Friday, May 28, 2010
Major Breakthrough: Fourth Photo of Planet Around Other Stars
This 2006 Hubble Space Telescope optical image shows the belt of dust and debris (bright oval) surrounding the star Fomalhaut and the planet (inset) that orbits the star every 872 years and sculpts the inner edge of the belt.
Major Breakthrough: Third Photos of Planets Around Other Stars
The HR 8799 planetary system (shown as an artist's conception) resembles a scaled-up version of the outer portion of the solar system, according to the researchers, who estimate the planets orbit their star at distances similar to those of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Credit: Gemini Observatory; Artwork by Lynette Cook
Second Major Breakthrough: Photos of Planets Around Other Stars
The three exoplanets (red dots in the right panel) are shown orbiting HR 8799, whose residual light is shown as the multi-colored specks in the center of the right panel. An infrared image of one of the planets, which lies at 38 AU from the star, is shown in the right panel. Credit: National Research Council Canada.
Major Breakthrough: First Photos of Planets Around Other Stars
This 3D representation of the three planets orbiting the star HR 8799 shows the system is located 90 degrees away from the Milky Way galactic center, lower than the sun.Breakthrough technology
Until now, scientists have inferred the presence of planets mainly by detecting an unseen world's gravitational tug on its host star or waiting for the planet to transit in front of its star and then detecting a dip in the star's light. While these methods have helped to identify more than 300 extrasolar planets to date, astronomers have struggled to actually directly image and see such inferred planets.
The four photographed exoplanets are discussed in two research papers published online today by the journal Science.
"Every extrasolar planet detected so far has been a wobble on a graph. These are the first pictures of an entire system," said Bruce Macintosh, an astrophysicist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and part of the team that photographed the multi-planet system in infrared light. "We've been trying to image planets for eight years with no luck and now we have pictures of three planets at once."
Astronomers have claimed previously to have directly imaged a planet, with at least two such objects, though not everybody agreed the objects were planets. Instead, they may be dim, failed stars known as brown dwarfs.
Parrot Talk More than Just Squawking
Parrot speech is commonly regarded as the brainless squawking of a feathered voice recorder. But studies over the past 30 years continually show that parrots engage in much more than mere mimicry. Our avain friends can solve certain linguistic processing tasks as deftly as 4-6 year-old children. Parrots appear to grasp concepts like "same" and "different", "bigger" and "smaller", "none" and numbers. Perhaps most interestingly, they can combine labels and phrases in novel ways. A January 2007 study in Language Sciences suggests using patterns of parrot speech learning to develop artificial speech skills in robots.
Elephants Do Forget, but They're Not Dumb
Elephants have the largest brain enearly 11 pounds on averageeof any mammal that ever walked the earth. Do they use that gray matter to the fullest? Intelligence is hard to quantify in humans or animals, but the encephalization quotient (EQ), a ratio of an animal's observed brain size to the expected brain size given the animal's mass, correlates well with an ability to navigate novel challenges and obstacles. The average elephant EQ is 1.88. (Humans range from 7.33 to 7.69, chimpanzees average 2.45, pigs 0.27.) Intelligence and memory are thought to go hand in hand, suggesting that elephant memories, while not infallible, are quite good.
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