The Huachuca Astronomy Club will hold their February meeting in the Community Room of the Student Union Building, Cochise College Sierra Vista campus on February 19, 2016 at 7 PM.
Our speaker will be HAC member Tom Kaye.
Tom is an advanced amateur astronomer that moved from Chicago to Sierra Vista to take advantage of the clear skies. He runs a wide field telescope nightly in search of exoplanets and records data on other unusual stellar targets. He is also the caretaker of the famous Junk Bond Observatory 32” telescope one of the largest in southern Arizona. His projects can be seen at www.spectrashift.com
His talk is titled: White Dwarf Eats Asteroids for Lunch
Abstract
For many years observations of white dwarf stars showed there were unusual elements in their spectra. These elements must have come from asteroids spiraling in to the star. It wasn’t until last year that the Kepler space telescope detected an anomaly around a white dwarf that was suspected of being a large asteroid in close orbit. Before much investigation could take place on the star WD-1145 it went behind the Sun and was gone for the season. Coming back out of the Sun a professional / amateur collaboration was formed to tackle low-in-the-sky observations before the professional observatories were able to image it. The team stumbled into the most active phase of the system, tracking multiple dust clouds, chunks and the main planetesimal orbiting every 4.5 hours. This talk will cover the discoveries made by this team and the new physics used to analyze the data.