Category The Universe, Exploring the Universe, Solar System, The Moon, Space, Space Travel

The International Astronomical Union  (IAU) is the only internationally recognized authority for assigning astronomical designations to celestial objects and surface features on them. The purpose of this is to ensure that names assigned are unambiguous. There have been many historical star catalogues, and new star catalogues are set up on a regular basis as new sky surveys are performed. All designations of objects in recent star catalogues start with an “initialism”, which is kept globally unique by the IAU. Different star catalogues then have different naming conventions for what goes after the initialism, but modern catalogs tend to follow a set of generic rules for the data formats used.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is the officially recognized authority in astronomy for assigning designations to celestial bodies such as stars, planets, and minor planets, including any surface features on them. In response to the need for unambiguous names for astronomical objects, it has created a number of systematic naming systems for objects of various sorts.

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Since then, astronomers – who study the universe and everything in it, like planets – have used bigger and better telescopes to find rings around all of the outer gas giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. These planets, unlike others in our system, consist largely of gas.

The first theory states that the rings formed at the same time as the planet. Some particles of gas and dust that the planets are made of were too far away from the core of the planet and could not be squashed together by gravity. They remained behind to form the ring system.

The second theory, and my personal favourite, is that the rings were formed when two of the moons of the planet, which had formed at the same time as the planet, somehow got disturbed in their orbits and eventually crashed into each other (an orbit is the circular path that the moon travels on around the planet). 

The other thing that all rings systems share is that they are all made of small particles of ice and rock. The smallest of these particles are no bigger than dust grains, while the largest of the particles are about 20 metres in diameter – about the size of a school hall. All the rings around the planets also contain gaps that are sometimes many kilometres wide and at first nobody could figure out why. We later learned that the gaps were caused by small moons that had gobbled up all the material in that particular part of the ring system.

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Tiangong-1 is a single-module space station operated by the China National Space Administration. The module was launched in 2011 and hosted two crews of taikonauts (Chinese astronauts) in 2012 and 2013. Since China’s space agency discloses less information about its missions than other space agencies, the details surrounding the space station are not widely known. 

The orbit of the space station passes over most of the civilized world, with the exclusion of northern latitudes that include the United States, Russia and Canada, as well as the extreme south of the world, including Antarctica and the tip of South Africa. However, most of the Earth is covered by water, reducing the chances of a crash in a populated area.

Tiangong-1 (whose name means “Heavenly Palace”) weighs about 8.5 metric tons, and is about 34 feet long by 11 feet wide (10.4 meters by 3.4 meters). It contains an experiment module — where the astronauts live and work — and a resource module that contains propellant tanks and rocket engines.

A primary goal for the module was to help the Chinese practice space dockings, which is an important skill for nations looking to build larger space stations or to send multiple spacecraft to the moon, Mars or other locations in the solar system.

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The Chang’e 1 lunar orbiter was China’s first deep space mission. The program was divided into three phases: circling the Moon, landing on the Moon and returning from the Moon. The program goals were to be accomplished between 2007 and 2020.

The goal of this first mission, besides proving basic technologies and testing out several engineering systems, was to create a 3D map of the lunar surface, to analyze the distribution of certain chemicals on the lunar surface, to survey the thickness of the lunar soil, to estimate helium 3 resources, and to explore the space environment (solar wind, etc.) in near-lunar space.

The Chinese Lunar Exploration Program is designed to be conducted in four phases of incremental technological advancement: The first is simply reaching lunar orbit, a task completed by Chang’e 1 in 2007 and Chang’e 2 in 2010. The second is landing and roving on the Moon, as Chang’e 3 did in 2013 and Chang’e 4 did in 2019. The third is collecting lunar samples from the near-side and sending them to Earth, a task for the future Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 missions. The fourth phase consists of development of a robotic research station near the Moon’s south pole. The program aims to facilitate a crewed lunar landing in the 2030s and possibly build an outpost near the south pole.

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In 2009, NASA launched a spacecraft called Kepler to look for exoplanets. Kepler looked for planets in a wide range of sizes and orbits. And these planets orbited around stars that varied in size and temperature.

Kepler detected exoplanets using something called the transit method. When a planet passes in front of its star, it’s called a transit. As the planet transits in front of the star, it blocks out a little bit of the star’s light. That means a star will look a little less bright when the planet passes in front of it.

When a planet passes in front of a star as viewed from Earth, the event is called a “transit”. On Earth, we can observe an occasional Venus or Mercury transit. These events are seen as a small black dot creeping across the Sun—Venus or Mercury blocks sunlight as the planet moves between the Sun and us. Kepler finds planets by looking for tiny dips in the brightness of a star when a planet crosses in front of it—we say the planet transits the star.

Once detected, the planet’s orbital size can be calculated from the period (how long it takes the planet to orbit once around the star) and the mass of the star using Kepler’s Third Law of planetary motion. The size of the planet is found from the depth of the transit (how much the brightness of the star drops) and the size of the star. From the orbital size and the temperature of the star, the planet’s characteristic temperature can be calculated. 

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Gamma Cephei Ab is an exoplanet approximately 45 light-years away in the constellation of Cepheus (the King). The planet was confirmed to be in orbit around Gamma Cephei A in 2002, but was first suspected to exist around 1988 (making this planet arguably the first true exoplanet discovered).

The first indications of Gamma Cephei Ab were reported in July 1988. The planet was tentatively identified by a Canadian team of astronomers, which was led by Bruce Campbell, Gordon Walker, and Stephenson Yang, while its existence was also announced by Anthony Lawton and P. Wright in 1989. Though not confirmed, this would have been the first true discovery of an extrasolar planet, and it was hypothesized based on the same radial velocity technique later used successfully by others. However, the claim was retracted in 1992 due to the quality of the data not being good enough to make a solid discovery.

On September 24, 2002, Gamma Cephei Ab was finally confirmed. The team of astronomers (including William D. Cochran, Artie P. Hatzes, et al.) at the Planetary Systems and their Formation Workshop announced the preliminary confirmation of a long-suspected planet Gamma Cephei Ab with a minimum mass of 1.59 MJ (1.59 times that of Jupiter). The parameters were later recalculated when direct detection of the secondary star Gamma Cephei B allowed astronomers to better constrain the properties of the system.

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