE on Ulysses solar polar orbiter, EPIC on GEOTAIL, EDP for Galileo mission, TRD on Mariner 3, and for the LECR on Mariner 4. Krimigis has also worked on the Cassini, Advanced Composition Explorer, the Mariner 5, MESSENGER and New Horizons programs.
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In 1986, Krimigis briefed Ronald Reagan on the AMPTE mission. He also met with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 and George W. Bush in 1990 to discuss space exploration.
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||||
In 2016, Krimigis received NASA's highest service honor, the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, for his lifelong efforts to advance space exploration and science.
|
||||
In 2017, Krimigis's contributions to the Voyager program were highlighted in the documentary film "The Farthest."
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|
||||
|
||||
== Research contributions ==
|
||||
Krimigis's research has focused on the study of the magnetospheres of planets and the heliosphere.
|
||||
Krimigis's publication record spans from "Interplanetary diffusion model for time behavior of intensity in a solar cosmic ray event," published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in 1965, to "Search for the exit: Voyager 1 at heliosphere's border with the galaxy," published in Science in 2013. Krimigis has published nearly 600 articles in scientific journals and books, on solar observations, planetary magnetospheres, and the charged particles in the interplanetary space. Krimigis has over 21,000 citations.
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|
||||
|
||||
== Honors and awards ==
|
||||
Fellow, APS, AGU, AAAS, AIAA
|
||||
Lifetime Achievement Award, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (2004)
|
||||
Member of the Academy of Athens, Chair of Science of Space (2004)
|
||||
COSPAR Space Science Award (2002)
|
||||
Smithsonian Institution Trophy (2002)
|
||||
Aviation Week and Space Technology Laurels in Space Award (1996, 2001)
|
||||
NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement (1981, 1986)
|
||||
Basic Sciences Award, International Academy of Astronautics (1994)
|
||||
Council of European Aerospace Societies Gold Medal (2011)
|
||||
National Air and Space Museum Lifetime Achievement Trophy Award (2015)
|
||||
Hellenic Physical Society Award, for major contributions to science in Greece and abroad (May 11, 2015)
|
||||
American Astronomical Society Space Flight Award (2015)
|
||||
NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal (2016)
|
||||
International Academy of Astronautics von Karman Award (2017)
|
||||
Homeric Award from the Chian Federation of America (2005)
|
||||
Over 40 NASA and ESA Group Achievement Awards
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
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|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
Dr Krimigis at I.A.U.
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Brief Biography from NASA
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Suzanne R. "Suzy" Dodd is an American project scientist of multiple NASA spacecraft missions.
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|
||||
== Biography ==
|
||||
Dodd was born in Tacoma, Washington and grew up in Gig Harbor in the same state. Her parents were from New York City. She received a BS degree in Engineering and Applied Science from Caltech (1984), a BA degree in Math/Physics from Whitman College (in Walla Walla, Washington), and an MS degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Southern California.
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Dodd was hired by Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1984 as a sequence design engineer for the Voyager 2 during its flyby of Uranus; she became the lead sequence engineer who designed the closest approach sequence for the Neptune flyby. She left Voyager in 1989, and worked on the mission planning team for the failed Mars Observer mission (1990-1993) and on the Cassini mission to Saturn, where she had a team of around 40 people. She worked on Cassini for six years (1993-1999).
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Dodd was a project manager of the Spitzer Space Telescope and the manager of the Spitzer Space Telescope Science Center at Caltech since 1999; a project manager of the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) (2012-2016); a manager of NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC). In 2010, she became the tenth project manager of the Voyager program. Voyager was already on an extended mission; in 2012 Voyager 1, and in 2018 Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space. Theoretically, the spacecraft have enough power until c. 2032; after that there wouldn't be enough power for communication systems. In 2016, she was named the director of JPL's Interplanetary Network Directorate that manages the Deep Space Network (DSN). The farthest spacecraft that "talk" with the DSN are Voyagers.
|
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Dodd received several NASA awards:
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NASA Exceptional Service Medal, NASA Public Service Medal, NASA Silver Achievement Medal and NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal.
|
||||
Dodd's husband was an athletic coach at Caltech; they have two daughters. She is an "avid Masters swimmer".
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|
||||
|
||||
== Selected publications ==
|
||||
Dodd, Suzanne; Gustavson, Robert (2000). "Flying Cassini with Virtual Operations Teams". Reducing the Cost of Spacecraft Ground Systems and Operations. Space Technology Proceedings. Vol. 3. pp. 161–167. doi:10.1007/978-94-015-9395-3_21. ISBN 978-90-481-5400-5.
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Dodd, Suzanne R. (2004). "The Spitzer science operations system: How well are we really doing?". In Mather, John C. (ed.). Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter Space Telescopes. Vol. 5487. p. 158. doi:10.1117/12.551632.
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Bennett, Lee; Comeau, Susan; Levine, Deborah A.; Dodd, Suzanne R. (2006). "The Spitzer Science Center: System description and lessons learned due to two years of operations". In Silva, David R.; Doxsey, Rodger E. (eds.). Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems. Vol. 6270. doi:10.1117/12.672201.
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||||
Dodd, Suzanne R.; Levine, Deborah A. (2006). "The Spitzer Space Telescope's performance: Getting the most out of a great observatory". In Silva, David R.; Doxsey, Rodger E. (eds.). Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems. Vol. 6270. doi:10.1117/12.670621.
|
||||
Dodd, Suzanne R.; Storrie-Lombardi, Lisa; Scott, Charles P. (2008). "Spitzer's model for dealing with the end of the cryogenic mission". In Brissenden, Roger J.; Silva, David R. (eds.). Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems II. Vol. 7016. pp. 70160D. doi:10.1117/12.788131.
|
||||
Storrie-Lombardi, Lisa J.; Dodd, Suzanne R. (2010). "Downsizing a great observatory: Reinventing Spitzer in the warm mission". In Silva, David R.; Peck, Alison B.; Soifer, B. Thomas (eds.). Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems III. Vol. 7737. pp. 77370L. doi:10.1117/12.857827.
|
||||
Storrie-Lombardi, Lisa J.; Dodd, Suzanne R. (2012). "Spitzer warm mission: maximizing the science return in the extended mission phase". In Peck, Alison B.; Seaman, Robert L.; Comeron, Fernando (eds.). Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems IV (PDF). Vol. 8448. pp. 84481E. doi:10.1117/12.925249.
|
||||
Yunjin Kim; Willis, J.; Dodd, S.; Harrison, F.; Forster, K.; Craig, W.; Bester, M.; Oberg, D. (2013). "Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) Mission". 2013 IEEE Aerospace Conference. pp. 1–9. doi:10.1109/AERO.2013.6496933. ISBN 978-1-4673-1813-6.
|
||||
Forster, Karl; Harrison, Fiona A.; Dodd, Suzanne R.; Stern, Daniel K.; Miyasaka, Hiromasa; Madsen, Kristin K.; Grefenstette, Brian W.; Markwardt, Craig B.; Craig, William W.; Marshall, Francis E. (2014). "NuSTAR observatory science operations: On-orbit acclimation". In Peck, Alison B.; Benn, Chris R.; Seaman, Robert L. (eds.). Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems V. Vol. 9149. pp. 91490R. doi:10.1117/12.2056916.
|
||||
Dodd, Suzanne R. (2014). "A comparison of operation models and management strategies for the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array". In Peck, Alison B.; Benn, Chris R.; Seaman, Robert L. (eds.). Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems V. Vol. 9149. doi:10.1117/12.2055499.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
Media related to Suzanne Dodd at Wikimedia Commons
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||||
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||||
The Farthest (The Farthest - Voyager in Space in the United States on PBS) is an Irish documentary film that chronicles the history of the Voyager program and its two space probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched in 1977. In 2013, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the Solar System and reach interstellar space. This makes the program one of the humankind's greatest achievements. The story is presented through the testimonies of the NASA team involved. The film premiered on 26 February 2017 at the Dublin Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award, and 22 August 2017 on PBS.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Cast ==
|
||||
The cast includes more than 20 of the original and current mission scientists, engineers, team members and NASA employees; among them are Frank Drake, Carolyn Porco, Lawrence Krauss, Timothy Ferris, Edward C. Stone, Nick Sagan, Larry Soderblom, Fran Bagenal and Jon Lomberg.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Reception ==
|
||||
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 100% approval rating based on 27 critical reviews, with the consensus stating, "Informative, enthusiastic and accessible, The Farthest will inspire even the most grounded of viewers to look up in wonder once in a while."
|
||||
Donald Clarke of The Irish Times awarded the film four stars out of five, calling it "A wonderful film that will inform generations to come." Leslie Felperin of The Guardian also gave the film four stars out of five, stating, "his exquisite, exemplary science documentary, directed by Irish editor turned helmer Emer Reynolds, recounts the rich and fascinating story of the Voyager mission, arguably Nasa’s finest, noblest contribution to scientific understanding." Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter commented, "The Farthest ultimately proves a welcome and invaluable reminder, in these budget-challenged times, that space exploration is of boundless importance."
|
||||
Nick Schager of Variety wrote, "It’s rare for a film to make one swell with pride about something he or she had no direct hand in, but “The Farthest” accomplishes that feat with aplomb." Noel Murray of the Los Angeles Times observed, "Reynolds takes a thorough and direct approach to the Voyager story, weaving together insightful and unexpectedly poetic interviews with several of the people who worked on the project, illustrated with a mix of archival footage and artfully shot re-creations." Richard A. Marini of San Antonio Express News called the film "Fascinating and inspiring."
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
The Farthest at IMDb
|
||||
The Farthest at Box Office Mojo
|
||||
The Farthest at Metacritic
|
||||
The Farthest at Rotten Tomatoes
|
||||
64
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Ferris-0.md
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
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|
||||
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|
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
Timothy Ferris (born August 29, 1944) is an American science writer. He is best known for Coming of Age in the Milky Way (1988), a history of astronomy which won the Science Writing Award. He also wrote The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report (1997), a popular overview of cosmology. In The Science of Liberty (2010), he argues that scientific thinking played a role in democracy. Ferris has produced three PBS documentaries: The Creation of the Universe (1985), Life Beyond Earth (1999), and Seeing in the Dark (2007). He was a producer of the Voyager Golden Record, a sample of the sights and sounds of Earth sent into space with the Voyager spacecraft.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Background and education ==
|
||||
Ferris is a native of Miami, Florida. He is a graduate of Coral Gables Senior High School in Coral Gables, Florida. He attended Northwestern University, graduating in 1966 with majors in English and communications. He studied for one year at the Northwestern University Law School.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Career ==
|
||||
After departing Northwestern Law School, Ferris joined United Press International as a reporter, where he worked in New York City.
|
||||
After starting his career as a newspaper reporter, Ferris became an editor at Rolling Stone. Ferris produced the Voyager Golden Record, an artifact of human civilization containing music, sounds of Earth and encoded photographs launched aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft. He has served as a consultant to NASA on long-term space exploration policy, and was among the journalists selected as candidates to fly aboard the Space Shuttle in 1986; the planned flight was cancelled due to the Challenger disaster. He was also a friend of and collaborator with American astronomer Carl Sagan.
|
||||
Ferris has taught astronomy, English, history, journalism, and philosophy at four universities. He is an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
|
||||
He has been a columnist for Smithsonian, Scientific American, and Science Digest magazines and a commentator for National Public Radio, MS-NBC, and the PBS News Hour.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Honors ==
|
||||
Ferris is a Guggenheim fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He won the Klumpke-Roberts Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1986, and has twice won the American Institute of Physics science-writing medal and the American Association for the Advancement of Science writing prize. He was named a CNN "Voice of the Millennium" in 1999. Coming of Age in the Milky Way was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times. Steven Weinberg included The Whole Shebang on his list of the 13 best popular science books.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Bibliography ==
|
||||
|
||||
Timothy Ferris (1977). The Red Limit: The Search for the Edge of the Universe. William Morrow & Co. ISBN 978-0-688-03176-3.
|
||||
Carl Sagan; Frank D. Drake; Ann Druyan; Timothy Ferris; Jon Lomberg & Linda Salzman Sagan (1978). Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House. ISBN 978-0-345-31536-6.
|
||||
Timothy Ferris (1980). Galaxies. Sierra Club Books. ISBN 978-0-87156-273-9.
|
||||
Timothy Ferris (1984). SpaceShots. Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-394-53890-0.
|
||||
Bruce Porter; Timothy Ferris (1988). The Practice of Journalism. Prentice-Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-693706-7.
|
||||
Timothy Ferris (1988). Coming of Age in the Milky Way. William Morrow & Co. ISBN 978-0-688-05889-0.
|
||||
Timothy Ferris; Clifton Fadiman, eds. (1991). World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics. Little Brown. ISBN 978-0-316-28129-4.
|
||||
Timothy Ferris (1992). The Mind's Sky: Human Intelligence in a Cosmic Context. Bantam Books. ISBN 978-0-553-37133-8.
|
||||
Timothy Ferris (1993). The Universe & Eye. Ingram Pinn (illust.). Pavilion Books. ISBN 978-0-517-15572-1.
|
||||
Timothy Ferris (1997). The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-684-83861-8.
|
||||
Timothy Ferris (2001). Life Beyond Earth. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-684-84937-9.
|
||||
Timothy Ferris, ed. (2001). Best American Science Writing 2001. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-093648-7.
|
||||
Timothy Ferris (2002). Seeing in the Dark: How Backyard Stargazers Are Probing Deep into the Universe and Guarding Earth from Interplanetary Peril. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-86579-3.
|
||||
Timothy Ferris (2010). The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-078150-7.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Films ==
|
||||
Producer, narrator, and writer, Seeing in the Dark, sixty-minute documentary film, PBS premier September 19, 2007; DVD and BR-DVD releases, PBS Home Video, 2008.
|
||||
Author and narrator, Life Beyond Earth, two-hour PBS television special, world premier November 10, 1999; DVD release, PBS Home Video, 2000.
|
||||
Author and narrator, The Creation of the Universe, ninety-minute television science special; U.S. premier, PBS network, November 20, 1985; also broadcast in the United Kingdom, Japan, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Venezuela, and Brazil. Inaugural release, PBS Home Video, 1991; laserdisc release, Pacific Arts Video, 1992; CD-ROM release, The Voyager Company, 1993; DVD release, PBS Home Video, 2005.
|
||||
Writer and narrator, segments on The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, PBS television: "Exploding Stars and the Origins of Human Civilization", October 21, 1993; "Pipe Organs and Particle Accelerators", June 8, 1993; "Columbus Day," October 7, 1992; and "The Voyager Encounter With Neptune," August 22, 1989.
|
||||
Presenter, segment on American Epic, PBS premier May 30, 2017; also broadcast in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, Israel, Spain, and Brazil. DVD and BR-DVD releases, PBS Home Video, 2017
|
||||
He appeared in The Farthest, a 2017 documentary on the Voyager program.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
|
||||
Official website
|
||||
Timothy Ferris at IMDb
|
||||
Appearances on C-SPAN
|
||||
"Voyagers' Records Wait for Alien Ears". Weekend Edition. Interview. NPR. August 19, 2007. 12892280.
|
||||
45
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_R._Eshleman-0.md
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
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|
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|
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|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:27:38.310626+00:00"
|
||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Von Russel Eshleman (1924–2017) was an American radio astronomer.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Biography ==
|
||||
Eshleman was born on September 17, 1924, in Covington, Ohio. His family was of Old German Baptist Brethren ancestry; he was the youngest of four sons. During the war, Eshleman served in the US Navy as an electronics technician (1943–1946). While in the Navy, he became interested in astronomy, thinking about "bouncing radio signals from the lunar surface". He unsuccessfully tried to do it using the ship's radar.
|
||||
After the war, Eshleman studied at the General Motors Institute of Technology, Ohio State University and the George Washington University. He received his BSc in electrical engineering from the latter in 1949. He get his MSc (1950) and PhD (1952) from Stanford University. His thesis was on "radio reflections from ionized meteor trails in the upper Earth's atmosphere", advised by Oswald Garrison Villard Jr. and Laurence Albert Manning. Eshleman was supported by both Office of Naval Research and Air Force. The Air Force was mainly interested in Eshleman's idea to use meteor ionization trails as a secure communication channel. He then became a researcher at Stanford, promoted to assistant professor in 1957 and to full professor in 1962. In the same year, he cofounded the Stanford Center for Radar Astronomy which performed radio science experiments with Pioneer 6, 7, 8, and 9 spacecraft. In 1959, Eshleman "recorded the first distinguishable echo of a radar signal bounced off the sun".
|
||||
He then switched to planetary exploration using radio science experiments. Eshleman became the PI of Radio Science Experiment for the twin Voyager program spacecraft, sent to the outer solar system. After Voyager, Eshleman worked on "evolute flashes during deep radio occultations, stellar gravitational lenses and their effects on propagating radio waves, ring particle dynamics, absorption in planetary atmospheres ... and retro-reflection from icy planetary surfaces."
|
||||
In 1979, Eshleman became the first who propose to use the Sun as a gravitational lens.
|
||||
Eshleman authored more than a hundred articles.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Awards and recognition ==
|
||||
Member of the Academy of Engineering
|
||||
Fellow of the IEEE
|
||||
Fellow of the American Astronomical Society
|
||||
NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (1981)
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Personal life ==
|
||||
Eshleman met his future wife, Patricia Middleton, in Stanford. They married in 1947 and had four children.
|
||||
Eshleman retired in 1992. He died on September 22, 2017, in Palo Alto, California, at 93.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Selected publications ==
|
||||
Kliore, Arvydas; Cain, Dan L.; Levy, Gerald S.; Eshleman, Von R.; Fjeldbo, Gunnar; Drake, Frank D. (10 September 1965). "Occultation Experiment: Results of the First Direct Measurement of Mars's Atmosphere and Ionosphere". Science. 149 (3689): 1243–1248. Bibcode:1965Sci...149.1243K. doi:10.1126/science.149.3689.1243. PMID 17747455.
|
||||
Fjeldbo, Gunnar; Fjeldbo, Wencke C.; Eshleman, Von R. (1966). "Models for the atmosphere of Mars based on the Mariner 4 Occultation Experiment". Journal of Geophysical Research. 71 (9): 2307–2316. Bibcode:1966JGR....71.2307F. doi:10.1029/JZ071i009p02307. ISSN 2156-2202.
|
||||
Fjeldbo, Gunnar; Eshleman, Von R. (1 August 1968). "The atmosphere of mars analyzed by integral inversion of the Mariner IV occultation data". Planetary and Space Science. 16 (8): 1035–1059. Bibcode:1968P&SS...16.1035F. doi:10.1016/0032-0633(68)90020-2. ISSN 0032-0633.
|
||||
Fjeldbo, G.; Kliore, A. J.; Eshleman, V. R. (1971). "The Neutral Atmosphere of Venus as Studied with the Mariner V Radio Occultation Experiments". Astronomical Journal. 76: 123. Bibcode:1971AJ.....76..123F. doi:10.1086/111096.
|
||||
Eshleman, Von R. (1 September 1973). "The radio occultation method for the study of planetary atmospheres". Planetary and Space Science. 21 (9): 1521–1531. Bibcode:1973P&SS...21.1521E. doi:10.1016/0032-0633(73)90059-7. ISSN 0032-0633.
|
||||
Eshleman, Von R. (14 September 1979). "Gravitational Lens of the Sun: Its Potential for Observations and Communications over Interstellar Distances". Science. 205 (4411): 1133–1135. Bibcode:1979Sci...205.1133E. doi:10.1126/science.205.4411.1133. PMID 17735051.
|
||||
Marouf, Essam A.; Leonard Tyler, G.; Zebker, Howard A.; Simpson, Richard A.; Eshleman, Von R. (1 May 1983). "Particle size distributions in Saturn's rings from voyager 1 radio occultation". Icarus. 54 (2): 189–211. Bibcode:1983Icar...54..189M. doi:10.1016/0019-1035(83)90192-6. ISSN 0019-1035.
|
||||
Tyler, G. Leonard; Marouf, Essam A.; Simpson, Richard A.; Zebker, Howard A.; Eshleman, Von R. (1 May 1983). "The microwave opacity of Saturn's rings at wavelengths of 3.6 and 13 cm from Voyager 1 radio occultation". Icarus. 54 (2): 160–188. Bibcode:1983Icar...54..160T. doi:10.1016/0019-1035(83)90191-4. ISSN 0019-1035.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/4
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record"
|
||||
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|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:18:17.300252+00:00"
|
||||
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||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
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|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:18:17.300252+00:00"
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
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|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
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|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:18:17.300252+00:00"
|
||||
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||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
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|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:18:17.300252+00:00"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:27:43.673796+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
33
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-1-0.md
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33
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-1-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-1"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-1"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:09.528652+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-1 is a magnitude 12 binary star system located about 1,250 light-years away in the Andromeda constellation. The binary system consists of a metal-rich F-type main-sequence star, named WASP-1A, and a distant low-mass star, named WASP-1B. WASP-1A has one known transiting hot Jupiter exoplanet named WASP-1b.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Stellar companion ==
|
||||
WASP-1A has a distant companion star, named WASP-1B. WASP-1B is a low-mass star that is around 0.3 times as massive as the Sun and has an effective temperature of about 3400 K. WASP-1B is located northward of WASP-1A at an angular separation of about 4.6 arcseconds, corresponding to a projected distance of 1587 AU. WASP-1B was first identified in observations from 2006 and confirmed in further observations from 2012 to 2014, which showed that it shares the proper motion of WASP-1A, indicating the two stars are gravitationally bound to each other.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2006, an extrasolar planet was discovered by the Wide Angle Search for Planets team using the transit method. The planet has a density of 0.31 to 0.40 g/cm3, making it about half as dense as Saturn, and one third as dense as water. The orbit of WASP-1b is inclined to the rotational axis of the star by 79.0+4.3−4.5 degrees, making it a nearly "polar" orbit.
|
||||
Two searches for additional planets using transit-timing variations have yielded negative results.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== See also ==
|
||||
SuperWASP
|
||||
List of extrasolar planets
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
"Planet WASP-1 b". Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia. Retrieved 2018-11-07.
|
||||
Image WASP 1
|
||||
25
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-10-0.md
Normal file
25
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-10-0.md
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@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-10"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-10"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:20.687844+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-10 is a star 461 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. It hosts a transiting planet discovered by the SuperWASP project.
|
||||
The star is likely older than the Sun, has a fraction of heavy elements close to the solar abundance, and is rotating rapidly, being spun up by the tides raised by the giant planet on a close orbit.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-10 hosts one confirmed exoplanet, WASP-10b. It is a hot Jupiter discovered in 2008.
|
||||
A candidate second planet with a 5-day period, WASP-10c, was inferred from transit-timing variations of WASP-10b in 2010, but this was refuted in 2013. Instead, there may be a super-Jupiter planet or brown dwarf on a wide (at least 5 AU) orbit, based on radial velocity observations.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
"WASP-10". Exoplanets. Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2009-05-06.
|
||||
22
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-11-0.md
Normal file
22
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-11-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-11"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-11"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
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|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:21.954576+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-11, also designated HAT-P-10, is a binary star system. The primary star is a main-sequence orange dwarf star. The secondary is an M dwarf with a projected separation of 42 AU. The system is located about 424 light-years away in the constellation Aries.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
A hot Jupiter with half Jupiter's mass, WASP-11b (or HAT-P-10b), was detected around the primary star independently by the Hungarian Automated Telescope Network and the Wide Angle Search for Planets teams, both of which used the transit method.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
"WASP-11/HAT-P-10". Exoplanets. Archived from the original on 2012-04-01. Retrieved 2009-05-06.
|
||||
25
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-12-0.md
Normal file
25
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-12-0.md
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@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-12"
|
||||
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|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-12"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:23.370322+00:00"
|
||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-12 is a magnitude 11 yellow dwarf star located approximately 1347 light-years away in the constellation Auriga. WASP-12 has a mass and radius similar to the Sun and is known for being orbited by a planet that is extremely hot and has a retrograde orbit around WASP-12. WASP-12 forms a triple star system with two red dwarf companions. Both of them have spectral types of M3V and are only 38% and 37% as massive as the Sun, respectively.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
|
||||
In 2008, the exoplanet WASP-12b was discovered orbiting WASP-12 by SuperWASP, using the transit method. It is a hot Jupiter completing an orbit around its star in just one day. Its high carbon-to-oxygen ratio indicates that rocky planets might have formed in the star system, and it may be a carbon planet. It is subject to intensive photo-evaporation, and may be completely destroyed within one billion years from now.
|
||||
In 2015, no indications of additional planets were found in the WASP-12 system.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
WASP-12b in transit (lightcurve)
|
||||
"WASP-12". Exoplanets. Archived from the original on 2009-11-25. Retrieved 2009-05-06.
|
||||
36
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-13-0.md
Normal file
36
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-13-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-13"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-13"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:24.560744+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-13, also named Gloas, is a star in the Lynx constellation. The star is similar, in terms of metallicity and mass, to the Sun, although it is hotter and most likely older. The star was first observed in 1997, according to the SIMBAD database, and was targeted by SuperWASP after the star was observed by one of the SuperWASP telescopes beginning in 2006. Follow-up observations on the star led to the discovery of planet Cruinlagh in 2008; the discovery paper was published in 2009.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Observational history ==
|
||||
|
||||
According to SIMBAD, WASP-13 was first observed in 1997, when it was catalogued by astronomers measuring the proper motion of stars in regions of the sky where galaxies are detected. Between November 27, 2006, and April 1, 2007, the SuperWASP-North telescope in the Canary Islands observed WASP-13; analysis of the data suggested that a planet could be in the orbit of the star.
|
||||
Follow-up observations were conducted by a team of British, Spanish, French, Swiss and American astronomers using the photometer on the James Gregory Telescope in Scotland; using visual comparisons to the nearby bright star HD 80408, the star's light curve was better defined. In combination with measurements of WASP-13's spectrum measured using the SOPHIE échelle spectrograph at the Haute-Provence Observatory in France, the star's radial velocity was also discovered. The Fibre-Fed Echelle Spectrograph on the Nordic Optical Telescope gathered additional measurements of WASP-13's spectrum, allowing astronomers to determine WASP-13's characteristics. Use of SOPHIE's data led to the discovery of the planet Cruinlagh in 2008; the planet was reported in 2009.
|
||||
Based on SIMBAD's archive, WASP-13 was included in ten more papers between its discovery and 2010.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Naming ==
|
||||
The star was designated WASP-13 as it hosts a planet discovered through the Wide Angle Search for Planets programme.
|
||||
In 2019 the IAU announced as part of NameExoWorlds that WASP-13 and its planet WASP-13b would be given official names chosen by school children from the UK. The chosen names were Gloas for WASP-13 and Cruinlagh for WASP-13b, the Manx words for 'to shine' and 'to orbit' respectively.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Characteristics ==
|
||||
WASP-13 is a sunlike, G-type star that is situated approximately 230 parsecs (750 light years) in the Lynx constellation. With an apparent magnitude of 10.42, the star cannot be seen with the unaided eye from the perspective of someone on Earth. The star's effective temperature, at 5,911 K, is slightly hotter than that of the Sun, and the radius of 1.58 R☉ is also larger, leading to a bolometric luminosity of 2.9 L☉. However, its metallicity is similar; this can be seen in how the logarithm of the concentration of iron, or [Fe/H], is approximately 0. WASP-13 has a mass of 1.2 M☉ and the logarithm of its surface gravity is measured at 4.04 cgs, while the rate at which it rotates is at most 4.9 km/s.
|
||||
The evolutionary status of WASP-13, as shown from its position in the Hertsprung-Russel diagram is near the main sequence turnoff, and it is considered very close to exhausting its core hydrogen and becoming a subgiant. Comparison with theoretical isochrones and stars with accurately-determined ages gives an age for WASP-13 of around 5.1 Gyr. Earlier estimates had given an older age, but with a very large uncertainty.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-13 has a planet that orbits its host star at a distance of 0.0558 AU, or approximately 5.58% of the mean distance between the Earth and Sun. The planet completes an orbit every 4.35301 days, or approximately 4 days and 8.5 hours. Cruinlagh's estimated mass is 0.53 times the mass of Jupiter, while its radius is about 1.53 times that of the planet.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
23
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-14-0.md
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|
||||
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|
||||
title: "WASP-14"
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
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|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:25.806594+00:00"
|
||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-14 or BD+22 2716 is a star 524 light-years away in the constellation Boötes. It hosts a transiting planet discovered by the SuperWASP project. There is a 0.33±0.04 M☉ companion star at a separation of 300±20 AU.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
WASP-14b is an exoplanet discovered in 2008. It is a massive hot Jupiter on a moderately eccentric orbit. At the time of discovery, it was one of the densest exoplanets known. Its radius best fits the model of Fortney.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
Image WASP-14
|
||||
"WASP-14". Exoplanets. Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2009-05-04.
|
||||
42
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-15-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-15"
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
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|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:27.056637+00:00"
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||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-15, also named Nyamien, is a magnitude 11 star located about 935 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus. The star, which is more massive, larger, hotter, and more luminous than the Sun, is also less metal-rich than the Sun. WASP-15 has one known planet in its orbit, WASP-15b; the planet is a hot Jupiter with an anomalously high radius, a phenomenon which may be explained by the presence of an internal heat source. The star was first observed by the SuperWASP program in 2006; future measurements in 2007 and 2008, as well as follow-up observations and analysis, eventually led to the discovery of WASP-15b using the transit method and Doppler spectroscopy.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Observational history ==
|
||||
WASP-15 was first observed from the South African Astronomical Observatory, which hosts the planet-searching SuperWASP program in the Southern Hemisphere (WASP-South), and was catalogued by its brightness and its coordinates in the sky. This information was captured first with one camera field between May 4, 2006 and July 17, 2006, and later again using two overlapping camera fields between January 31, 2007 to July 7, 2007 and from January 31, 2008 to May 29, 2008.
|
||||
Data processing led to the acquisition of 24,943 data points that suggested that some body transited, or crossed in front of (and briefly dimmed), WASP-15 every 3.7520 days. Approximately eleven transits, full and partial, were observed. Use of the EulerCAM photometer at the La Silla Observatory's 1.2 m Leonhard Euler Telescope on March 29, 2008 provided further evidence for an exoplanet by better defining the transit's curve. Later, the CORALIE spectrograph (also on the Euler telescope) between March 6, 2008 and July 17, 2008 used Doppler spectroscopy to collect 21 radial velocity measurements. Analysis confirmed the presence of a planet that was later designated WASP-15b.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Naming ==
|
||||
WASP-15, and its planet WASP-15b, were chosen as part of the 2019 NameExoWorlds campaign organised by the International Astronomical Union, which assigned each country a star and planet to be named. WASP-15 was assigned to Ivory Coast. The winning proposal named the star Nyamien refers to the supreme creator deity of Akan mythology, and the planet Asye refers to the Earth goddess of Akan mythology.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Characteristics ==
|
||||
WASP-15 is an F-type star with a mass that is 1.18 times larger than the Sun, and a radius that is 1.477 bigger. It is, thus, larger, more massive, and more diffuse than the Sun. The star has an effective temperature of 6300 K, making it also hotter than the Sun. With a metallicity of [Fe/H] = -0.17, WASP-15 has 0.676 times the amount of iron than the Sun, and has consistently lower levels of other metals, including sodium, magnesium, silicon, calcium, and scandium. In addition, WASP-15 is most likely younger than the Sun, as it has an estimated age of 3.9 billion years. WASP-15 is approximately 3.09 times more luminous than the Sun.
|
||||
WASP-15 is located at a distance of approximately 287 parsecs (940 light-years), and it has an estimated apparent magnitude of 10.9. It is, thus, not visible from Earth with the unaided eye.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
WASP-15 is host to the planet WASP-15b. The planet, which is a Hot Jupiter, orbits its host star at a distance of 0.0499 AU every 3.7520656 days. WASP-15b was noted by its discoverers because of its anomalously high radius, which is 1.428 times that of Jupiter, compared to its mass, which is 0.542 times the size of Jupiter. WASP-15b's large radius cannot be explained solely by its proximity to its star, suggesting that some form of tidal heating or other internal heating mechanism is also involved.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== See also ==
|
||||
SuperWASP
|
||||
List of extrasolar planets
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
"WASP-15". Exoplanets. Archived from the original on 2012-04-01. Retrieved 2009-05-04.
|
||||
WASP primary website
|
||||
24
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-16-0.md
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||||
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|
||||
title: "WASP-16"
|
||||
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||||
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||||
category: "reference"
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||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-16 is a magnitude 11 yellow dwarf main sequence star, with characteristics similar to the Sun, located 628 light-years away in the Virgo constellation.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2009, a planet of the star was announced by the SuperWASP project. It is another hot Jupiter type exoplanet.
|
||||
In 2024, a candidate mini-neptune was detected, also using the transit method. Further observations are needed to confirm its existence. The planet takes ten days to fully orbit WASP-16 and has an equilibrium temperature of 810 K (537 °C).
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
SuperWASP Homepage
|
||||
"WASP-16". Exoplanets. Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2009-08-28.
|
||||
25
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-17-0.md
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25
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-17"
|
||||
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||||
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||||
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||||
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||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-17, also named Dìwö, is an F-type main sequence star approximately 1,310 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. It hosts the planet WASP-17b.
|
||||
The star, although similar to the Sun in terms of overall contents of heavy elements, is depleted of carbon. The carbon to oxygen molar ratio of 0.18±0.04 for WASP-17 is well below the solar ratio of 0.55.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Nomenclature ==
|
||||
The planet was discovered by the SuperWASP project, hence the name WASP-17.
|
||||
This was one of the systems selected to be named in the 2019 NameExoWorlds campaign during the 100th anniversary of the IAU, which assigned each country a star and planet to be named. This system was assigned to Costa Rica. WASP-17 is named Dìwö, which in the Bribri language means the Sun, and its planet is named Ditsö̀.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
|
||||
As of 2009, an exoplanet has been confirmed to orbit the star. The planet, WASP-17b, is unusual in that it is believed to orbit in the opposite direction to the star's spin (a retrograde orbit), and is twice the size of Jupiter, but half its mass. The planet is also named Ditsö̀. It is subject to intensive photo-evaporation, and may be completely destroyed within one billion years from now.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
22
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-18-0.md
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22
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-18"
|
||||
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||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-18"
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||||
category: "reference"
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||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:30.783258+00:00"
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||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-18 is a magnitude 9 star located 400 light-years (120 parsecs) away in the Phoenix constellation of the Southern Hemisphere. It has a mass of 1.29 solar masses.
|
||||
The star, although similar to the Sun in terms of overall contents of heavy elements, is depleted in carbon. The carbon to oxygen molar ratio of 0.23±0.05 for WASP-18 is well below the solar ratio of 0.55.
|
||||
There is a red dwarf companion star at a separation of 3,519 AU.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2009, the SuperWASP project announced the discovery of a large, hot Jupiter type exoplanet, WASP-18b, orbiting very close to this star. It has an orbital period of less than a day and a mass 10 times that of Jupiter.
|
||||
Observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory failed to find any X-rays coming from WASP-18, and it is thought that this is caused by WASP-18b disrupting the star's magnetic field by causing a reduction in convection in the star's atmosphere. Tidal forces from the planet may also explain the higher amounts of lithium measured in earlier optical studies of WASP-18.
|
||||
A 2019 study proposed a second candidate planet with a 2-day orbital period based on transit-timing variations, but a 2020 study using data from both TESS and ground-based surveys ruled out the existence of a planet with the proposed properties, setting an upper limit of 10 Earth masses on any planet with this period.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
28
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-19-0.md
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28
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-19-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-19"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-19"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
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|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:32.003031+00:00"
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||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-19, formally named Wattle, is a magnitude 12.3 star about 869 light-years (266 parsecs) away, located in the Vela constellation of the Southern Hemisphere. This star has been found to host a transiting hot Jupiter-type planet in a tight orbit.
|
||||
WASP-19 is older than the Sun, has a fraction of heavy elements above the solar abundance, and is rotating rapidly, being spun up by the tides raised by the giant planet on a close orbit.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Nomenclature ==
|
||||
The designation WASP-19 indicates that this was the 19th star found to have a planet by the Wide Angle Search for Planets.
|
||||
In August 2022, this planetary system was included among 20 systems to be named by the third NameExoWorlds project. The approved names were proposed by a team from Brandon Park Primary School in Wheelers Hill (Melbourne, Australia), led by scientist Lance C. Kelly and teacher David Maierhofer and announced in June 2023. WASP-19 is named "Wattle" and its planet is named "Banksia", after the plant genera Wattle (specifically the golden wattle Acacia pycnantha) and Banksia (specifically the scarlet banksia Banksia coccinea) respectively.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In December 2009, the SuperWASP project announced that a hot Jupiter type exoplanet, WASP-19b, was orbiting very close to this star and with the shortest orbital period of any transiting exoplanet known at the time.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Further reading ==
|
||||
Mancini, L.; et al. (2013). "Physical properties, transmission and emission spectra of the WASP-19 planetary system from multi-colour photometry". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 436 (1): 2–18. arXiv:1306.6384. Bibcode:2013MNRAS.436....2M. doi:10.1093/mnras/stt1394. S2CID 55455709.
|
||||
36
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-2-0.md
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36
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-2-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-2"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-2"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:11.961220+00:00"
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||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-2 is a binary star system located about 496 light-years away in the Delphinus constellation.
|
||||
The primary is a magnitude 12 orange dwarf star, orbited by a red dwarf star on a wide orbit. The star system shows an infrared excess noise of unknown origin.
|
||||
The primary star hosts one known exoplanet, WASP-2b. Since the planet transits the star, the star is classified as a planetary transit variable and has received the variable star designation V357 Delphini.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Binary star ==
|
||||
In 2008 a study was undertaken of fourteen stars with exoplanets that were originally discovered using the transit method through relatively small telescopes. These systems were re-examined with the 2.2 m (87 in) reflector telescope at the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain. This star system, along with two others, was determined to be a previously unknown binary star system. The previously unknown secondary star is a dim magnitude 15 M-type star separated by about 111 AU from the primary, appearing offset from the primary by about one arc second in the images. This discovery resulted in a recalculation of parameters for both the planet and the primary star.
|
||||
A re-examination of the WASP-2 spectrum in 2015 resulted in the measurement of the stellar companion's temperature as 3513±28 K, and an angular separation of 0.73 arcseconds.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
The primary star has one exoplanet, WASP-2b, a hot Jupiter detected by the SuperWASP project in 2006 using the transit method.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== See also ==
|
||||
WASP-1
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Notes ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
"WASP-2". Exoplanets. Archived from the original on 2012-04-01. Retrieved 2009-05-04.
|
||||
27
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-20-0.md
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27
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-20-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-20"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-20"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:33.290639+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-20, also known as CD-24 102, is a binary star system in the equatorial constellation Cetus, located at a distance of about 940 light-years (290 parsecs) from the Sun. The primary star is an F-type main sequence star and hosts one confirmed exoplanet, WASP-20b.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Stellar properties ==
|
||||
WASP-20 is a star of spectral type F9, aged 3.6 billion years. Its mass is 10.09+0.05−0.02 solar masses for a radius of 1.14+0.08−0.01 solar radii, or a density of 0.73±0.17 grams per cubic centimeter.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
WASP-20b is a transiting hot Jupiter discovered in 2014. WASP-20b orbits WASP-20 in less than five Earth days very close to its star (0.06 AU) in a circular (near-zero eccentricity) orbit. The orbit is inclined by 85.56°±0.22° relative to the plane of the sky and is thus edge-on, as necessary for a transit to be observed.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== See also ==
|
||||
Wide Angle Search for Planets
|
||||
Lists of planets
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
25
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-21-0.md
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25
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-21"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-21"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:34.487246+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-21, also named Tangra, is a G-type star (spectral type G3V) that has reached the end of its main sequence lifetime. It lies approximately 834 light-years away, in the constellation of Pegasus. The star is relatively metal-poor, having 40% of heavy elements compared to the Sun. Kinematically, WASP-21 belongs to the thick disk of the Milky Way. It has an exoplanet named WASP-21b.
|
||||
A survey in 2012 failed to find any stellar companions to WASP-21.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Naming ==
|
||||
In 2019 the WASP-21 system was chosen as part of the NameExoWorlds campaign organised by the International Astronomical Union, which assigned each country a star and planet to be named. WASP-21 was assigned to Bulgaria. The winning proposal named the star Tangra after a deity worshipped by the early Bulgars, and the planet Bendida after a deity worshipped by the Thracians.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2010 WASP-21 was discovered to host a hot Jupiter type planet by the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP), confirmed by radial velocity by the WASP team in 2010.
|
||||
Transit-timing variation analysis in 2015 did not find any additional planets in the system.
|
||||
In 2020, spectroscopic analysis found that the WASP-21b atmosphere is mostly cloudless and contains sodium.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
18
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-23-0.md
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18
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-23-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-23"
|
||||
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||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-23"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
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||||
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||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-23 is a K1V-type main sequence star located 671 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Puppis. It has a mass of 0.84 solar masses and a radius of 0.88 solar radii. It is around 6.2 billion years old and has an effective temperature of 5046 Kelvin.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
There is only one known exoplanet orbiting this star named WASP-23b that was discovered by the transit method in the year 2010 by Triaud et al. It is a hot Jupiter with similar mass and radius to Jupiter.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
32
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-24-0.md
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32
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-24"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-24"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:38.103619+00:00"
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|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
WASP-24 is an F-type star with the hot Jupiter planet WASP-24b in orbit, about 1,075 light-years away in the constellation Virgo. WASP-24 is slightly larger and more massive than the Sun, it also has a similar metallicity and is hotter than the Sun. WASP-24 was first observed by the SuperWASP planet-searching organization, which flagged it as a potential host to a planet before following up with radial velocity and spectral measurements. Analysis of these confirmed the planetary nature of WASP-24b, which was later released to the public on the SuperWASP website.
|
||||
An eclipsing binary pair of companion stars were identified by a 2019 study using Gaia DR2 data. They are separated by 21.8 arcseconds from the primary star, corresponding to a distance of 7097 AU.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Observational history ==
|
||||
Between March 2008 and April 2009, the northern and southern portions of the SuperWASP Consortium observed the night sky in WASP-24's vicinity. The star, in particular, was flagged as a host to a planetary candidate. After accumulating over 9,750 datapoints for a light curve on WASP-24, all information on the star that had been previously catalogued was collected alongside the new data, and the star was set aside for manual follow-up observations.
|
||||
The 2.56m Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) at the Canary Islands' Roque de los Muchachos Observatory was used to collected radial velocity measurements. The Fibre-Fed Echelle Spectrograph, or FIES, was the instrument that collected these observations between December 2008 and April 2009; also used was the CORALIE spectrograph on the Leonhard Euler Telescope at Chile's La Silla Observatory, which collected additional radial velocity and spectral measurements. Analysis of WASP-24's spectrum ruled out the possibility that WASP-24 is a rapidly rotating star, which could make confirmation of a planet difficult, or that it is a spectroscopic binary star system. Use of a span bisector analysis revealed that the star is not very active. WASP-24 was then observed using Hawaii's Faulkes Telescope North and Australia's Faulkes Telescope South, searching for a period at which the discovered planet WASP-24b might transit, or cross in front of, its star, over various days in 2009 and 2010.
|
||||
Using information collected by NOT, WASP-24's temperature, metallicity, and other characteristics were derived. Detected levels of lithium and the star's surface gravity suggests that the star does not follow the main sequence. These stellar characteristics were later used to derive its planet's characteristics.
|
||||
WASP-24 and, specifically, the discovery of orbiting hot Jupiter WASP-24b were first reported on SuperWASP's website in April 2010, followed by its formal publication in September 2010.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Characteristics ==
|
||||
WASP-24 is an F-type star that lies 330 parsecs, or 1,075 light years, away. With an apparent magnitude of 11.3, the star is invisible to the naked eye from the Earth's perspective. WASP-24 is 1.129 solar masses and 1.147 solar radii, making it just slightly larger and more massive than the Sun. It is also hotter, with an effective temperature of 6100 K. The star has a metallicity similar to that of the sun, which means that it has the same amount of metals (elements heavier than He) as found in the Sun. The best fit for WASP-24's age is 3.8 billion years, although this is not well-constrained, and its actual age may lie anywhere between 2.6 and 5.1 billion years.
|
||||
The star's surface gravity, logg = 4.15, and its low levels of lithium helped derive the star's age, and revealed that it most likely evolved away from the zero age main sequence.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-24b is a hot Jupiter that is 1.091 Jupiter masses and 1.383 Jupiter radii. Thus, the planet is larger and slightly more massive than Jupiter is. WASP-24b orbits at a distance of 0.03619 AU, roughly 3.5% of the mean distance between the Earth and Sun. It is the only planet yet discovered to orbit WASP-24.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
23
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-25-0.md
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data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-25-0.md
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||||
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|
||||
title: "WASP-25"
|
||||
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|
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source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-25"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
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tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:39.384656+00:00"
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||||
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||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-25 is a G-type main-sequence star about 701 light-years away in the constellation of Hydra.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Star characteristics ==
|
||||
WASP-25 is slightly metal-poor (85% of Solar amount) and is probably a young star which has just entered the main sequence.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
The hot Jupiter class planet WASP-25b was discovered around WASP-25 in 2010. The planet would have an equilibrium temperature of 1212±35 K.
|
||||
A Rossiter-McLaughlin effect based study in 2011 found a modest misalignment of the planetary orbit to the rotational axis of the parent star, equal to 14.6±6.7 degrees. A habitability study in 2018 found WASP-25b does not adversely affect the stability of planetary orbits in the habitable zone of WASP-25.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
22
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-26-0.md
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||||
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|
||||
title: "WASP-26"
|
||||
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|
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source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-26"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
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||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:40.629976+00:00"
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||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-26 is a G-type subgiant star about 824 light-years away in the constellation of Cetus.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Star characteristics ==
|
||||
WASP-26 is an old star close to leaving the main sequence and is part of a wide binary. The binary's projected separation is 3800 astronomical units, its companion star being a K-type star with an effective temperature of 4600K and a visual magnitude of 13.6. WASP-26 produces a large amount of ultraviolet light due to frequent flares, with an average ultraviolet flux close to the F7 class main-sequence star WASP-1.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
The hot Jupiter class planet WASP-26b was discovered around WASP-26 in 2010. The planet would have an equilibrium temperature of 1660±40 K, but measured temperatures are slightly higher at 1775K and no noticeable difference exists between the day-side and the night-side of the planet. A 2011 study using the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect failed to determine the inclination of the planetary orbit to the equatorial plane of the parent star due to high stellar noise, but an initial constraint of -34+36−26° was published in 2012.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
18
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-28-0.md
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data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-28-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-28"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-28"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:43.000173+00:00"
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||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-28 is a F8V-type main sequence star located 1116 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Pisces. It has a mass of 0.9 solar masses and a radius of 1.08 solar radii. It is an aged and cool star being around 5 billion years old and having a temperature at around 6100 Kelvin.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
The only known exoplanet orbiting around this star is WASP-28b, a highly irradiated and inflated hot Jupiter. It has a mass of 0.9 Jupiters and a radius of 1.3 Jupiters. It orbits at a distance of 0.044 AU taking about 3.4 days to complete an orbit around its star. The orbit has an eccentricity of 0.975 and an inclination of 88.61°.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
19
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-29-0.md
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data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-29-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-29"
|
||||
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||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-29"
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||||
category: "reference"
|
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|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:44.247202+00:00"
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||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-29 is a binary star system 285 light-years (87 parsecs) away in the constellation of Phoenix. The primary star is a K-type main-sequence star. Its comoving companion, a red dwarf star, was discovered in 2021. The star system kinematically belongs to the thin disk of the Milky Way. The primary is an old star with small starspot activity and low x-ray flux.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
The "hot Saturn" class planet WASP-29b was discovered around WASP-29 in 2010. The planet would have an equilibrium temperature of 960±30 K. The planetary atmosphere has abundant carbon monoxide but likely lacks methane and sodium, although the high and dense cloud deck of WASP-29b prevents high-quality spectroscopic measurements.
|
||||
A study in 2018 revealed the stability of planetary orbits in the habitable zone of WASP-29 is significantly affected by the WASP-29b planet.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
32
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-3-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-3"
|
||||
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||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-3"
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||||
category: "reference"
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|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:13.286284+00:00"
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||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-3 is a triple star system located about 753 light-years (231 parsecs) away from the Sun in the constellation Lyra. The system has an apparent magnitude of 10. The brightest and most massive star of this system is WASP-3A, an F-type main sequence star which has one known transiting hot Jupiter exoplanet, WASP-3b. Since the planet transits the star, the star is classified as a planetary transit variable and has received the variable star designation V838 Lyrae.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Triple system ==
|
||||
WASP-3 has been identified as a triple star system in a 2019 study of astrometry from the Gaia mission. The brightest and most massive component of the system is WASP-3A, an F-type main sequence star that is 1.24 times as massive as the Sun and 1.31 times as large as the Sun in radius. WASP-3A appears to be a variable star; observations between 2007 and 2010 show that the star's chromospheric activity had increased during that time period. The second companion, WASP-3B, is a low-mass star about 0.11 times as massive as the Sun and has an effective temperature of about 2900 K. WASP-3B is separated eastward from WASP-3A at an angular separation of approximately 1.19 arcseconds, corresponding to a projected separation distance of about 300 AU. WASP-3B was first identified in observations from 2012 to 2013. The third companion, WASP-3C, is much more distant with an angular separation of approximately 18.3 arcseconds from WASP-3A, corresponding to a projected separation distance of 4230 AU. WASP-3C is about 0.77 times as massive as the Sun and has an effective temperature of about 4700 K.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
WASP-3A has one known transiting hot Jupiter extrasolar planet, WASP-3b, which was detected by the SuperWASP project in 2007. It was confirmed in 2008 by observations from the William Herschel Telescope.
|
||||
In 2010, researchers proposed a second planet orbiting WASP-3A due to transit timing variations in WASP-3b. But in 2012 this proposal was refuted.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== See also ==
|
||||
SuperWASP
|
||||
WASP-4
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
"WASP-3". Exoplanets. Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2009-05-04.
|
||||
28
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-32-0.md
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data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-32-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-32"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-32"
|
||||
category: "reference"
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||||
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|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:45.484598+00:00"
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||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-32, also named Parumleo, is an F-type main-sequence star about 913 light-years away in the constellation of Pisces.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Nomenclature ==
|
||||
The designation WASP-32 comes from the Wide Angle Search for Planets.
|
||||
This was one of the systems selected to be named in the 2019 NameExoWorlds campaign during the 100th anniversary of the IAU, which assigned each country a star and planet to be named. This system was assigned to Singapore. The star was given the formal name Parumleo in January 2020, Latin for small lion and referencing the national animal of Singapore, and the planet was named Viculus, Latin for little village.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Stellar characteristics ==
|
||||
The WASP-32 star is relatively depleted of lithium, which is common for massive stars hosting hot Jupiter planets.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
The hot Jupiter class planet WASP-32b, later named Viculus, was discovered around WASP-32 in 2010. It was found to orbit the parent star in a prograde direction in 2014.
|
||||
A follow-up study utilizing transit-timing variation analysis failed to find any such variation, so there is no evidence of other massive planets around WASP-32 as of 2015.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
27
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-34-0.md
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27
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-34-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-34"
|
||||
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|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-34"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:47.913141+00:00"
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||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-34, also named Amansinaya, is a sunlike star of spectral type G5V that has 1.01 times the mass and 0.93 times the diameter of the Sun. It rotates on its axis every 34±15 days, indicating it is around 6.7 billion years old. It hosts at least one exoplanet.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Naming ==
|
||||
In 2019 the IAU announced as part of NameExoWorlds that WASP-34 and its planet WASP-34b would be given official names chosen by school children from the Philippines. The star is named Amansinaya, after Aman Sinaya, which is one of the two trinity deities of the Philippine's Tagalog mythology, and is the primordial deity of the ocean and protector of fisherman. The planet WASP-34b is named Haik. Haik is the successor of the primordial Aman Sinaya as the god of the sea of the Philippines' Tagalog mythology.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
WASP-34 has a transiting planet discovered in 2011 by the Wide Angle Search for Planets. This is a hot Jupiter, with just over half the mass of Jupiter and taking just 4.3 days to complete an orbit. The planetary color was found to be redder than other hot Jupiters, hinting at peculiar chemistry. The planet has a large measured temperature difference between the dayside (1185±47 K) and nightside (726±119 K).
|
||||
There is a long-period radial velocity trend, showing evidence for a massive object orbiting further out. A 2014 study suggests an object at least 15 times the mass of Jupiter at a distance of 5 AU.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
WASP primary website
|
||||
19
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-35-0.md
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19
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-35-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-35"
|
||||
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||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-35"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
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|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:49.158143+00:00"
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||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-35 is a G-type main-sequence star about 660 light-years away. The star's age cannot be well constrained, but it is probably older than the Sun. WASP-35 is similar in concentration of heavy elements compared to the Sun.
|
||||
The star has no detectable starspot activity. An imaging survey in 2015 found no detectable stellar companions, although a spectroscopic survey in 2016 yielded a suspected red dwarf companion with a temperature of 3800±1100 K.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2011 a transiting hot Jupiter planet, WASP-35b, was detected. The planet's equilibrium temperature is 1450±20 K.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
28
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-36-0.md
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28
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-36-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-36"
|
||||
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|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-36"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
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|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:50.386505+00:00"
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||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-36 is a G-type main-sequence star about 1,230 light-years away in the Hydra constellation.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Star characteristics ==
|
||||
WASP-36 is a yellow main sequence star of spectral class G2, similar to the Sun. It has a candidate stellar companion with apparent magnitude 14.03, seemingly confirmed in 2019 using Gaia DR2 data.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2010, the SuperWASP survey found the hot Jupiter class planet WASP-36b using the transit method. Its temperature was measured to be 1705±44 K. The planetary transmission spectrum taken in 2016 has turned out to be anomalous: the planet appears to be surrounded by a blue-tinted halo that is too wide to be an atmosphere and may represent a measurement error.
|
||||
The planetary dayside temperature measured in 2020 is 1440+150−160 K.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Further reading ==
|
||||
Zhou, G.; Bayliss, D. D. R.; Kedziora-Chudczer, L.; Tinney, C. G.; Bailey, J.; Salter, G.; Rodriguez, J. (2015). "Secondary eclipse observations for seven hot-Jupiters from the Anglo-Australian Telescope". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 454 (3): 3002–3019. arXiv:1509.04147. Bibcode:2015MNRAS.454.3002Z. doi:10.1093/mnras/stv2138. S2CID 84835437.
|
||||
Maciejewski, G.; Dimitrov, D.; Mancini, L.; Southworth, J.; Ciceri, S.; D'Ago, G.; Bruni, I.; Raetz, St.; Nowak, G.; Ohlert, J.; Puchalski, D.; Saral, G.; Derman, E.; Petrucci, R.; Jofre, E.; Seeliger, M.; Henning, T. (2016). "New transit observations for HAT-P-30 b, HAT-P-37 b, TrES-5 b, WASP-28 b, WASP-36 b, and WASP-39 B". Acta Astronomica. 66 (1): 55. arXiv:1603.03268. Bibcode:2016AcA....66...55M.
|
||||
22
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-37-0.md
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22
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-37-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-37"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-37"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
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|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:51.690805+00:00"
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||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-37 is a G-type main-sequence star about 1,240 light-years away in the constellation of Virgo.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Star characteristics ==
|
||||
WASP-37 has a low metallicity of just 40% of solar, and is likely older than the Sun. WASP-37 does not have noticeable flare activity.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
The hot Jupiter class planet WASP-37b was discovered around WASP-37 in 2010. A study in 2018 found that the stability of orbits in the habitable zone of WASP-37 is not significantly affected by WASP-37b.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
25
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-39-0.md
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25
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-39-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-39"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-39"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:54.237368+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-39, also named Malmok, is a G-type main-sequence star about 702 light-years (215 parsecs) away in the constellation Virgo. With an apparent magnitude of 12.1, it is much too faint to be visible to the naked eye. The star is slightly smaller and cooler than the Sun. It hosts one known exoplanet, WASP-39b.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Nomenclature ==
|
||||
The designation WASP-39 comes from the Wide Angle Search for Planets. Since the planet transits the star, the star is classified as a planetary transit variable and has received the variable star designation V732 Virginis.
|
||||
This was one of the systems selected to be named in the 2019 NameExoWorlds campaign during the 100th anniversary of the IAU, which assigned each country a star and planet to be named. This system was assigned to Aruba. The approved names were Malmok for the star and Bocaprins for the planet, named after Malmok and Boca Prins, both beaches in Aruba.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
|
||||
The planet WASP-39b, later named Bocaprins, is a low-density hot Jupiter, about the mass of Saturn but larger, discovered in 2011 by the Wide Angle Search for Planets using the transit method. Its orbit is aligned with the star's equator. It has been a target for observation by the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope, which have identified water vapor, carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide in its atmosphere.
|
||||
There is evidence of a possible circumstellar disk around WASP-39, farther than 2 AU from the star.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
28
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-4-0.md
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28
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-4-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-4"
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
WASP-4 is a G-type main-sequence star approximately 891 light-years away in the constellation of Phoenix. Despite its advanced age, the star is rotating rapidly, being spun up by the tides raised by a giant planet on a close orbit.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2007 the exoplanet WASP-4b was discovered orbiting this star. With an orbital period of just 1.3 days, it is classified as a hot Jupiter. The planet's orbital period appears to be decreasing at a rate of 7.33±0.71 milliseconds per year, suggesting that its orbit is decaying, with a decay timescale of 15.77±1.57 million years. Another superjovian planet in the system has been suspected. A 2025 study further supported orbital decay for WASP-4b, but another same-year study discounted this, attributing all evidence for orbital decay to the light travel time effect of an outer planet. Although the previous candidate has not been addressed, this planet has nearly the same orbital elements and thus both should be the same object.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== See also ==
|
||||
Wide Angle Search for Planets
|
||||
Lists of planets
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
"SuperWASP Homepage". Archived from the original on 2002-12-08. Retrieved 2008-07-02.
|
||||
"UK planet hunters announce three new finds" (PDF). 2007-10-30. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-05-16. Retrieved 2008-07-02.
|
||||
20
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||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
WASP-41 is a G-type main-sequence star about 533 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus. Its surface temperature is 5450±150 K. WASP-41 is similar to the Sun in its concentration of heavy elements, with a metallicity Fe/H index of −0.080±0.090, but is much younger at an age of 2.289±0.077 billion years. The star exhibits strong starspot activity, with spots covering 3% of the stellar surface.
|
||||
Multiplicity surveys did not detect any stellar companions as of 2017.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2011, one planet, named WASP-41b, was discovered on a tight, circular orbit. The transmission spectrum taken in 2017 was gray and featureless. No atmospheric constituents could be distinguished. The planetary orbit of WASP-41b is slightly misaligned with the equatorial plane of the star, at a misalignment angle of 9.15+2.85−2.62°. The planetary equilibrium temperature is 1242±12 K.
|
||||
Another planet, WASP-41c, was discovered in 2015. The planets are too far apart to significantly affect each other's orbits. The planetary equilibrium temperature of WASP-41c is 247±5 K.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
19
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-42-0.md
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||||
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|
||||
title: "WASP-42"
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
WASP-42 is a K-type main-sequence star about 580 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus. Its surface temperature is 5315±79 K. WASP-42 is similar to the Sun in concentration of heavy elements, with metallicity ([Fe/H]) of 0.05±0.13, and is much older than the Sun at 11.3+1.5−4.8 billion years. The star does exhibit starspot activity as is typical for its spectral class.
|
||||
Multiplicity surveys did not detect any stellar companions to WASP-42 in 2017.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2012, one planet, named WASP-42b, was discovered on a tight, mildly eccentric orbit. The planetary equilibrium temperature is 1,021±19 K.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
34
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||||
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|
||||
title: "WASP-43"
|
||||
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|
||||
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||||
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||||
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||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
WASP-43, also named Gnomon, is a K-type star about 284 light-years (87 parsecs) away in the Sextans constellation. It is about half the size of the Sun, and has approximately half the mass. WASP-43 has one known planet in orbit, a hot Jupiter called WASP-43b. At the time of publishing of WASP-43b's discovery on April 15, 2011, the planet was the most closely orbiting hot Jupiter discovered. The small orbit of WASP-43b is thought to be caused by WASP-43's unusually low mass. WASP-43 was first observed between January and May 2009 by the SuperWASP project, and was found to be cooler and slightly richer in metals than the Sun. WASP-43 has also been found to be an active star that rotates at a high velocity.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Nomenclature ==
|
||||
The designation WASP-43 indicates that this was the 43rd star found to have a planet by the Wide Angle Search for Planets.
|
||||
In August 2022, this planetary system was included among 20 systems to be named by the third NameExoWorlds project. The approved names, proposed by a team from Romania, were announced in June 2023. WASP-43 is named Gnomon and its planet is named Astrolábos, after the gnomon and the Greek word for the astrolabe.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Observational history ==
|
||||
WASP-43 was first observed by the WASP-South part of the planet-searching SuperWASP project between January and May 2009. It was determined from the collected data that WASP-43 could potentially host a planet that transited, or crossed in front of, its host star as seen from Earth. Later observations by both the WASP-South and SuperWASP-North sections of SuperWASP between January and May 2010 yielded a total of 13,768 data points.
|
||||
Scientists interpreted that a 0.81-day orbit of a possible planet from the data, and followed up with observations using the CORALIE spectrograph on the Leonhard Euler Telescope at Chile's La Silla Observatory. CORALIE provided radial velocity measurements that indicated that WASP-43 was being transited by a planet that was 1.8 times Jupiter's mass, now dubbed WASP-43b. Another follow-up using the TRAPPIST telescope further defined the light curve of the body transiting WASP-43.
|
||||
WASP-43b's discovery was reported on April 15, 2011 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Characteristics ==
|
||||
WASP-43 is a K-type star with a mass that is 0.72 times that of the Sun, and a radius that is 0.67 times that of the Sun. With an effective temperature of 4400 K, WASP-43 is cooler than the Sun. It also has slightly lower quantities of iron than the Sun, with a measured metallicity of [Fe/H] = -0.05 (89% of that measured in the Sun). However, in general, the star has a slightly larger quantity of metals than the Sun. A notable exception is lithium, which is not present in WASP-43's spectrum. However, the star's spectrum also indicates that WASP-43 is an active star. WASP-43 has been found to rotate quickly, although the exact mechanism that causes such speed in this rotation is uncertain, it may be possible that this is caused by tidal interactions between WASP-43 and its planet.
|
||||
With an apparent magnitude of 12.5, WASP-43 cannot be seen with the unaided eye. The star is located approximately 87 parsecs (280 light-years) away from Earth.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
WASP-43b is a hot Jupiter with a mass that is 1.78 times the mass of Jupiter and a radius that is 0.93 times Jupiter's radius. WASP-43b orbits its host star every 0.813475 days (19.5234 hours) at a distance of 0.015 AU, the closest orbit yet found at the time of WASP-43b's discovery. WASP-43's unusually low mass accounts for WASP-43b's small orbit. Because planets with orbits around stars like WASP-43 are not usually observed, models either suggest that planets like WASP-43b are either uncommon or have short lifetimes caused by a decay in their orbits. WASP-43b has a density of 2.20 g/cm3.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
31
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|
||||
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|
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|
||||
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||||
WASP-44 is a G-type star about 1,180 light-years (360 parsecs) away in the constellation Cetus that is orbited by the Jupiter-size planet WASP-44b. The star is slightly less massive and slightly smaller than the Sun; it is also slightly cooler, but is more metal-rich. The star was observed by SuperWASP, an organization searching for exoplanets, starting in 2009; manual follow-up observations using WASP-44's spectrum and measurements of its radial velocity led to the discovery of the transiting planet WASP-44b. The planet and its star were presented along with WASP-45b and WASP-46b on May 17, 2011 by a team of scientists testing the idea that hot Jupiters tend to have circular orbits, an assumption that is made when the orbital eccentricity of such planets are not well-constrained.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Observational history ==
|
||||
WASP-44 was observed between July and November 2009 by WASP-South, a station of the SuperWASP planet-searching program based at the South African Astronomical Observatory. Observations of the star revealed a periodic decrease in its brightness. WASP-South, along with the SuperWASP-North station at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the Canary Islands, collected 15,755 photometric observations, allowing scientists to produce a more accurate light curve. Another set of observations yielded a 6,000 point photometric data set, but the light curve was prepared late and was not considered in the discovery paper.
|
||||
|
||||
In 2010, a European science team investigated the star using the CORALIE spectrograph and collected seventeen spectra of WASP-44. From the spectra, radial velocity measurements were extrapolated. Analysis of collected CORALIE data ruled out the possibility that the detected radial velocity was caused by the blended spectrum of a spectroscopic binary star, supporting the possibility that the body orbiting WASP-44 was indeed a planet, designated WASP-44b.
|
||||
The Leonhard Euler Telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile was used to follow up on the planet circling WASP-44, searching for a point at which the planet transited, or crossed in front of, its host star. One transit was detected.
|
||||
WASP-44, its recently discovered planet, the planets orbiting WASP-45 and WASP-46, and a discussion exploring the validity of the common assumption amongst scientists that closely orbiting hot Jupiter planets have highly circular orbits unless proven otherwise, were reported in a single discovery paper that was published on May 17, 2011 by the Royal Astronomical Society. The paper was submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on May 16, 2011.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Characteristics ==
|
||||
WASP-44 is a G-type star (the same class of star as the Sun) that is located in the Cetus constellation. WASP-44 has a mass that is 0.951 times that of the Sun. In terms of size, WASP-44 has a radius that is 0.927 times that of the Sun. WASP-44 has an effective temperature of 5410 K (cooler than the Sun). However, the star is metal-rich with relation to the Sun. Its measured metallicity is [Fe/H] = 0.06, or 1.148 times that the amount of iron found in the Sun. WASP-44's chromosphere (outermost layer) is not active. The star also does not rotate at a high velocity.
|
||||
The star has an apparent magnitude of 12.9. It cannot be seen from Earth with the naked eye.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
There is one known planet in the orbit of WASP-44: WASP-44b. The planet is a hot Jupiter with a mass of 0.889 times that of Jupiter. Its radius is 1.14 times that of Jupiter. WASP-44b orbits its host star every 2.4238039 days at a distance of 0.03473 AU, approximately 3.47% the mean distance between the Earth and Sun. With an orbital inclination of 86.02º, WASP-44b has an orbit that exists almost edge-on to its host star with respect to Earth. WASP-44b's orbital eccentricity is fit to 0.036, indicating a mostly circular orbit. An analysis of transit timing variations to search for additional planets was negative.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
20
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-45-0.md
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||||
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||||
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|
||||
|
||||
WASP-45 is a K-type main-sequence star about 701 light-years (215 parsecs) away. The star's age cannot be well constrained, but it is probably older than the Sun. Yet WASP-45 is enriched in heavy elements compared to the Sun, having 240% of the solar abundance.
|
||||
WASP-45 has low ultraviolet emission, therefore it is suspected to have a low starspot activity, although chromospheric activity was reported elsewhere.
|
||||
There is a companion star at a separation of 4.4 arcseconds, corresponding to 929 AU. The companion is estimated to have a mass of 0.157 M☉ and a temperature of 3,154 K. Although it shares a similar distance and common proper motion with the primary star, its relative space velocity appears to be high enough that the pair are not gravitationally bound.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2011 a transiting hot Jupiter planet, WASP-45b, was detected. The planet equilibrium temperature is 1,170±24 K. No Rayleigh scattering was detected in the planetary atmosphere, implying the existence of hazes or a high cloud deck.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
20
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-46-0.md
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||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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||||
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||||
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||||
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||||
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|
||||
|
||||
WASP-46 is a G-type main-sequence star about 1,210 light-years (370 parsecs) away. The star is older than the Sun and is strongly depleted in heavy elements compared to the Sun, having just 45% of the solar abundance. Despite its advanced age, the star is rotating rapidly, being spun up by the tides raised by a giant planet in a close orbit.
|
||||
The star displays excess ultraviolet emission associated with starspot activity, and is suspected to be surrounded by a dust and debris disk.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2011 a transiting hot superjovian planet, WASP-46b, was detected. The planet's equilibrium temperature is 1,636±44 K. The dayside temperature measured in 2014 is much higher at 2,386 K, indicating a very poor heat redistribution across the planet. A re-measurement of the dayside planetary temperature in 2020 resulted in a lower value of 1,870+130−120 K.
|
||||
In 2017, a search for transit-timing variations of WASP-46b yielded zero results, thus ruling out existence of additional gas giants in the system. The orbital decay of WASP-46b was also not detected.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
39
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-47-0.md
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||||
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|
||||
title: "WASP-47"
|
||||
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||||
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||||
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||||
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||||
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|
||||
|
||||
WASP-47 is a star similar in size and brightness to the Sun about 881 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius. It lies within the Kepler K2 campaign field 3. It was first noticed to have a hot Jupiter exoplanet orbiting every 4 days in 2012 by the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) team. While it was thought to be a typical hot Jupiter system, three more planets were found in 2015: an outer gas giant within the habitable zone, a hot Neptune exterior to the hot Jupiter's orbit and a super-Earth interior to the hot Jupiter's orbit. WASP-47 is the only planetary system known to have both planets near the hot Jupiter and another planet much further out.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Nomenclature and history ==
|
||||
Prior to the discovery of its planets, WASP-47 was given the 2MASS designation of 2MASS J22044873-1201079. It was also observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and given the designation WISE J220448.74-120108.4. When observed by NASA's K2 mission, it was given the Ecliptic Plane Input Catalog designation of EPIC 206103150, and later named K2-23 after the discovery of planets d and e.
|
||||
In 2012, a team from the SuperWASP group, led by Coel Hellier, announced the discovery of a Hot Jupiter exoplanet, with the designation WASP-47b, orbiting every 4.17 days. Three years later in 2015, Neveu-Van Malle et al. found a second planet, WASP-47c, orbiting within the habitable zone of the system using the HARPS spectrograph at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. Using data from NASA's K2 mission a Planet Hunters volunteer discovered multiple planets around WASP-47 and after analysing the data the researchers (Becker et al. 2015) published the two additional transiting planets, the Hot Neptune WASP-47d and the Mega-Earth WASP-47e, orbiting near WASP-47b.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Stellar characteristics ==
|
||||
WASP-47 is a G-type main-sequence star of spectral type G9V, making it quite similar to the Sun. It is 1.11 M☉ and 1.16 R☉, with a temperature of 5,576 K and an age of about 6.5 billion years. In comparison, the Sun has a slightly higher temperature of 5,772 K but is significantly younger, at 4.5 billion years old.
|
||||
The star is very metal-rich, with a metallicity ([Fe/H]) of about +0.36, or about twice the amount of iron and other elements heavier than Hydrogen and Helium than the Sun. This would explain how two massive gas giants, as well as a Mega-Earth, were able to form around the same star. WASP-47 is estimated to have a luminosity of 1.16 L☉.
|
||||
The star's apparent magnitude, or how bright it appears from Earth's perspective, is around 12. Therefore, it is far too faint to be seen with the unaided eye.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-47 has a diverse and complex system of four planets. Three of them – e, b, and d – transit the host star, while WASP-47c was found with the radial velocity method. The first three have widely varying sizes, between 1.8 and 13 times the radius of Earth. They are also much more massive than Earth, with the least massive WASP-47e at 9.0 M🜨. Both gas giants are significantly more massive than Jupiter, at 1.2 and 1.57 MJ, respectively. In comparison, Jupiter is about 318 M🜨. However, because of observation effects from Earth's turbulent atmosphere, the mass values for all four planets have relatively high uncertainties, with WASP-47c having the greatest uncertainty. Despite that, the compositions for the planets are well-constrained. WASP-47e has almost no volatile materials (including water vapour, hydrogen and helium), d has a thin gaseous envelope, and b and c are both gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn.
|
||||
The presence of two rather small planets, as well as the orbital configuration of the first three planets, is not expected for hot Jupiter-systems, as a migrating gas giant is thought to kick out any small inner planets. In order for the system to come out the way it is now, the two gas giants likely would have to have formed before the lower-mass planets e and d. This is called two-stage planetary formation, and is hypothesized to have happened in the Solar System as well. It is hypothesized that WASP-47b would have moved inwards and brought planet-forming material close to the star. Once most of the gas dissipates, the two gas-poor planets form nearby the large hot Jupiter.
|
||||
Based on the analysis of phase curves, it was found that the planet b might have a very dark surface (its albedo is tentatively measured at 0.016) and the planet e probably also has a low albedo as well. While the planet c lies within the habitable zone, it is unlikely that it is itself habitable although its large exomoons (if exist) might be.
|
||||
Planets e, b, and d have very similar orbits, with orbital periods of 0.8, 4.2, and 9.1 days, respectively. All of them are very hot (with temperatures above 1000 K) and have very low orbital eccentricities, even lower than those of Earth. In stark contrast to the inner planets, c has an eccentric orbit (e = 0.36) lasting over 580 days within the habitable zone of its host star. The high eccentricity cannot be explained by the inward migration of WASP-47b, and there is not any secondary star to cause it. The only likely remaining explanation is that another massive planet altered the orbit of WASP-47c that is either further out in the system or was ejected billions of years ago.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== See also ==
|
||||
Planetary migration
|
||||
Nice model
|
||||
55 Cancri e, another large rocky planet very similar to WASP-47e.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
19
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-48-0.md
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||||
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||||
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|
||||
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||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-48 is a G-type main-sequence star about 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. The star is likely older than the Sun and slightly depleted in heavy elements. It shows an infrared excess noise of unknown origin, yet has no detectable ultraviolet emissions associated with starspot activity. The discrepancy may be due to large interstellar absorption of light in interstellar medium for WASP-48. The measurements are compounded by the emission from eclipsing contact binary NSVS-3071474 projected on sky plane nearby, although no true stellar companions were detected by survey in 2015.
|
||||
The star is rotating rapidly, being spun up by the tides raised by the giant planet on close orbit.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2011 a transiting hot Jupiter planet, WASP-48b, was detected.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
23
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-49-0.md
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||||
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|
||||
title: "WASP-49"
|
||||
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||||
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|
||||
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||||
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|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-49 is a binary star system about 636 light-years (195 parsecs) away in the constellation Lepus. The two stars are separated by 443 AU. The primary is a G-type main-sequence star, with a surface temperature of 5,600 K (5,330 °C; 9,620 °F). WASP-49 is depleted of heavy elements relative to the Sun. It has a metallicity Fe/H index of –0.23, meaning it has 59% the iron level of the Sun.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2012, one exoplanet, designated WASP-49b, was discovered around the primary star by a team led by Monika Lendl. This is a hot Jupiter with an equilibrium temperature of 1369±39 K.
|
||||
In 2017, WASP-49b was found to have an extensive sodium envelope. A study in 2019 using data from the Hubble Space Telescope in near-UV found clear absorption features caused by metals, including magnesium and iron. The gaseous magnesium and iron is not gravitationally bound to the planet, but could be magnetically confined to it. The sodium layer around WASP-49b could be due to a tidally-heated Io-like exomoon. In October 2024, a 5-year study was published indicating that the sodium envelope most likely comes from a distinct body orbiting WASP-49b rather than the star or the planet, although the exact dynamics of the envelope remains to be settled.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Further reading ==
|
||||
Unni, Athira; Oza, Apurva V.; et al. (June 2025). "Doppler shifted transient sodium detection by KECK/HIRES". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. 540 (1): L48–L53. arXiv:2504.03974. Bibcode:2025MNRAS.540L..48U. doi:10.1093/mnrasl/slaf031.
|
||||
31
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-5-0.md
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31
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-5"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-5"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:15.740071+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-5 is a magnitude 12 G-type main-sequence star located about 1,020 light-years (310 parsecs) away in the Phoenix constellation. The star is likely older than the Sun, slightly enriched in heavy elements and is rotating rapidly, being spun up by the tides raised by the giant planet on a close orbit.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
This star has one exoplanet, WASP-5b, detected by the SuperWASP project in 2007.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== See also ==
|
||||
SuperWASP
|
||||
WASP-4
|
||||
WASP-3
|
||||
List of extrasolar planets
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
UK planet hunters announce three new finds (PDF)
|
||||
SuperWASP Homepage
|
||||
"WASP-5". Exoplanets. Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2009-05-04.
|
||||
24
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-50-0.md
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24
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-50-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-50"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-50"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:29:07.896767+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-50, also named Chaophraya, is a G-type main-sequence star about 594 light-years away in the constellation Eridanus. The star is older than the Sun and slightly depleted in heavy elements compared to the Sun, and has a close to average starspot activity. Despite its advanced age, the star is rotating rapidly, being spun up by the tides raised by a giant planet on a close orbit.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Nomenclature ==
|
||||
The designation WASP-50 comes from Wide Angle Search for Planets, a consortium of academic organisations detecting exoplanets using the transit method.
|
||||
This was one of the systems selected to be named in the 2019 NameExoWorlds campaign during the 100th anniversary of the IAU, which assigned each country a star and planet to be named. This system was assigned to Thailand. The approved names were Chaophraya for the star and Maeping for the planet, after the Chao Phraya and Mae Ping rivers in Thailand.
|
||||
The Thai names Chaophraya (เจ้าพระยา) and Maeping (แม่ปิง) were proposed by Duangrat Wichiansri (ดวงรัตน์ วิเชียรศรี) following a national vote conducted by NARIT in 2019,
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2011 a transiting hot superjovian planet, WASP-50b (named Maeping in 2019) was detected. In 2022 its albedo was found to be no more than 0.44, meaning that the planet reflects less than 44% of the light irradiated by its host star. This allows the planetary equilibrium temperature to be constrained at 1393±42 K.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
27
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-52-0.md
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27
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-52"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-52"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:29:10.392150+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-52, also named Anadolu, is a K-type main-sequence star about 570 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. It is older than the Sun at 10.7+1.9−4.5 billion years, but it has a similar fraction of heavy elements.
|
||||
The star has prominent starspot activity, with 3% to 14% of the stellar surface covered by areas 575±150 K cooler than the rest of the photosphere.
|
||||
A multiplicity survey in 2015 did not detect any stellar companions.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Nomenclature ==
|
||||
The designation WASP-52 comes from the Wide Angle Search for Planets.
|
||||
This was one of the systems selected to be named in the 2019 NameExoWorlds campaign during the 100th anniversary of the IAU, which assigned each country a star and planet to be named. This system was assigned to Turkey. The approved names were Anadolu for the star, after the Turkish name for Anatolia, and Göktürk for the planet after the Göktürks, a historical group of Turkic people.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2012 a transiting hot Jupiter planet, WASP-52b, was detected in a tight, circular orbit. The planet was named Göktürk by Turkish astronomers in December 2019. The planet has a small measured temperature difference between dayside (1481±34 K) and nightside (1224±77 K). The planetary orbit is well aligned with the equatorial plane of the star, the misalignment being 5.47+4.61−4.21°.
|
||||
Search for transit timing variation did not result in the detection of additional planets in system as of 2021.
|
||||
A transmission spectrum taken in 2020 has revealed the presence of hydrogen, sodium and potassium, although the sodium and potassium lines may be attributable to volcanically active moons of the gas giant, not the planet itself. The atmosphere has no high winds and relatively low-lying clouds, indicating it is not significantly enriched by heavy elements. No signs of the planetary atmosphere escaping to space were detected in 2020, but updated measurement in 2022 showed signs of helium escape, consistent with mass loss rate of 0.5% per billion years.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
22
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-54-0.md
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22
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-54"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-54"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:29:11.626483+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-54, also known as BD+00 3088, is a binary star system about 818 light-years away in the constellation Virgo. The primary, WASP-54A, is an F-type subgiant, accompanied by the red dwarf WASP-54B on a wide orbit. WASP-54 is depleted in heavy elements, having 55% of the solar abundance of iron. WASP-54 is slightly older than the Sun at 6.9+1.0−1.9 billion years.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Star system ==
|
||||
A multiplicity survey in 2017 detected a red dwarf stellar companion WASP-54B 5.7″ away from WASP-54A. The companion was proven to be co-moving in 2020.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2012 a transiting hot Jupiter planet, WASP-54b, was detected on a tight orbit around WASP-54A. The planetary equilibrium temperature is 1742+49−69 K.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
19
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-55-0.md
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19
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-55-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-55"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-55"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:29:13.000968+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-55 is a G-type main-sequence star about 954 light-years away in the constellation Virgo. The star is much younger than the Sun at approximately 1.1+0.8−0.6 billion years. WASP-55 is similar to the Sun in concentration of heavy elements.
|
||||
A multiplicity survey in 2016 found one candidate stellar companion to WASP-55 at a projected separation of 4.435″±0.018″. Follow-up observations in 2017 were unable to confirm if the suspected companion red dwarf star, with a temperature of 3,340±90 K, is gravitationally bound to WASP-55 or not. It was confirmed in 2019 using Gaia DR2 data.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2012 a transiting hot Jupiter planet, WASP-55b, was detected on a tight, circular orbit. Its equilibrium temperature is 1,305 K.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
18
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-56-0.md
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18
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-56-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-56"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-56"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:29:14.238375+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-56 is a sun-like star of spectral type G6 about 1,070 light-years away in the constellation of Coma Berenices. It has an apparent magnitude of 11.48. Observations at the Calar Alto Observatory using the lucky imaging technique detected a candidate companion star located 3.4 arcseconds away, however it was not known if this is an actual binary companion or an optical double. It was confirmed in 2019 using Gaia DR2 data.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
It has a planet that was discovered by transit photometry in 2011 by the SuperWASP program. Fourteen transits were observed over three watching seasons, each lasting 214 minutes and reducing the stars' brightness by 14 millimagnitudes. The planet has around 0.6 times the mass of Jupiter and an orbital period of 4.6 days. The planet possibly has a large core of heavy metals.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
19
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-57-0.md
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19
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-57-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-57"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-57"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:29:15.432541+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-57 is a single G-type main-sequence star about 1,322 light-years away in the constellation Libra. WASP-57 is depleted in heavy elements, having 55% of the solar abundance of iron. WASP-57 is much younger than the Sun at 0.957±0.518 billion years.
|
||||
A multiplicity survey in 2015 did not detect any stellar companions to WASP-57.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2012 a transiting hot Jupiter planet, WASP-57b, was detected on a tight, circular orbit around WASP-57. The planetary equilibrium temperature is 1338±29 K.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
20
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-58-0.md
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20
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-58-0.md
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@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-58"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-58"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:29:16.669902+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-58 is a binary star system in the constellation Lyra. It comprises a G-type main-sequence star and a red dwarf at a separation of 384 astronomical units. WASP-58 is slightly depleted in heavy elements, having 80% of the solar abundance of iron. The system is much older than the Sun at 12.80+0.20−2.10 billion years. Based on parallax measurements, it lies at a distance of 960 light-years (290 parsecs).
|
||||
Lithium was detected in the stellar spectrum of WASP-58A, making the star anomalous for its advanced age.
|
||||
A multiplicity survey in 2015 detected a red dwarf stellar companion at a projected separation of 1.281±0.002″ to WASP-58A, and it was confirmed to be gravitationally bound in 2016.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2012 a transiting hot Jupiter planet, WASP-58b, was detected on a tight, circular orbit around the primary star WASP-58A. The planetary equilibrium temperature is 1270±80 K.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
20
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-59-0.md
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20
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-59-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-59"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-59"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:29:17.905224+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-59 is a K-type main-sequence star about 379 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. The star's age is essentially unconstrained by observations. WASP-59 is slightly depleted in heavy elements, having 70% of the solar abundance of iron. The star produces extremely low levels of ultraviolet light, indicating an absence of flare activity.
|
||||
A multiplicity survey in 2015 did not detect any stellar companions to WASP-59.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2012 a transiting hot Jupiter planet, WASP-59b, was detected on a tight, mildly eccentric orbit.
|
||||
Its equilibrium temperature is 670±35 K. The planet is unusually dense for a gas giant, representing an outlier on the mass-radius diagram.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
34
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-6-0.md
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34
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-6-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-6"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-6"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:16.992868+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-6, also officially named Márohu, is a type-G yellow dwarf star located about 651 light-years (200 parsecs) away in the Aquarius constellation. Dim at magnitude 12, it is visible through a moderate sized amateur telescope. The star is about 80% of the size and mass of the Sun and it is a little cooler. Starspots in the WASP-6 system helped to refine the measurements of the mass and the radius of the planet WASP-6b.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Nomenclature ==
|
||||
The designation WASP-6 indicates that this was the 6th star found to have a planet by the Wide Angle Search for Planets.
|
||||
In 2019 the IAU announced that WASP-6 and its planet WASP-6b would be given official names chosen by the public from the proposals collected in a national campaign from the Dominican Republic, as part of NameExoWorlds. The star WASP-6 is named Márohu and its planet Boinayel from the proposal received by Marvin del Cid. Márohu, the cemí of drought, is the protector of the Sun.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
The SuperWASP project announced that this star has an exoplanet, WASP-6b, in 2008. This object was detected by the astronomical transit method. It is a hot Jupiter with an inflated radius and low density.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== See also ==
|
||||
SuperWASP or WASP Planetary Search Program
|
||||
List of extrasolar planets
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
WASP Planets
|
||||
WASP primary website
|
||||
The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia
|
||||
25
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-60-0.md
Normal file
25
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-60-0.md
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@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-60"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-60"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:29:19.119923+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-60, also named Morava, is a F-type main-sequence star about 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. The star's age is much younger than the Sun's at 1.7±0.5 billion years. WASP-60 is enriched in heavy elements, having 180% of the solar abundance of iron. The star does not have noticeable starspot activity, an unexpected observation for a relatively young star. The age of WASP-60 determined by different methods is highly discrepant though, and it may actually be an old star which experienced an episode of spin-up in the past.
|
||||
A multiplicity survey in 2015 did not detect any stellar companions to WASP-60.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Nomenclature ==
|
||||
The designation WASP-60 comes from the Wide Angle Search for Planets.
|
||||
This was one of the systems selected to be named in the 2019 NameExoWorlds campaign during the 100th anniversary of the IAU, which assigned each country a star and planet to be named. This system was assigned to Serbia. The approved names were Morava for the star and Vlasina for the planet, after the Morava and Vlasina rivers in Serbia.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
In 2012 a transiting hot Jupiter planet, WASP-60b, was detected on a tight, circular orbit. The planet was named Vlasina by Serbian astronomers in December 2019, after the Vlasina River, a tributary of the Morava. Its equilibrium temperature is 1479±35 K.
|
||||
Measurement of the Rossiter–McLaughlin effect in 2018 revealed WASP-60b is on a retrograde orbit relative to the equatorial plane of the star, orbital obliquity equal to 129±17°.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
22
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-7-0.md
Normal file
22
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-7-0.md
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|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-7"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-7"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:18.233267+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-7, also identified as HD 197286, is a type F star located about 527 light-years away in the constellation Microscopium. This star is a little larger and about 28% more massive than the Sun and is also brighter and hotter. At magnitude 9.5 the star cannot be seen by the naked eye but is visible through a small telescope.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
The SuperWASP project announced an extrasolar planet, WASP-7b, orbiting this star in 2008. The planet appears to be another hot Jupiter, a low-density planet with Jupiter's mass orbiting very close to a hot star and thus emitting enough heat to glow.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
"WASP-7". Exoplanets. Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2009-05-06.
|
||||
28
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-8-0.md
Normal file
28
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-8-0.md
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@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "WASP-8"
|
||||
chunk: 1/1
|
||||
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-8"
|
||||
category: "reference"
|
||||
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
|
||||
date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:28:19.490344+00:00"
|
||||
instance: "kb-cron"
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
WASP-8 is a binary star system 294 light-years (90 parsecs) away. The star system is much younger than the Sun at 300 million to 1.2 billion years age, and is heavily enriched in heavy elements, having nearly twice the concentration of iron compared to the Sun.
|
||||
The primary, WASP-8A, is a magnitude 9.9 main-sequence yellow dwarf star. It is reported to be a G-type star with a temperature of 5600 K and has a mass 1.093±0.024, a radius 0.976±0.020 and a luminosity of 0.79 times that of the Sun. There is a companion star WASP-8B located 4.5 arcseconds away with the same proper motion, indicating a stellar binary system. The binarity was confirmed in 2020. The axis orientation of the primary star is uncertain, but it is close to pointing one of the poles to the Earth.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== Planetary system ==
|
||||
The primary star is orbited by two known exoplanets, designated WASP-8b and WASP-8c. WASP-8b was discovered in 2010 by the astronomical transit method and was catalogued as part of the SuperWASP mission. WASP-8c was discovered in late 2013 with the radial velocity method.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== See also ==
|
||||
SuperWASP
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== References ==
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
== External links ==
|
||||
WASP planets
|
||||
"Notes for star WASP-8". Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia. Archived from the original on 2008-08-03. Retrieved 2008-08-07.
|
||||
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