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media notices
Animation by Robert Hurt, Spitzer Science Center.
"Incipient planet formation:" Catherine Espaillat revealed the class of pre-transitional disks, exemplified by UX Tau A, in a paper and press release in December 2007.
Catherine also joined up with Freddy Lahuis and Ilaria Pascucci to reveal gas in protoplanetary disks that can be traced by emission from ionized neon. See Catherine's paper in ApJ Letters, and the press release at SSC from September 2007.
Our observation of water-line emission in the protostar NGC 1333 IRAS4B -- and thereby the first sight of protostellar envelope material raining onto a brand-new protoplanetary disk -- was widely covered by the media in late August 2007. See the paper in Nature, or the press release at SSC.
"It takes a village:" Elise Furlan's paper on the possibility of planetary formation in the quadruple system HD 98800 was featured in a press release in July 2007.
The 2007 Guinness Book of World Records lists CoKu Tau/4b as the Youngest Planet Known, and in July 2007 MSNBC selected it for the list of the ten most intriguing exoplanets. Alas, the CoKu Tau/4 system looks more likely to be a binary star than a star-giant planet system, but we always thought the giant planets we inferred for GM Aur and DM Tau were younger anyway.
Greg Sloan summed up the unusual PAH emission from HD 100764, and the implications for the formation of organic matter later incorporated into planetary systems, in a paper that was the subject of an April 2007 press release.
"Baby pictures of the Solar system:" Nuria Calvet's paper on possible planetary formation in the disks of GM Aur and DM Tau was the subject of a Web feature at SSC, in September 2005.
The cover story of the July 2005 issue of Discover magazine, written by our UR colleague Adam Frank, features the IRS_Disks team and their work on protoplanetary disk evolution and planet formation.
The
media folks at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is the Spitzer Space
Telescope's home lab, produced a really slick Flash presentation on the
highlights of the first year of Spitzer's operation. They chose six results to
highlight, two of which -- "Youngest Planet" and "Ingredients For Life" -- are
results from the IRS_Disks program: the same results we announced in the May
2004 Space Science Update. The presentation also contains lots of the great
animations that Robert Hurt has made to illustrate Spitzer results, occasionally
narrated by Robert himself.
Have a look at
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/spitzer-2005/ .
RedNova.com selected our indirect detection of a giant planet in the disk around the ~1 million-year-old star CoKu Tau/4 as #3 on their list of the top space stories of 2004. Read all about it here.
When a
group of our theoretical-astrophysics colleagues in Rochester showed with a
dynamical simulation that our observation of the central clearing in the disk of
CoKu Tau/4 is indeed consistent with the effect of a recently-formed giant
planet, this topic lurched back into the news.
The paper, by Alice Quillen et al:
Astrophys. J. (Letters) 612, L137 (2004) .
Example news coverage in the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50170-2004Nov14_2.html
The
5-27-04 NASA Space Science Update generated a fair amount of press -- at
least 380 major newspapers and at least 70 TV broadcasts within a day. Here are
some of our favorites:
New York Times, 28 May 2004: page A18
Washington Post, 28 May 2004: page A2
New Scientist:
www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99995052
BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3755617.stm
NASA Space Science Update, 27
May 2004
The
first "science-based" press conference on Spitzer Space Telescope observations,
featuring Ed Churchwell with results from the GLIMPSE legacy project, Dan Watson
with results from IRS_Disks on planet formation in the disk of CoKu Tau/4 and organics and ices in protoplanetary envelopes, Deborah Padgett and Alan Boss serving as outside
pundits, and Anne Kinney as emcee.
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