Home of MagAO and MagAO-X.
Today was our first night of Arizona engineering. We have a lot of calibrations to do, with all of our modes, but sadly it was cloudy and windy out of the North. I hear it’s because of El Nino.
Sunset:
These pictures are all from the past week or so. Which one is Tucson and which one is LCO?
Yesterday’s song was Glitch Mob, which reminded me of flash mobs:
We have reached 100% MagAO for 2015B.
If you visit LCO you’ll notice that many, if not most, of the car doors have bird droppings all over them just behind the mirrors. This video shows you why — some of the birds have discovered that other birds live inside the mirrors, and spend most of their days attacking said mirror-birds. This is just a little #LifeAtLCO.
The intended purpose of a “poker face” is to make a fortune. Tonight the Glitch Mob tells us about Fortune Days.
For the first time in MagAO’s history we closed the loop on our first night. It usually takes too long during the day to get everything done. We didn’t get Clio bolted on, but we were able to close the loop with the “dummy dichroic”.
Following last night’s song, which was a Gaga Parody, here’s a Gaga cover.
Clio is cold, thanks to Mauricio Navarette’s help with the liquid nitrogen. He brought a longer hose, showed me how to clear out the warm air before pumping it in, and filled Clio when ever he could today.
Jared and I went for a ride in the new Clay car with Michigan grad students Jeb Bailey and Yingyi Song to the GMT site. Buell posted about the ground-breaking ceremony last week — it wasn’t just ceremonial, there is actual construction going on up there. It’s a huge flat Cerro Campanas and we found some rocks that ring like bells as the name says.
Yesterday’s song of the day was a pop parody about science. Today’s song of the day is a pop parody about doing science:
MagAO’s revolutionary visible light capabilities have allowed us to directly image a planet residing inside a circumstellar disk gap for the first time. These images, of the forming protoplanet LkCa 15 b, provide the first incontrovertible evidence of accretion onto a forming planet.
In fact, the study joined two independent results from Arizona facilities – interferometric data from the Large Binocular Telescope on Mt. Graham in Arizona and direct images from our very own MagAO system at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.
The MagAO data was obtained by myself (Kate Follette), Laird Close, Jared Males, and Katie Morzinski as part of the Giant Accreting Protoplanet Survey (GAPplanetS). The final product: images of the forming protoplanet LkCa15b glowing in the light of ultra hot hydrogen gas. This is an indication that the planet is still growing, because Hydrogen gas glows at this characteristic wavelength of light when it is in the process of falling onto a massive object – in this case a protoplanet! LkCa15 b is visible glowing in Hydrogen-alpha, but unlike our previous discovery of HD142527B, it is NOT glowing in ordinary visible light. This indicates that the underlying object is very low mass – the first true GAPplanet!
Read about the entire study, which combined our H-alpha data with near-infrared interferometric data from the Large Binocular Telescope collected by Steph Sallum and Josh Eisner, at the links below. Steph and Josh were able to isolate light from two more protoplanet candidates – LkCa15c and d, and saw LkCa15b in the same place as the MagAO direct images, providing independent confirmation of its identity as a forming protoplanet!
