NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Wednesday, June 7, about the discovery of carbon-rich gas around a young star that may be forming terrestrial planets.

The discovery was made with the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) spacecraft and will be featured in the June 8 issue of Nature.

Participants:
-- Aki Roberge, NASA Postdoctoral Fellow, Goddard Space Flight Centre, Greenbelt, Md, US.
-- Conel Alexander, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution of Washington
-- Marc Kuchner, ExoPlanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Centre, Greenbelt, Md, US.

A video file about this discovery will air on NASA TV on June 7.

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`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

Thanks for the tip. BTW, It's handy that the Astronomy Picture of the Day for May 29, 2006 is a live feed from NASA TV. Bookmark the page today.

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Forming opinions as we speak

It's especially nice to see FUSE results getting some press (although I still think that tracing O VI in the warm intergalactic medium was its greatest hit). The spacecraft has been recovered from a couple of what "should" have been mission-ending failures. They use electromagnetic pointing to take the place of two failed reaction wheels both to turn to new targets and maintain pointing, using the reaction against on-board currents against the instantaneous direction of the geomagnetic field (which MOST was launched latee to use exclusively). FUSE does one kind of measurement - high-resolution spectra in the 912-1150 Angstom region, where normal mirror coatings are ineffective. This narrow span is remarkably rich in spectral features, including bands of cold molecular hydrogen as well as high-ionization species of ions we can't see anywhere else.

Yeah, too bad NASA is making no effort to maintain observational capability in that spectral range, it slipped under the radar, as it were.

As I see it, there are a bunch of issues involved. The UV community of observers is not as cohesive and politically effective as, say, the X-ray astronomers (anachronistic as this kind of wavelength chauvinism is). On top of that, the far-UV range is really essential for a few problems (intergalactic medium, reionization of helium, certain elemental abundances in hot stars and star-forming galaxies) and much less important for lots of others. Lyman-limit absorption means that the only things you can see at redshifts z>0.25 are certain quasars, leaving the FUV out of the race toward galaxy evolution except as a low-z comparison set (a favorite of mine, BTW). Then toss in the fact that mirror coatings tend to be useful either in the FUV or elsewhere, and anything that works here will look like a niche mission... It took a good long time and redesigns to get FUSE funded and flown in the first place. Used to be named Lyman, which would have made a really cool combination if someone could have combined Lyman and Spitzer data in one project.

(Truth in advertising - this from someone not too proud to analyze galaxy spectra taken by the Voyagers, and whose second FUSE paper shows up in print - press date is today. Hey, there it is, lead article for June!)

Hats off to those who mine the available data. Personally, I think "niche" missions are as important as mortar is to bricks.

The Carbon-Rich Gas in the Beta Pictoris Circumstellar Disk

Aki Roberge, Paul D. Feldman, Alycia J. Weinberger, Magali Deleuil, Jean-Claude Bouret

arXiv.org preprint

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman