Category Archives: research

Exocomets may be as common as exoplanets

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Thousands of potential exoplanets and many stars with massive disks of gas and dust that suggest planets are forming have been found. However, not much of the stuff intermediate between dust and planets, such as asteroids, planetesimals and comets have been detected. UC Berkeley and SSL astronomer Barry Welsh has looked closely at a number of stars with dust disks and found evidence that they also have comets. Read more.

FOXSI sounding rocket launch

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On Friday November 2nd, an SSL sounding rocket had a successful flight from the White Sands Missile Range.  The Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager (FOXSI) payload observed the Sun for six minutes before landing safely and intact in the New Mexico desert.  FOXSI carried focusing X-ray optics and silicon strip detectors and successfully imaged solar X-rays during its flight.  After some upgrades, FOXSI will fly again in two years.

View of a primitive meteorite

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This shows an image of a primitive meteorite* overlaid with a color image showing the chemical composition.  Red represents aluminum, green represents magnesium, and blue represents calcium.  The red/green stripes on the right side are an object called a chondrule.  These are small rocks formed by some unknown event early in the formation of the solar system.  Whatever the nature of the event, it produced a plethora of millimeter sized molten droplets that rapidly crystallized into spherical and nearly spherical shapes in outer space.  The bar-like pattern you see in this chondrule tells us that it cooled much more rapidly than other materials, but not so fast as to form “dendritic” patterns which look like snowflakes.  By understanding this chondule and others, scientists at SSL and elsewhere hope to reconstruct the tumultuous formation of our solar system.  Someday we may even understand the formation of the planets themselves.
 
* For folks interested in details, this meteorite is Parnallee, an LL 3.6.  The B&W image is a backscatter electron image using the Tescan Vega3 SEM, and the chemical map was acquired using an Oxford X-ray detector.