### A Jewel for the Northern Crown

On approximately May 18 each year, the constellation Corona Borealis, a.k.a. the Northern Crown, is directly overhead as viewed from Berkeley, California (slightly North of zenith as viewed from my parents' place in Pasadena). I have to admit that I never paid much attention to this fairly inconspicuous constellation until about a year ago. But around the Summer 2006 I noticed that one of the stars in the constellation, designated kappa by the German astronomer Johann Bayer in the early 1600's, did something really interesting. From about 2004 to 2005 the star was steadily accelerating away from the Earth. This is not unusual, stars commonly do this as they are tugged by the gravity of other stars. But in 2005 kappa Coronae Borealis turned around and started heading back toward us. If it performed another of these turns anytime within the next 10 years, it would indicate that the star has a planet orbiting it.

I try not to get my hopes up too much when it comes to potential planets. I used to jump out of my seat every time I saw a hint of a signal in my data, but I've had far more false alarms and disappointments than planets over the years. Astronomy is characterized by long stretches of monotony interrupted by short stretches of amazing discovery. Most days I'm tracking down bugs in my computer program, or testing new algorithms, or writing telescope proposals. But as I noted in a previous post, every once in a while you get to figure out something really cool that no one else has ever known before. And if you're a planet hunter, sometimes you find new planets--new places in the Galaxy that no one on Earth ever knew about.

This summer I had one of those exciting Astronomy moments. Soon after I graduated from UC Berkeley, kappa Coronae Borealis performed a U-turn and revealed the presence of a Jupiter-like planet. The standard convention is to name planets after the stars they orbit. The first planet gets a "b" tacked onto the star's name, the second discovered gets a "c" and so on. This leads to a lot unromantic planet names. Instead of Tatooine or the Dagoba System, examples of extrasolar planets include HD86081b and HIP14810c. But because the kappa star in Corona Borealis is bright enough to be seen by an astronomer in the early 1600s, it gets named after its constellation--and so does this new planet. So I'm proud to announce today the latest exoplanet: kappa Coronae Borealis b.

My collaborators and I wrote a paper announcing the planet back in September (along with another planet, HD167042b) and it was accepted in the Astrophysical Journal about a week ago. I posted the the paper on the astronomy preprint server (astro-ph) and it appears in tonight's addition. Since the paper is fairly technical, here are the key points about this new planet:
1. It has an orbital period of 3.3 years, so a year on this planet would take 1208 days.
2. It orbits at a distance of 2.7 times the Earth-Sun distance, which makes its orbit remarkably similar to the minor planet Ceres in our Solar System, which orbits between Mars and Jupiter.
3. The planet is 1.8 times the mass of Jupiter, or 572 times the mass of Earth. It likely does not have a solid surface, but instead is surrounded by a deep atmosphere of hydrogen making it a rather unpleasant place to hang out. However, there's always the possibility that it has one or more moons that could be Earth-like. But until technology makes several more leaps forward, we can't know for sure.
4. The star has a mass of 1.8 times the mass of the Sun. Unlike the Sun, the star has run out of hydrogen fuel in its core and is now burning Helium. As a result, it has swollen to a radius of 4.7 times the radius of the Sun, it's about 12.3 times as bright as the Sun and 800 degrees cooler. If you were orbiting kappa CrBb, the star would appear to be about twice the size of the Sun as viewed from Earth (1 degree across, rather than 1/2 of a degree), and it would have a red tint, rather than the Sun's whitish-yellow. Evolved stars like kappa Coronae Borealis are known as subgiants.
5. Planets around these massive subgiants appear to be twice as abundant as planets around Sun-like stars. 9% of stars that are twice as massive as the Sun have Jupiter-like planets, compared to about 4-5% of Sun-like stars. This is evidence of a relationship between the mass of a star and the likelihood that it has a planet, which may be an important clue about how planets form.
6. The planet's orbit is not circular. Instead it has an eccentricity of 0.145. Here's how the orbit of the planet would look if it were in our Solar System:

This Spring, if you're ever in a dark place far away from a major city you should try to locate the constellation Corona Borealis. Right above the U-shaped crown is a red Jewel that has an alien world orbiting it. Who knows, maybe there will be some Kappans are looking back at you!

Now excuse me, but I have a proposal to edit and a deconvolution algorithm to test.

karinms said…
Sweet!

It is Berkely'o'clock on astro-ph this evening:
you & collaborators, Eugene, Josh, Erik, Sukanya, Joe Barranco. Crazy.
JohnJohn said…
Yeah, it was Berkeley'o'clock the last time I posted to astro-ph. That day it was me et al., Marshall, James (twice), Holly and Carl! I guess all that time spent together in Campbell hall synchronized our publication cycles :)
NERDS. NERDS. NERDS. NERDS. NERDS.

Did you know that I am also occassionally referred to as a "Jewel of the Northern Crown" in reference to my residence in Minnesota? It's quite remarkable how this state has made me into something of a star in my own right.
jcom said…
Is this Johnson et al. 2007c now??? Oh the hotness!
mama mia said…
kudos, son-in-law! can't wait to tell all my friends about the kappa b....I wonder if a sorority or fraternity is up there?
bloggerx said…
regardin "The new batch of planets have yet another interesting pattern: their orbits are mainly circular, while planets around sunlike stars span a wide range of circular to elliptical paths. Johnson says he's now trying to find an explanation."

I would think that the mixture of eliptical v.s. circular orbit ratio would be an indication of the age of the solar system and the formation of the planets. The more eliptical (lower ratio) the younger the planet(s) in the system.

### On the Height of J.J. Barea

Dallas Mavericks point guard J.J. Barea standing between two very tall people (from: Picassa user photoasisphoto).

Congrats to the Dallas Mavericks, who beat the Miami Heat tonight in game six to win the NBA championship.

Okay, with that out of the way, just how tall is the busy-footed Maverick point guard J.J. Barea? He's listed as 6-foot on NBA.com, but no one, not even the sports casters, believes that he can possibly be that tall. He looks like a super-fast Hobbit out there. But could that just be relative scaling, with him standing next to a bunch of extremely tall people? People on Yahoo! Answers think so---I know because I've been Google searching "J.J. Barea Height" for the past 15 minutes.

So I decided to find a photo and settle the issue once and for all.

I then used the basketball as my metric. Wikipedia states that an NBA basketball is 29.5 inches in circumfe…

### The Force is strong with this one...

Last night we were reviewing multiplication tables with Owen. The family fired off doublets of numbers and Owen confidently multiplied away. In the middle of the review Owen stopped and said, "I noticed something. 2 times 2 is 4. If you subtract 1 it's 3. That's equal to taking 2 and adding 1, and then taking 2 and subtracting 1, and multiplying. So 1 times 3 is 2 times 2 minus 1."

I have to admit, that I didn't quite get it at first. I asked him to repeat with another number and he did with six: "6 times 6 is 36. 36 minus 1 is 35. That's the same as 6-1 times 6+1, which is 35."

Ummmmm....wait. Huh? Lemme see...oh. OH! WOW! Owen figured out

x^2 - 1 = (x - 1) (x +1)

So $6 \times 8 = 7 \times 7 - 1 = (7-1) (7+1) = 48$. That's actually pretty handy!

You can see it in the image above. Look at the elements perpendicular to the diagonal. There's 48 bracketing 49, 35 bracketing 36, etc... After a bit more thought we…

### The Long Con

Hiding in Plain Sight

ESPN has a series of sports documentaries called 30 For 30. One of my favorites is called Broke which is about how professional athletes often make tens of millions of dollars in their careers yet retire with nothing. One of the major "leaks" turns out to be con artists, who lure athletes into elaborate real estate schemes or business ventures. This naturally raises the question: In a tightly-knit social structure that is a sports team, how can con artists operate so effectively and extensively? The answer is quite simple: very few people taken in by con artists ever tell anyone what happened. Thus, con artists can operate out in the open with little fear of consequences because they are shielded by the collective silence of their victims.
I can empathize with this. I've lost money in two different con schemes. One was when I was in college, and I received a phone call that I had won an all-expenses-paid trip to the Bahamas. All I needed to do was p…