But it was a far more modest observatory, located just above sea level in rural Levy County and just down the road from the UF campus, that proved key to a new discovery about what one astronomer termed “one of the weirdest” planets outside our solar system.

Three UF astronomers are among the authors of a paper that will appear Thursday in Astrophysical Journal, the leading journal in astronomy, pinning down the extravagantly unusual orbit of HD 80606b, a Jupiter-sized planet nearly 200 light years away. The astronomers made observations of the planet eclipsing its star from a 41-year-old telescope at the department’s Rosemary Hill Observatory 30 miles west of Gainesville in Bronson.

“Really, the critical data came from Florida and Indiana, because they were in the right place at the right time, and the weather was OK,” said Josh Winn, an assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the lead author of the paper.

The weather was OK – but just barely. Knicole Colón, a UF astronomy doctoral student who made the observations with UF associate scientist and Rosemary Hill director Francisco Reyes, said the two were blessed with cooperative clouds.

“It was fairly cloudy, and we were somewhat disappointed,” she said. “But it turned out that throughout the night, there was a hole in the cloud cover, right where our star was.”

The Rosemary Hill Observatory was founded in 1967 on an 80-acre site in Levy County less than 140 feet above sea level. It has two telescopes, the larger of which is a 30-inch Tinsley reflecting telescope. Although faculty members and graduate students have used that telescope and its 18-inch companion for research, they serve mainly as teaching tools. For research, astronomers often travel to remote mountaintops where larger, more sophisticated telescopes can capture light from far more distant stars at much finer resolutions — now including the largest of them all, the 34.1-foot Gran Telescopio Canarias, perched at 7,874 feet above sea level on a mountaintop in Spain’s Canary Islands.

The events of the night of June 4, 2009, however, proved that small, simple telescopes can still play starring roles.

On that night, Reyes and Colón joined teams at about a dozen different observatories spread from Massachusetts to Hawaii to observe the planet eclipse its host star, HD 80606.

Astronomers noticed the eclipse for the first time in late February, but they only managed to observe the very end of it. The planet completes one orbit around its star every 111 days, so the next chance for observation came on June 4. The eclipse lasts nearly 12 hours, yet any single observatory can only observe it for a short time between twilight and when the planet and star disappear below Earth’s horizon. As a result, 25 astronomers worked together, relay-race fashion east to west, to capture the event.

Colón said she, Reyes and UF astronomy assistant professor Eric Ford spent several days testing and readying the Rosemary Hill telescope. However, the weather had been poor for weeks, and prospects didn’t look good. On the appointed night, it was too cloudy at the first observatory, in Massachusetts, for successful observations. The Florida observatory was next.

Colón said that despite widespread clouds, she and Reyes located a reference star and zeroed in on HD 80606 just in time for the beginning of the eclipse. The team caught only part of the event, but the next observatory, in Indiana, was able to pick up soon after. All told, six observatories gathered about six hours of observations, capturing more than half of the eclipse. Although most were small, they included the 31-foot Keck I telescope in Hawaii. Ford participated remotely in those observations from Berkeley, Calif.

When Colón uses the Gran Telescopio Canarias, she submits her requirements for observation, then awaits the results from astronomers at the telescope. The Rosemary Hill observations were completely different.

“You are staring at a star as a planet crosses in front of it, which is pretty amazing,” she said. “It’s definitely a unique experience that you can’t get from the remote observing that I do.”

Most planets orbit their stars in a more or less circular shape. But HD 80806b’s orbit is an elongated ellipse, as though someone had grabbed its orbit and squeezed. Astronomers were unsure of the cause of this comet-like orbit, but the leading theory was a companion star’s gravitational pull. By combining their observations of the eclipse, the team demonstrated the planet’s orbit is not aligned with the star’s rotation, which suggests this theory is probably correct, Winn said.

A team led by astronomy professor Stephen Eikenberry late last week captured the first images of the cosmos ever made with a UF-designed and built camera/spectrometer affixed to the Gemini South telescope in Chile. The handful of “first light” images include a yellow and blue orb-like structure that depicts our Milky Way galaxy, home to thousands of black holes – including, at its core, a “supermassive” black hole thought to be as massive as 4 million suns put together.

“We plan to use this instrument to provide the first accurate tracking of the growth and evolution of this black hole over the last 4 billion years,” Eikenberry said.

Installation of the instrument, called FLAMINGOS-2, caps a seven-year, $5 million effort involving 30 UF scientists, engineers, students and staff. Once the instrument is scientifically tested — a process expected to last around six months — it will support a range of new science. Astronomers will use FLAMINGOS-2 (FLAMINGOS is short for the Florida Array Multi-object Imaging Grism Spectrometer) to hunt the universe’s first galaxies, view stars as they are being born, reveal black holes and investigate other phenomena.

“Achieving first light is a great achievement and important milestone,” said Nancy Levenson, deputy director of the Gemini Observatory.

The 8-meter Gemini South telescope in the Chilean Andes is one of only about a dozen 8- to 10-meter telescopes worldwide. All require technologically sophisticated instruments to interpret the light they gather. FLAMINGOS-2 “sees” near-infrared or heat-generated light beyond the range of human vision. It can reveal objects invisible to the eye, such as stars obscured by cosmic dust, or objects so far away they have next to no visible light

The instrument joins other near-infrared imagers installed on other large telescopes. But it is unusual in its ability to also act as a spectrometer, dividing the light into its component wavelengths. Astronomers analyze these wavelengths to figure out what distant objects are made of, how hot or cold they are, their distance from Earth, and other qualities.

Uniquely, FLAMINGOS-2 can take spectra of up to 80 different objects simultaneously, speeding astronomers’ hunt for old galaxies, black holes or newly forming stars and planets.

“At a cost of $1 per second for operating the Gemini telescope, it will make a huge gain in the scientific productivity and efficiency of the observatory,” Eikenberry said. “What would take an entire year previously can now be done in four nights. This is a real game changer.”

Astronomers compete heavily for time on the world’s largest telescopes, often waiting months or years for the opportunity to make observations. Eikenberry said his FLAMINGOS-2 agreement with Gemini South entitles him to at least 25 nights of observations. He will use the time to contribute to three large studies, or surveys, of the sky headed by UF astronomers.

The first is aimed at learning more about the thousands of black holes and neutron stars at the Milky Way’s center. The second will probe the formation and evolution of galaxies across time, while the third will investigate the birth of new stars.

Levenson said the Gemini telescopes are well-known for their excellent image quality. With its wide large field of view and ability examine dozens of objects at once, FLAMINGOS-2 is a good match with the Gemini South telescope.

“The center of our Milky Way galaxy is a very dusty, very crowded environment, so infrared measurements and the ability to separate the fine details of the different stars and other objects are very important,” she said.

FLAMINGOS-2’s debut comes less than two months after UF astronomers helped inaugurate the Gran Telescopio Canarias, the world’s largest telescope, in Spain’s Canary Islands. UF, which owns a 5 percent share of the 10-meter telescope, is the only participating U.S. institution.

The Gemini Observatory is the lead sponsor of FLAMINGOS-2 and the source of the $5 million for design and construction. The original FLAMINGOS, a smaller prototype that pioneered the approach used successfully in the larger version, was designed and built by the late UF astronomy professor Richard Elston. Elston was at work on the early stages of FLAMINGOS-2 when he died of cancer in 2004 at age 43.

The Gemini Observatory, which operates twin 8-m telescopes located in Chile in Hawaii, is an international collaboration supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

An analysis of data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory Scientific Collaboration, or LIGO, and the Virgo Collaboration has set the most stringent limits yet on the amount of gravitational waves that could have come from the Big Bang in the gravitational wave frequency band where LIGO can observe. In doing so, scientists have put new constraints on the details of how the universe looked in its earliest moments.

“Gravitational waves are the only way to directly probe the universe at the moment of its birth; they’re absolutely unique in that regard,” said David Reitze, a UF professor of physics and the spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. “We simply can’t get this information from any other type of astronomy. This is what makes this result in particular, and gravitational-wave astronomy in general, so exciting.”

The research is set to appear in the Aug. 20 issue of the journal Nature. Seventeen UF faculty members, postdoctoral associates and graduate students join the paper’s authors.

Much like it produced the cosmic microwave background, the Big Bang is believed to have created a flood of gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space and time — that carry information about the universe as it was immediately after the Big Bang. These waves would be observed as the “stochastic background,” analogous to a superposition of many waves of different sizes and directions on the surface of a pond. The amplitude of this background is directly related to the parameters that govern the behavior of the infant universe.

Earlier measurements of the cosmic microwave background have placed the most stringent upper limits of the stochastic gravitational wave background at very large distance scales and low frequencies. The new measurements by LIGO directly probe the gravitational wave background in the first minute of its existence, at time scales much shorter than accessible by the cosmic microwave background.

The research also constrains models of cosmic strings, objects that are proposed to have been left over from the beginning of the universe and subsequently stretched to enormous lengths by the universe’s expansion. These strings, some cosmologists say, can form loops that produce gravitational waves as they oscillate, decay and eventually disappear.

Gravitational waves carry with them information about their violent origins and about the nature of gravity that cannot be obtained by conventional astronomical tools. The existence of the waves was predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 in his general theory of relativity. The LIGO and GEO instruments have been actively searching for the waves since 2002; the Virgo interferometer joined the search in 2007.

The UF LIGO research group built one of the most important and complex parts of the gravitational wave detector, the input optics, said David Tanner, a UF professor of physics. The input optics takes light from the laser, shapes the beam into an ideal form, and directs it to the interferometer at the heart of the gravitational wave detector. UF scientists are working to design and build a second version of the input optics for a major upgrade to LIGO scheduled to go on line in three to four years.

“UF also plays important role in analysis of LIGO data, including searches for sharp bursts of gravitational waves, and for the stochastic background of gravitational waves … the subject of the just published paper,” Tanner wrote in an e-mail.

The authors of the new paper report that the stochastic background of gravitational waves has not yet been discovered. But the nondiscovery of the background described in the Nature paper already offers its own brand of insight into the universe’s earliest history.

The analysis used data collected from the LIGO interferometers in Hanford, Wash., and Livingston, La. Each of the L-shaped interferometers uses a laser split into two beams that travel back and forth down long interferometer arms. The two beams are used to monitor the difference between the two interferometer arm lengths.

“Since we have not observed the stochastic background, some of these early-universe models that predict a relatively large stochastic background have been ruled out,” said Vuk Mandic, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota and the head of the group that performed the analysis. “We now know a bit more about parameters that describe the evolution of the universe when it was less than one minute old.”

The inauguration of the Gran Telescopio Canarias — with its 10.4-meter diameter mirror, the telescope has more light-collecting area than any other — is scheduled for July 24 in Spain’s Canary Islands. Officials and astronomers from the University of Florida, the only U.S. institution that is part of the project, will join more than 500 astronomers, journalists and celebrities in a ceremony presided over by Spain’s King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofia.

“The completion and inauguration of the GTC is a huge milestone for astronomy and for the University of Florida in collaboration with its partners in Spain and Mexico,” UF Provost Joe Glover said. “We look forward to our astronomers playing a central role in the major discoveries this uniquely powerful telescope will enable.”

Perched 7,874 feet above sea level on a mountain on the island of La Palma, the GTC has 6 square meters more light collecting area than any of the roughly one dozen 8- to 10-meter telescopes worldwide. With a mirror composed of 36 hexagonal segments thought to have the smoothest surfaces ever made, it is also the world’s most technologically advanced optical telescope. Sensors keep the mirrors aligned to counteract the force of gravity, with the result that they act as a single surface, even as the telescope is rotated and aligned in place.

Spain owns 90 percent, Mexico 5 percent and UF 5 percent of the telescope under construction since 2000. UF contributed $5 million toward the $180 million project — and its astronomers designed and built one of the first two astronomical instruments for the telescope, a multimillion dollar heat-sensing camera called CanariCam.

Stan Dermott, chairman of UF’s astronomy department, said the GTC’s size and technical attributes enable it not only to gather more light than any other telescope, but also resolve the light into sharper and clearer focus. For astronomers, he said, those capabilities make it a powerful tool to study cosmic origins – the early days of the universe and the very early moments in the mysterious births of stars, planets and galaxies.

“The interpretation of the structure of the disks where new planets form is highly dependent on the quality of the image,” he said, adding that the GTC also will enable the discoveries of new planets, possibly including the first habitable planet.

The telescope gathers the light, but only astronomical instruments can reveal the mysteries it contains. The car engine-sized CanariCam, built at UF but now in La Palma and expected to become operational next year, “sees” the infrared light — the invisible light that accompanies heat — emitted by stars and planets as they form in space. It also sees the light that, in its visible form, is obscured by the dust clouds and gas in space.

CanariCam is unique among mid-infrared cameras in its ability to determine the direction of polarized light and accomplish coronagraphy, which blocks the bright light of stars to make faint planets nearby more visible. Those abilities will help it reveal cool planets and more about the role of magnetic fields in planet and star formation, said Charles Telesco, UF astronomy professor and the principal investigator on the CanariCam project.

UF astronomer Eric Ford became one of the first astronomers worldwide to use the GTC earlier this year. Dermott said he anticipates that about 60 astronomy faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral associates and others — most of the members of the department — will become involved with GTC-related observations or research. He stressed that access to such a prominent telescope is key to success in astronomical research.

“All the objects we study are remote, and you have to get your information from looking at images,” he said. “If the competition has a better image than you, you are basically out of business. So having the GTC puts our students and faculty on the front line.”

There is far more demand for the world’s largest telescopes than available nights, with the result that most astronomers get far less time than they want — and in some years, none at all. UF’s part ownership of the GTC means that its astronomers are guaranteed 20 nights each year. UF’S instrument-building program will result in additional nights, as will UF astronomers’ collaborations with Mexican and Spanish astronomers, Dermott said.

More photos are available at http://www.iac.es/gtcinauguracion/prensa.php?op1=4&lang=en

The team headed by Eric Ford, an assistant professor of astronomy, used the Canary Islands-based GTC to observe a known star and its Jupiter-sized orbiting planet as part of an effort aimed in part at learning how planets contract in size as their stars age. With analysis of the data from the observations now under way, the team also hoped to glean insights about how to tune the GTC’s capabilities to study not only huge, gaseous Jupiter-size planets but also Neptune-sized or “super-Earth”-sized planets that could be closer in composition to Earth.

“The excellent site and large size of the GTC plus the unique filtering capabilities of its detectors will allow astronomers to minimize the effects of Earth’s atmosphere,” Ford said. “By repeatedly measuring the color of exoplanets’ host stars, astronomers can study the atmospheres of exoplanets — and distinguish small planets from other phenomena such as large star spots or binary stars.”

The UF team’s late-May observations were among several announced earlier this week by the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias that marked the long-awaited scientific debut of the GTC, first launched in 2000 on the island of La Palma, and only recently completed. UF contributed $5 million to the roughly $180 million telescope and owns a 5 percent share – the only U.S. institution with an ownership stake in the telescope. The Spanish government owns 90 percent, with Mexico owning the remaining 5 percent.

The GTC’s unique 34.1-foot primary mirror, composed of 36 hexagonal segments, gives it unparalleled abilities to see deep into the universe and examine distant objects in great detail. The telescope is equally notable for the ultra-precise computer control of its mirror segments — control that makes possible more finely detailed images than achievable with other telescopes. Its size and controllability makes the GTC powerful enough to detect an ordinary candle from 20,000 miles away — and resolve the width of its flame from six miles away.

UF astronomers say they will use the telescope to learn more about what occurred in the earliest years of the universe, how stars, planets and galaxies come into being, and to discover and learn more about planets outside our solar system.

“We made this investment because we want our excellent faculty and students to have as much opportunity as possible for top-class research,” said Stan Dermott, chairman of the astronomy department. “In astronomy, that requires access to the best facilities.”

Ford, graduate student Knicole Colón, and postdoctoral associates Brian Lee and Suvrath Mahadven, tapped a Spanish-built astronomical instrument, OSIRIS, to gather the data on the extrasolar star, HAT-P-3, and its planet, HAT-P-3b.

However, A UF-designed and built instrument, CanariCam, is anticipated to be the second instrument installed on the GTC. Among other goals, CanariCam will explore origins and early evolution of planetary systems by imaging the protoplanetary disks where planets are born. UF astronomers also made significant contributions to a third instrument expected to be installed on the GTC known as FRIDA.

“The University of Florida is a partner not just in the observing sense,” Dermott said. “We are also a partner in the sense of being the major builder of instruments for the telescope.”

The GTC’s first, ceremonial observations occurred in 2007, before the telescope’s mirror was complete. A formal inauguration is planned for July 24 on the island of La Palma. King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofia of Spain will preside over the ceremony.

University of Florida and University of California-Santa Cruz astronomers are the first to discover the onset of a huge flow of gas from a quasar, or the super-bright core of an extremely remote young galaxy still being formed. The gas was expelled from the quasar and its enormous black hole sometime in the space of four years around 10 billion years ago – an extremely brief and ancient blip noticed only by a sharp-eyed undergraduate and the unlikely convergence of two separate observational efforts.

“It was completely serendipitous,” said Fred Hamann, a UF astronomy professor. “In fact, the only way it could have happened is through serendipity.”

A paper about the research appeared online this month in the Letters of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Quasars are enormously bright cores of very distant galaxies thought to contain “super-massive” black holes a billion times larger than our sun. They are seen only in the centers of very distant galaxies that formed long ago — galaxies whose light is just now reaching Earth after billions of years in transit. The quasar in question occurred about 10.3 billion years ago.

The black holes within quasars are invisible, but the cosmic material cascading toward them builds up and forms hot “accretion” disks, the source of quasars’ intense light. Some of the incoming material also can be expelled from quasars to form enormous gas clouds that zoom out at extremely high speeds. With the quasar in question, the gas is flowing at an astonishing rate of 58 million mph, Hamann said.

But while astronomers had observed the presence of such gas clouds with other quasars, they had never witnessed one actually coming into being — until now.

Hamann said the discovery was initiated when Kyle Kaplan, an undergraduate at UC-Santa Cruz, earlier this spring noticed peculiarities in the spectra, or wavelengths of light, that had been observed and recorded from the quasar. The spectra were gathered in 2006 as part of an effort to study the galaxies between the quasar and Earth.

UC-Santa Cruz Professor Jason Prochaska was aware of Hamann’s work on quasars and asked him to take a look.

When Hamann and other astronomers checked the spectra against the spectra of the same region recorded in a separate sky survey in 2002, they were surprised to discover that there were zero indications of the gas cloud.

“So that’s how we know this appeared between 2002 and 2006,” he said.

Daniel Progra, a physics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and an expert on gas outflows from astronomical objects, indicated the discovery is a lucky one.

“I am most excited about this work,” he said. “We humans cannot directly monitor changes in quasars as they take very many years. Therefore, a discovery of a change over a few years is very interesting. It is not unexpected, but chances are very small.”

He said the discovery supports a computer model he developed that predicts the gas outflows are dynamic and complicated.

Hamann said the discovery also opens a window to understanding more about how quasars come into being.

“The fact that we saw one appear in so short a time frame means that it’s a volatile type of structure,” he said. “It could be an evolutionary phase, or maybe a transition stage from one phase to another.”

It also poses interesting questions about the role of quasars in the formation of galaxies. Astronomers hope future observations will prove telling, Hamann said.

“One interesting question in astronomy is ‘how does the evolution of quasars relate to the evolution of galaxies?,’” he said. “The matter ejected from quasars might be the key to this relationship because it can disrupt or regulate the formation of galaxies around quasars. This discovery is a small piece of that story that we can see happening in real time, and what we are going to do now is keep watching.”

Other astronomers and authors of the paper are Paola Rodriquez Hidalgo, a UF graduate student, and Stephane Herbert-Fort, a University of Arizona graduate student.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III, slated to begin mid-year and end in mid-2014, consists of four independent surveys operated by the survey’s consortium. One will probe the distant universe and seek to learn more about mysterious dark energy, while two of the surveys will map the Milky Way and examine origins of stars. The UF-led survey will seek to find giant planets orbiting nearby stars and uncover more about the conditions in which they form.

“What we’re undertaking here is the largest homogeneous survey of planets ever conducted,” said Jian Ge, a UF professor of astronomy and the project’s principal investigator. “We not only want to find more planets, we also want to try to understand the big picture of how and where they form and evolve over time.”

At the heart of the survey — known as MARVELS, short for Multi-object Apache Point Observatory Radial Velocity Exoplanet Large-area Survey – is a UF-designed and built instrument capable of simultaneously surveying as many as 120 stars for planets.

The plan is to use the instrument, which employs a specially designed interferometer, to scour some 11,000 stars for orbiting giant planets — more than three times the number of stars searched by all other telescopes to date. The instrument detects planet signals through measuring the gravitational pull of the planet on the star.

The search is expected to yield not only at least 150 planets, almost double today’s number, but also provide much better understanding of the conditions needed for planets to be present. That’s important for future planet searches, including searches for Earth-like planets, because it will help astronomers narrow their search among millions of stars for those most likely to yield fast or interesting results.

“Only through a systematic, homogeneous survey like this one can we begin to understand different planet populations and probe planet distributions among different type stars and environments,” Ge said. “Also, this survey will provide many signposts for other astronomers using the really big, really expensive telescopes to discover smaller mass planets, possibly Earth-like planets, and also find more systems like our solar system.”

In order to substantially boost the survey speed and sample over current planet surveys capable of single object observations, the MARVELS survey will simultaneously target 120 relatively faint stars. The faintness of the stars largely limits the survey’s sensitivity to giant planets, although the UF instrument has four times the light particle, or photon, collecting power than current single object planet hunting instruments at other telescopes.

The search is expected to begin in the fall, shortly after the instrument is completed and installed. Like the other surveys, the MARVELS survey will be conducted from the 2.5 meter SDSS telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III is a continuation of two previous SDSS surveys in the past eight years. The new survey is expected to be funded in part with a $7 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, with the survey and its four component surveys representing a total investment of about $50 million.

UF’s MARVELS instrument has about $2.5 million in funding, including part of an $875,000 grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation for an earlier, prototype version called the W.M. Keck Exoplanet Tracker. The UF survey is also being funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA and UF. Once the instrument is up and running, UF is expected to receive an additional roughly $6 million in funding for building another survey instrument, operating the survey, and handling the survey data, Ge said.

Ge said an added benefit of UF’s participation in the project is that it will allow UF astronomers free and timely access to data from all of the surveys. “We have full access to all that data, which is a huge scientific resource,” he said.

Stan Dermott, chairman of the UF astronomy department, noted that UF is also a partner with Spain in the world’s largest telescope, the Gran Telescopio Canarias, expected to begin scientific observations this year.

“Over the next 10 years,” he said, “the combination of the SDSS telescope and the GTC telescope may offer UF a unique tool to investigate both giant and Earth-like planets.”

But what if aliens were hunting life outside their own planet? Armed with telescopes only a bit bigger and more powerful than our own, could they peer through the vastness of space and lock in onto Earth as a likely home to life?

That’s the question at the heart of paper co-authored by a University of Florida astronomer that appeared this week in the online edition of Astrophysical Journal. The answer, the authors say, is a qualified “yes.” With a space telescope larger than the Hubble Space Telescope pointed directly at our sun, they say, “hypothetical observers” could measure Earth’s 24-hour rotation period, leading to observations of oceans and the chance of life.

“They would only be able to see Earth as a single pixel, rather than resolving it to take a picture,” said Eric Ford, a UF assistant professor of astronomy and one of five authors of the paper. “But that could be enough for them to identify our planet as one that likely contains clouds and oceans of liquid water.”

This research may sound whimsical, but it has a serious goal: to provide a road map for Earth-bound astronomers trying to study Earth-like planets — a task expected to become possible in coming decades as more powerful telescopes come on line, said Enric Palle, the lead author of the paper and an astronomer with the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias.

For humans or curious aliens, observing planets is challenging for a number of reasons – habitable planets all the more so. The planet can’t be too close or too far away from its star, or its surface would scald or freeze. And, it must have a protective atmosphere like Earth’s.

Most planets found so far are much larger than Earth, which means they are likely hot gas planets similar to Jupiter, a profoundly uninhabitable place with no solid surface and atmosphere composed largely of hydrogen and helium.

But astronomers are beginning to plan how future space telescopes could directly detect planets much closer to Earth’s size and proximity to the sun. One challenge: To figure out how to use a planet’s light to recognize if its surface and atmosphere are Earth-like.

For Ford and his colleagues, the answer lies in probing how the Earth would appear to outside or alien observers.

Astronomers have long recognized that even a large telescope would need to observe Earth for several weeks to collect enough light to identify chemicals in the planet’s atmosphere. During these observations, the brightness of the Earth would change, primarily because of clouds rotating into and out of view. If astronomers could measure Earth’s rotation period, then they would know when a given part of the planet was in view. The hitch was that astronomers were unsure whether Earth’s seemingly chaotically changing cloud patterns would make it impossible for alien observers to determine this rotation rate.

Based on data retrieved from satellite observations of Earth, Ford and his colleagues created a computer model for the brightness of the Earth, revealing that on the global scale Earth’s cloud cover is remarkably consistent — with rain forests usually turning up cloudy, arid regions clear, and so on. As a result, extraterrestrial astronomers who watched Earth for a period of several months would notice repeating patterns – a bit like watching the spots on a spinning ball come into view and then disappear. From those repeating patterns, they could then deduce Earth’s 24-hour rotation period, Ford said.

That done, the “E.T.” astronomers could infer that anomalies in the pattern were caused by changing weather patterns, most prominently, clouds, he said. Although some uninhabitable planets are extremely cloudy, the repeated presence and absence of clouds indicates active weather. On Earth, this variability results in water turning from gas to a vapor and back again, so finding similar variability on another planet would be a reasonable indication of liquid water.

“Venus is always covered in clouds. The brightness never changes,” Ford said. “Mars has virtually no clouds. Earth, on the other hand, has a lot of variation.”

Not only that, but observers could likely also infer the presence of continents and oceans from Earth’s changing light pattern.

The research will be useful to astronomers designing the next generation of space telescopes because it provides an outline of the capabilities required for studying the surfaces of Earth-like planets, Ford said. He said it appears that zeroing in on Earth-like planets orbiting the nearest stars would require a telescope at least twice the size of the Hubble Space Telescope. Ford said he hopes that his research will help to motivate an ever larger space telescope that could search for Earth-like planets around many stars.

The other authors of the paper are P. Montañés-Rodríguez and M. Vazquez, both of the Instituto de Astrofisca de Canarias in Spain, and Sara Seager, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The IAC and UF are partners in the construction of the Gran Telescopio Canarias, a 10-meter telescope in the Canary Islands, which will start operations in 2008.

The research was funded in part by a Ramon y Cajal fellowship for Palle, by a Hubble fellowship and UF for Ford, and by a NASA grant for Seager.

MIT release | IAC release in Spanish | IAC release in English

The Gran Telescopio Canarias, or GTC, under construction in Spain’s Canary Islands for the past seven years, will hold its “first light” opening ceremony Friday. UF, which contributed $5 million to the project and owns a 5 percent share, is the only U.S. institution with a stake in the massive telescope.

“This is one of the largest international projects that the university is involved in, and first light is certainly a big step for a small department,” said Stan Dermott, astronomy department chairman and one of four UF astronomy faculty members who will attend Friday’s ceremony.

The roughly $175 million GTC is not yet complete. Only 12 of the 36 mirrors that together will compose its 34.1-foot primary mirror have been installed, Dermott said. The rest are expected to be mounted this year, with the telescope’s grand opening — to be presided over by King Juan Carlos I of Spain — set for next summer. Only after that date will scientific-quality observations begin.

All that said, enough of the mirror is assembled to allow telescope operators to make initial test runs, he said. So at 10 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time Friday (6 p.m. EDT), Prince Felipe, heir to the Spanish throne, will train the telescope on Polaris, the North Star, for a ceremonial observation to be attended by about 300 people.

Besides Dermott, the UF contingent will be astronomers Charlie Telesco, Rafael Guzman and Anthony Gonzalez, as well as Tom Walsh, UF director of sponsored research. “This will be the first demonstration that the telescope can produce a focused image of a star,” Dermott said.

The Spanish government is the main owner of the GTC, with UF and two institutes in Mexico as partners. As a result of its participation, UF astronomers will be allotted 20 nights of telescope time annually for observations. A UF-designed and built infrared imager and spectrometer, meanwhile, will be one of the first instruments mounted on the telescope when it opens for scientific observation next year.

“We are not just passive partners in this project,” Dermott said. “We are the world’s leader in developing astronomical instruments, and our instrument, CanariCam, will be one of the first instruments used on the GTC.”

Dermott said UF’s participation in the GTC effectively makes it one of a handful of institutions with guaranteed access to the world’s most powerful telescopes. That will open the door to a wide range of research not only at the GTC but elsewhere as well.

”Already we are forming scientific teams that will involve other telescopes to take part in surveys of the distant universe,” he said. “For example, Rafael Guzman is leading a team that will investigate the origin of galaxies. In a sense, we have joined the club of big observers now.”

Funded in part by the Spanish government with a $6.5 million grant, Guzman’s team of 40 astronomers from the U.S., Spain, France and England is conducting a survey called GOYA, or Galaxy Origins and Young Assembly. Other UF astronomers are also participating or heading GTC-related projects.

But University of Florida physicists have proposed a way to do just that, a step they say considerably improves the chance of detecting one of the universe’s most elusive particles, a candidate for the common but mysterious dark matter.

In a paper that appears online today in the journal Physical Review Letters, physicists at the University of Florida and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory propose a redesign of the experiment currently being attempted in various forms by several groups of physicists worldwide. Although theoretical at the moment, they say their design could make such experiments a billion times more sensitive in their goal of detecting axions.

Axions are elemental particles whose confirmation would shed light on several different conundrums in particle physics. These could include pinning down the nature of dark matter, the mysterious substance said to make up 30 percent of the universe but so far observed only indirectly by its effects.

“A half dozen groups want to do this experiment, and some of them probably will try this approach,” said Pierre Sikivie, a faculty member in UF’s physics department and an author of the paper. “It works in principle, but in reality it will take some effort to set this up right so that it can produce a result.”

The unimproved experiment seeks to detect axions by shining a laser down the bore of a powerful superconducting magnet. A wall in the middle stops the laser cold, with the theoretical axions continuing through the wall and into the other side of the magnet. There, the magnet reconverts them into photons, or particles of light.

The detection of this light “reappearing” on the other side of the wall is what gives the experiment its iconic name.

Researchers in the U.S. and Europe are in various stages of conducting the experiment. The activity has been stimulated by a recent Italian experiment that claims to have discovered axion-like particles. The hope is to confirm the Legnaro National Laboratories’ results or take them a step further.

Sikivie, UF physics professor David Tanner and Karl van Bibber, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, propose a redesign of the “shining light through walls” experiment to make it, in their words, “vastly more sensitive.”

In a nutshell, they suggest placing pairs of highly reflective mirrors called Fabry-Perots cavities on both sides of the wall. The cavity on the laser light side of the wall would cause the light to bounce back and forth repeatedly, as though in an echo chamber. This action would produce many more of the hypothesized axions than a single beam of light, making them easier to detect on the other side of the wall.

“What happens is, because the light goes back and forth many times as it goes through the magnet, it produces more axions,” Sikivie said.

The Fabry-Perot cavity on the other side of the wall would perform a similar function, producing even more photons from the added axions.

Sikivie said researchers are doing separate experiments to detect axions produced by the sun, which would seem to be an easier approach because the sun is a much more powerful source than any laser. But the modified experiment would at least in theory have a higher sensitivity than these solar-based experiments.

“With these two cavities on both sides, it actually gets better, by a factor of 10 maybe, than the solar axion experiments,” he said.

A University of Florida astronomer is among more than three dozen astronomers who found the new large planets, announced today at the Transiting Extrasolar Planets Workshop at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.

Stephen Kane, a UF postdoctoral associate, said he and his colleagues pinpointed the planets by detecting the slight dimming of starlight that occurs when the planets pass in front of their stars. Of about 200 planets discovered so far, the new planets are only the 13th and 14th to be found using this technique, called the transit method. But that’s likely to change quickly as the United Kingdom-based effort to discover planets with the transit method gathers steam, Kane said.

“We can expect these two planets to be the first in a wave of a whole lot of these new types of planets,” he said.

Known as “Hot Jupiters” because of their Jupiter-like size and temperature, the new planets are so close to their stars that they complete their orbit in a mere two and two-and-one-half days, respectively. That compares to 88 days for Mercury, the planet with the fastest orbit nearest the sun in our solar system. The very close orbit also means that the new planets are hotter than Mercury, which has a surface temperature of 752 degrees Fahrenheit. The planets are estimated to have a temperature of at least 3,272 degrees.

There is also evidence that the solar radiation from the stars is so intense that it is whipping away their atmospheres. “Hot Jupiters are assumed to have a significantly reduced lifetime due to their proximity to the star,” Kane said.

Most planets outside our solar system have been found using the radial velocity method, which measures the gravitational wobble in the star induced by the orbiting planet. The transit method would seem at first to be impractical because it requires a lucky break: The orbital plane of the planets under observation must be aligned toward Earth so astronomers can see the starlight dim as the planets pass.

The astronomers who discovered the two new planets dealt with this complication through, in Kane’s words, “brute force.” The astronomers surveyed millions of stars using twin telescopes snapping photos of the southern and northern skies from La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands and Sutherland, South Africa. Each telescope is equipped with eight wide-angle cameras, each of which has a field of view of eight degrees, which comprises a relatively large chunk of the sky. By comparison, the full moon comprises about half a degree.

The work was done through UK’s leading planet detection program, a consortium of eight universities called SuperWASP, or Wide Angle Search for Planets.

Kane’s role in the research was to help pick out from the vast numbers of photographed stars the most likely candidates for further investigation. The job was a difficult one because planets passing in front of stars only slightly diminish the starlight, dimming it by only about 1 percent for just a few hours. Kane also led the research on the prototype for SuperWASP, and has worked on both SuperWASP telescopes, among other efforts.

“We have computer programs which are able to search all of these light curves from the stars and see if there’s something in them which looks like the star has become fainter for a short period, but it’s a complicated task,” Kane said.

After SuperWASP identified the tiny dips in starlight caused when the planets passed in front of their stars, a French-built instrument detected a slight wobble in each star’s motion as the planets passed around them, confirming the existence of the planets.

The planets are located in the constellations Andromeda and Delphinius, respectively. The Andromeda planet is more than 1,000 light years away, while the Delphinius planet is 500 light years away.

Both of the new planets are far too hot to support life. But Kane said their discovery adds to growing knowledge about how planets form, which should help astronomers understand and zero in on Earth-like planets.

“Once we understand planet formation, we’ll understand a lot more about how terrestrial planets form as well,” he said.

Source
Stephen Kane, skane@astro.ufl.edu, at conference in Germany:
(011) 49-6221-9130, Room 422

“It’s the most direct evidence that we have for dark matter,” said Anthony Gonzalez, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Florida and a member of the team of astronomers who made the discovery. “You can actually see the separation between where the bulk of the matter is and the normal everyday matter.”

These results are being published in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The discovery was made with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes.

Despite considerable evidence for dark matter, some scientists have proposed alternative theories for gravity where it is stronger on intergalactic scales than predicted by Newton and Einstein, removing the need for dark matter. However, such theories cannot explain the observed effects of this collision.

“A universe that’s dominated by dark stuff seems preposterous, so we wanted to test whether there were any basic flaws in our thinking,” said Doug Clowe of the University of Arizona at Tucson, leader of the study. “These results prove that dark matter exists.”

Gonzalez echoed Clowe, characterizing the results as raising a “significant challenge” to dark matter alternative theories.

In galaxy clusters, the “normal” matter, like the atoms that make up the stars, planets and everything on Earth, is primarily in the form of hot gas and stars. The mass of the hot gas between the galaxies is far greater than the mass of the stars in all of the galaxies. The galaxies and hot gas are bound in the cluster by the gravity of an even greater mass of dark matter. Without dark matter, which is invisible and currently can be detected only through its gravity, the fast-moving galaxies and the hot gas would quickly fly apart.

The team used about a week of Chandra time to observe the galaxy cluster 1E0657-556, which is also known as the “bullet cluster” because of a spectacular bullet-shaped cloud of extremely hot gas. The X-ray image shows that the bullet shape is due to a wind produced by the high-speed collision of a smaller cluster with a larger one.

Meanwhile, the Hubble Space Telescope, European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and Magellan optical telescopes were used to determine the location of the mass in the clusters. This was done using a technique known as gravitational lensing, where gravity from the clusters distorts light from background galaxies as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Gonzalez assisted in the analysis of the Hubble Space Telescope images and otherwise contributed to the optical data analysis.

The hot gas in this collision was slowed by a drag force, similar to air resistance. In contrast, the dark matter was not slowed by the impact because it does not interact directly with itself or the gas except through gravity. This produced the separation of the dark and normal matter seen in the data. If hot gas were the most massive component in the clusters, as proposed by alternative gravity theories, such a separation would not be seen. Instead, dark matter is required.

“This is the type of result that future theories will have to take into account,” said Sean Carroll, a cosmologist who was not involved with the study. “As we move forward to understand the true nature of dark matter, this new result will be impossible to ignore.”

This result also gives scientists more confidence that the Newtonian gravity familiar on Earth and in the solar system also works on the huge scales of galaxy clusters.

“We’ve closed this loophole about gravity, and we’ve come closer than ever to seeing this invisible matter,” said Clowe.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center, Cambridge, Mass.

Additional information and images can be found at: http://chandra.harvard.edu and http://chandra.nasa.gov.

Other scientists involved in the research include Marusa Bradac of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC); Dennis Zaritsky of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory; Maxim Markevitch, Scott Randall, Christine Jones and William Forman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Tim Schrabback of the University of Bonn, and Phil Marshall of KIPAC. Support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation and NASA. This project was also partially supported by the Department of Energy through the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Astronomers from Spain, Mexico and the United States will gather in Miami next week to plan for the first observations of the world’s largest telescope – a $160 million behemoth under development for the past six years on Spain’s Canary Islands.

As many as 150 astronomers from the partner institutions in the Gran Telescopio Canarias or GTC – the University of Florida, two universities in Mexico and several Spanish institutions — will meet in Coral Gables starting Tuesday to plan the telescope’s first observations, expected late next year.

The highlight of the weeklong “First Light Science with the GTC” conference will be a reception, to be attended by UF President Bernie Machen, U.S. and Mexican officials and astronomers, Thursday evening at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables.

Members of the media are invited to the event, which will feature speeches and presentations by Machen and other dignitaries, as well as leading astronomers. There will also be a detailed scale model of the GTC on display, as well as a live video tour of the telescope on the Canary Islands off Africa’s west coast.

A 5 p.m. lecture on the history of astronomy in Spain and the Americas will precede the cocktail reception, which begins at 6 p.m. Presentations and the guided video tour will follow from 7 to 8 p.m. The Biltmore is at 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables.

When the GTC is completed, the telescope will have a 10.4 meter, or 34.1 foot, primary mirror, the largest mirror of any optical telescope in the world. That will give it unprecedented power to peer into the heavens — the equivalent of the ability to see the edge of a dime from two miles away, said UF astronomy professor Charlie Telesco. That means the telescope will be able to spot both extremely faint objects, such as dim planets orbiting bright stars, and very distant ones, such as galaxies millions of light years away.

Because of the time it takes for light to travel, the most distant objects are also the oldest, and the GTC will be able to peer back to when the 13-billion-year old universe was just 7 percent of its current age, or 900 million years old, Telesco said. That will significantly enhance astronomer’s understanding of the origins of galaxies, stars and planets, he said.

“When we add all the pieces together, we can weave a fabric that can begin to describe the universe,” he said.

The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica in Mexico, as well as the Instituto de Astrofisca de Canarias in Spain, are among the GTC’s other partners. The international element is important because it represents a unique opportunity for Florida to build a top telescope program, said Stan Dermott, professor and chairman of the UF astronomy department.

“A single university like UF does not have the financial resources to build a giant telescope or the complex instruments that go with it on its own,” Dermott said. “We can only participate in world-class astronomy and space science through collaboration.”

Dermott noted that the GTC endeavor represents a renewal of ties between countries with traditions in astronomy. Spain was a leading center of astronomy in the era leading up Columbus. Indeed, Spanish astronomers warned Columbus that his estimate of the distance to India was far too low, a warning that proved correct when he stumbled on America en route, said Steve Eikenberry, a UF astronomer. Meanwhile, indigenous people in pre-Columbian Mexico were finely attuned to astronomical calendars and events, he said.

“The Maya in particular in Mexico had very advanced astronomical science,” Eikenberry said. “They built their cities around astronomical orientations and had accurate calendars.”

He and UF astronomy Professor Rafael Guzman will cover that and other elements of the history of Hispanic astronomy leading up to the GTC in their lecture Thursday prior to the reception. “There are significant historical roots for the GTC project,” Eikenberry said. “Today, Hispanic astronomy is seeing a tremendous upsurge and the University of Florida is very much at the epicenter of a lot of that activity.”

Besides the participants, sponsors of the conference include the National Science Foundation, the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau, the Canary Islands Foundation and Schott, the manufacturer of the glass used in the mirror.

En Español:
Astronomos se reunen en Miami en torno al telescopio mas grande del mundo

The team of astronomers from the University of Florida, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has found nearly 300 new galaxy clusters and groups, including nearly 100 at distances of eight to 10 billion light years. The new sample, a six-fold increase in the number of known clusters and groups at such extreme distances, will allow astronomers to study very young galaxies two-thirds of the way back to when the universe is believed to have originated in the Big Bang.

The team will present its findings today in Calgary, Canada, at the American Astronomical Society’s biannual meeting.

Anthony Gonzalez, an assistant professor of astronomy at UF and one of the team of astronomers who made the discovery, likened the view of the clusters to a glimpse at the Los Angeles basin when it was still home only to a collection of dusty, small towns. By knowing what the clusters looked like eight to 10 billion years ago, the astronomers will have a better idea of where and when the first stars and galaxies formed and how they grew and changed over the universe’s full 13.7 billion- year lifespan.

“It would be like taking a snapshot of cities as they were near the beginning,” he said. “You’re watching everything fall together, so you can see some of the pieces, some of the little towns, before they become part of a giant city.”

Galaxy clusters are among the universe’s most dense places, similar to cities on Earth, and a single galaxy cluster can contain hundreds of large galaxies similar to our Milky Way.

The most massive, oldest galaxies tend to be found in galaxy clusters. This makes clusters the best place to look to determine when the first stars formed and how these galaxies grew with time. While individual galaxy clusters have previously been found at similar distances, this is the first time that such a large number of galaxy clusters has been detected so far away.

Gonzalez said the astronomers’ key step in finding the large number of clusters was to merge infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Space telescope with existing deep optical imaging obtained by National Optical Astronomy Observatory Deep Wide-Field Survey team at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

The team used the Spitzer telescope to make infrared mosaics, a process that was thousands of times faster than with the biggest ground-based telescopes because of the Spitzer telescope’s unique capabilities. The combined Kitt Peak and Spitzer data provided information on the distances to the galaxies, enabling the astronomers to weed out small, nearby galaxies whose light was cluttering the view between the observers and the most distant clusters. Gonzalez’s main role was to analyze the maps of massive galaxies and detect the hidden galaxy clusters.

“We’re basically getting rid of all the junk to isolate the most distant, massive galaxies,” Gonzalez said.

The research will allow astronomers to embark on several new studies, said Mark Brodwin, an astronomer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a co-investigator on the team.

“Clusters of galaxies are the repositories of the most massive galaxies in the universe,” he said. “As such, our survey serves as an ideal laboratory in which to study the process of massive galaxy formation over the last two-thirds of the lifetime of the universe.”

The next step is to study the newly discovered galaxies in detail, Brodwin said. Astronomers want to learn more about their size, shape, mass and the rate at which they form new stars and merge together to form larger galaxies. “These key measurements will improve our fundamental understanding of the galaxy formation process,” he said.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, based in Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. JPL is a division of Caltech.

Researchers, including a University of Florida astronomer, found the planet, which has a mass about five times that of Earth, orbiting a small star near the center of the galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius.

Located about three times as far away from its star as the distance from Earth to the sun, it is probably too cold to support life. But its presence suggests there are many other small planets orbiting the star. That makes it likely that at least some are located in the so-called habitable zone, the region around stars where temperatures are moderate enough for liquid water to appear on their surfaces.

“The good thing about this is it shows that planets this size might be quite common in habitable zones,” said Stephen Kane, a postdoctoral associate in UF’s astronomy department.

Kane co-authored a paper about the discovery set to appear Jan. 26 in the journal Nature.

Since the first planet was discovered outside our solar system in 1992, astronomers have found the vast majority of the 160-plus planets so far with a technique called radial velocity. The technique detects planets that are too faint to be seen with visual telescopes by observing the wobble in the stars induced by the orbiting planet.

Bigger planets have more gravitational pull, inducing bigger, more detectable wobbles. Also, the closer planets lie to the star, the more wobble they cause. As a result, radial velocity tends to turn up the largest, closest, hottest and consequently the most gaseous planets – planets, in other words, that are not good candidates for supporting life.

Astronomers discovered the new, small planet by tapping a completely different stellar phenomenon: galactic microlensing. Most easily observed with small, older stars known as M dwarfs, microlensing occurs when light from a distant star encounters the gravitational field of a closer star as the closer star passes in front or just to the side it. The gravitational field literally bends and magnifies the light.

The effect is a bit like the beam from a searchlight encountering a giant magnifying glass. But, for planet-finders, the key item of interest is that if the parent star is orbited by a planet, the planet’s gravitational field also acts as its own little lens — magnifying some of the distant star’s light in a brief but distinctive flicker.

“There’s a very subtle effect, a spike, and that’s what we’re looking for,” Kane said.

It’s rare for one star to pass so near another star that it causes microlensing to occur. The timing is also brief, with most microlensing events lasting 30 days or less. As a result, astronomers hunting such events focus their searches on the center of the galaxy, where stars are most densely distributed. This area is best viewed from the Southern Hemisphere, so astronomers coordinate observations using multiple telescopes in such places as Australia, Chile, South Africa and the Canary Islands.

“We have a real-time alert system,” Kane said. “We’ve got people in Australia observing, and if they see something strange happen but their source is starting to set, they call up South Africa and say, ‘Something’s happening here. Point your telescopes at this.’”

In the latest finding, some 73 astronomers affiliated with three independent groups coordinated observations of a microlensing event first identified on July 11, 2005. Nearly a month later, on Aug. 9, the astronomers observed “a short duration deviation from a single-lens light curve … due to a low-mass planet orbiting the lens star,” the Nature paper says.

The planet is at the outer edge of the zone where it can be seen. With a surface temperature below 350 degrees below zero, it is probably rocky and icy. Even if conditions appeared more favorable for life, its location would make it tough to learn more: The planet is located 7,000 parsecs, or nearly 23,000 light years, from Earth.

That said, M dwarfs are the most common type of stars in the galaxy. The fact that microlensing uncovered such a small planet around one M dwarf suggests that there are likely many others, possibly with better conditions, Kane said.

“This has huge implications for finding life,” he said.