1844 Daguerreotype Of Agrippa Hull, A Free Born Black And Veteran Of The American Revolution.

A cosmic barbecue: Researchers spot 60 new ‘hot Jupiter’ candidates

Yale researchers have identified 60 potential new “hot Jupiters"—highly irradiated worlds that glow like coals on a barbecue grill and are found orbiting only 1% of Sun-like stars.

Hot Jupiters constitute a class of gas giant planets located so close to their parent stars that they take less than a week to complete an orbit. Second-year Ph.D. student Sarah Millholland and astronomy professor Greg Laughlin identified the planet candidates via a novel application of big data techniques. They used a supervised machine learning algorithm—a sophisticated program that can be trained to recognize patterns in data and make predictions—to detect the tiny amplitude variations in observed light that result as an orbiting planet reflects rays of light from its host star.

Millholland and Laughlin searched systematically for reflected light signals in the observations of more than 140,000 stars from four years of data from NASA’s Kepler mission. The Kepler spacecraft is best known for enabling the detection of thousands of exoplanets that transit their host stars. During a transit, a planet passes in front of a star and causes a periodic dip in the observed starlight.

Reflected light signals can be difficult to distinguish from stellar or instrumental variability, the researchers said, but a big data approach enabled them to pull out the faint signals. They generated thousands of synthetic datasets and trained an algorithm to recognize the properties of the reflected light signals in comparison to those with other types of variability.

The reflected light signals hold rich information about the planets’ atmospheres, according to the researchers. They contain characteristics such as cloud existence, atmospheric composition, wind patterns, and day-night temperature contrasts. Read more at: phys.org

she disappeared on the horizon

by Denny Bitte

French soldiers moving up through a communication trench during the Battle of the Hills, April 1917.

I respect your choice, even if it breaks my heart. I will never run after you or beg you to do something you don’t want to. Because that’s how much I love you. To choose your happiness over mine. I won’t be selfish with you. Forced love is not true love.

F.F. // While I’m moving on.. #2 (via myunpredictableuniverse)

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The Leavenworth Weekly Times, Kansas, April 12, 1888

Time waits for no one