PLANET NINE, SUPERNOVA, THE FRANTIC HUNT FOR ANOTHER EARTH

[ABOVE, 3 DIFFERENT ANIMATIONS OF THE EVENT]

NASA Kepler Space Telescope observed growth of the supernova within the star KSN 2011d.

NASA’s planet hunter, the Kepler space telescope, has captured the brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shock wave-what astronomers call the “shock breakout” of a supernova- for the first time in visible light wavelengths. An international science team, including two astronomers from the University of Maryland, analyzed light captured by Kepler every 30 minutes over a three-year period, searching some 50 trillion stars spread across 500 distant galaxies.
The astronomers were hunting for signs of massive stellar death explosions known as supernovae.

“Like police getting surveillance footage of a crime after the event, we can study brightness histories from Kepler to find out what was happening in the exact hour that the shock wave from the stellar core reached the surface of the star,” said Edward Shaya, an associate research scientist in astronomy at UMD and a co-author on the study. “These events are bright enough that they change the brightness of the whole galaxy by a measurable amount.”

“It lasted only 20 minutes and took place 1.2 billion light years away, but NASA managed to catch it on camera: a star exploding. The brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shockwave — or “shock breakout” — has been captured for the first time in visible light by the Kepler space telescope,” according to a news report published by CNN

The team analyzing the Kepler data found exactly what they were looking for: a red supergiant 500 times the size of our sun and around 1.2 billion light years away exploded while in the telescope’s view.
“Kepler was monitoring the same patch of sky every 30 minutes”, Dr Brad Tucker of the Australian National University explained. “It doesn’t download all of its pixels, because that’s too much data for its bandwidth,” he continued – so the team had to get time for a specific supernova-hunting mission. “What we had to do was select 500 galaxies and hope we got a supernova.”

“There's a quick brightening in the first moment of explosion,” he said, “this huge extra light that fades before you get the normal explosion.”


In the Kepler data, Tucker said, “we see this distinct extra feature – a wave that peaks just after time zero, then slowly fades over a few days.


“Physically, it looks exactly like a wave – it comes with a wave-front and dies away.”


And, Tucker said, the shockwaves seen in the Kepler data were in keeping with “the physical mechanism of a core-collapse supernova: gravity keeps condensing the star core (towards either a neutron star or a black hole) and when that finishes, it bounces off.

“The bounce ripples through the star, and that's what causes it to blow up.”

So a year-long mission watching 500 galaxies “stacked the deck” enough to make it likely one would be observed. The two supernovae that were eventually spotted are KSN 2011a (700 million light years away, 300 times the size of the sun) and KSN 2011d (1.2 billion light years away, 500 times the size of the sun).

Interestingly, the smaller of these didn’t show a shockwave.
According to this NASA that might be because it’s surrounded by gas that obscured the event.

Tucker added that the repurposed K2 mission should catch more such events, since he said it will be able to watch thousands of galaxies instead of a select few.

Lead researcher Peter Garnavich, an astrophysics professor at the University of Notre Dame, said in a statement that the star is so colossal that “Earth’s orbit around the sun would fit comfortably within (it).”

NEXT FOR KEPLER?
HUNTING FOR "ORPHAN PLANETS"...AND I MUST WONDER WHY!
APRIL 6, 2016
With its journey to find Earth-like planets in our solar system over, NASA's Kepler space telescope will embark on a new mission this week: the search for free-playing planets in an attempt to uncover how common these orphan planets are, also referred to as the K2 mission.

Orphan worlds - a term for planets without host stars - are very hard to find, but they do exist. Scientists believe that they are the result of an ejection from their solar system families due to gravitational dynamics, whereby they are lured away by tidal forces.

However, due to the difficulty involved in finding them, researchers are still unsure of just how common these planets are.

In order to answer this question, scientists are going to use a technique known as microlensing, a phenomenon that occurs when the gravity of an unseen foreground, such as an orphan planet, magnifies the light from a distant background star.
"For a lensing event that's due to a just a single object, the most salient feature of the light curve is the time scale," said Calen Henderson, an astronomer with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "In general, a shorter time scale is potentially indicative of a lower-mass lensing object."

"If you're just monitoring one star, it's very, very rare to capture a microlensing event," Henderson said. "That would only happen once per individual star every maybe 300,000 years. It's a fishing expedition. Microlensing events are rare. They're unpredictable and so what microlensing surveys have done for decades is just try to play the numbers game," he said.

Although some variations in star brightness stem from stellar flares, others are caused by bodies in the foreground that alter the light of the background star.
"What we're going to try to do with K2 is look for those events that are due to a lensing system that is just a free-floating planet," Henderson said.

NASA's Kepler team hopes to shed light on these unique orphan planets by the end of the K2 mission.

THE QUESTION THAT COMES TO MIND IS ...ARE THEY PERHAPS STUDYING THESE TWO THINGS BACK-TO-BACK BECAUSE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF OUR OWN SUN EXPLODING "AHEAD OF SCHEDULE", OF EARTH SOMEHOW ESCAPING TO BECOME AN "ORPHAN WORLD", OR IS IT STILL THAT SEARCH FOR A "NEW HOME" FOR EARTHLINGS BECAUSE OF SOME OTHER UPCOMING DISASTER THAT WILL THREATEN OUR CONTINUATION?

YEAH, YEAH, CALL ME PARANOID, WHATEVER, BUT THERE'S JUST TOO MUCH "NEW EARTH" PLANET-HUNTING GOING ON FOR IT NOT TO BE CAUSED BY SOMETHING PERHAPS WE SHOULD KNOW AND DON'T.


TAKE "PLANET NINE", FOR EXAMPLE....FIRST IT WAS DENIED FOR DECADES, BUT NOW THEY SEEM TO BE FINE WITH SAYING IT'S PROBABLY THERE, AND COULD CROSS EARTH'S ORBIT.
Mar 28, 2016

Planet Nine: Scientists Uncover New Data That Further Supports Its Existence

A new finding continues to lend support to the theory that there is a ninth planet lurking at the edge of our solar system.

Back in January, a team of researchers proposed the existence of a ninth planet on the edge of our solar system. The team came to the conclusion using a mathematical model that suggested that a distant planet - about the size of Neptune - was influencing the orbital path of six objects in the Kuiper Belt, a mysterious area that scientists believe is filled with asteroids and other icy objects.
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"It's almost like having six hands on a clock all moving at different rates, and when you happen to look up, they're all in exactly the same place," said Mike Brown, who conducted the original research suggesting the planet's existence along with Konstantin Batygin. "Basically it shouldn't happen randomly. So we thought something else must be shaping these orbits."

Not long afterwards, another research team narrowed down the area of the planet's supposed location, and yet another claimed that Planet Nine is crossing high-eccentricity KBOs (Kuiper belt objects) due to orbital resonance.

Now, Brown and Batygin claim to have found another small object that is located in the exact location that their model predicts, further supporting the existence of a mysterious ninth planet.

Although none of these claims have yet to be presented in a peer-reviewed journal or verified with other scientists, the Canada France Hawaii Telescope, which is currently in the midst of examining the far reaches of our solar system for the Outer Solar System Origins Survey, will be able to verify the claims as it discovers new Kuiper Belt objects.

If Planet Nine is proven to exist, Brown and Batygin claim that there will be no debate about its classification as a true planet."

 

The team calculated that if it exists, Planet Nine would be 3.7 times wider than our planet, with a surface temperature of minus 375 degrees Fahrenheit.


"This means that the planet's emission is dominated by the cooling of its core; otherwise, the temperature would only be 10 Kelvin," said Esther Linder, co-author of the study and student from the University of Bern in Switzerland. 


"With our study, candidate Planet Nine is now more than a simple point mass; it takes shape, having physical properties," said Christoph Mordasini, co-author of the study and astrophysics professor at the University of Bern.



In terms of its formation, the team believes that Planet Nine originated from the same disk of dust and gas as the other planets in our solar system, although some astronomers are suggest that other more exotic origins are possible.

The findings will be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

 


SO, "NIBIRU" LIVES?

(Baaaa haaaa haaa!)

Planet X or Nibiru is headed for Earth, doomsayers believe ...

www.nydailynews.com/.../planet-x-nibiru-headed-ea...

New York Daily News

Jan 21, 2016 - "Planet X, or Nibiru, is on a crash course with Earth, doomsayers believe — prophecies draw new focus with 'Planet Nine' discovery."

The planet, according to Caltech researchers, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and takes about 15,000 years to make a full orbit around the sun.

Could "Planet Nine" actually be the Planet X we’ve been waiting for?

And here's a long movie that shows the coming "Apocalypse" of scary old Nibiru...be afraid, be very afraid.... NOT....

[Warning, the video is quite grating on the nerves....bad audio, bad narration.]

Soviet-born Zecharia Sitchin first wrote about Nibiru — a distant member of our solar system — in the 1970s.
The name comes from Babylonian astrology, and relates to astronomical objects.

Sitchin was a scholar who interpreted ancient texts and biblical writings. His books have sold millions of copies.
According to Sitchin, Nibiru features an elongated, elliptical orbit and comes near Earth every 3,600 years.

Despite Sitchin's death in 2010, his website is still maintained, and a Wednesday post addressed the discovery of a new planet.


"With an elliptical orbit of 10,000 or 20,000 of our years, this planet may not be Nibiru, which has an orbit of about 3,600 of our years," a post on his website states. "However, this prediction of a likely additional planet in our solar system is exciting news. Perhaps the search will lead us to either finding Nibiru, or perhaps we'll find that something has changed and impacted Nibiru's orbit since the last time it orbited Earth."

Additionally, a 1984 Associated Press article claims that dinosaurs and other species were killed off by a dim dwarf star that periodically causes immense comet showers, "plunging Earth into cold and darkness that kills up to 70 percent of all life."

ALSO (ahem! cough, cough) HUGE GASHES IN THE EARTH THAT HAVE BEEN OPENING ALL OVER THE WORLD ARE CAUSED BY THE APPROACH OF...UMMM...NIBIRU.

SEE https://screenshotsnews.net/first-came-the-giant-sinkholes-now-we-have-massive-gashes-opening-up-in-the-earth/

AND, THAT WINDS UP THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION OF THE TEA ROOM FOR TONIGHT.

SCIENCE, SCIENCE FICTION....LOVE 'EM BOTH!
SURE BEATS THE ELECTION PROCESS GOING ON OUT THERE...THAT FITS IN NO KNOWN CATEGORY OF "CRAZY".