Good morning.
It’s a sunny Wednesday for the Whippet City, with a high of forty-one, and west winds at 10 to 15 mph. We’ll have 9h 14m of sunlight, 10h 18m of daylight, and tomorrow will be one minute longer.
Discovery takes more than one form, and comes from more than one place. Consider the Ars Technica story, 15 potential planets in habitable zones found by citizen scientists:
It’s distinctly possible that the first truly Earth-like planet in another star system will be discovered by a non-scientist.
Well, that’s not quite true: the process of discovery is more complicated than that. However, volunteers working with exoplanet data from NASA’s Kepler telescope recently identified 42 planet candidates orbiting relatively nearby stars. Of those, 20 potentially lie within the habitable zone of their systems, meaning the basic conditions could be right for liquid surface water. One of these worlds, known as PH2 b, is definitely a Jupiter-sized planet clearly within its star’s habitable zone. While the planet itself is unlikely to harbor conditions suitable for life, perhaps it has moons that would.
These volunteers were from Planet Hunters, part of the Zooniverse family of citizen science projects. Several Zooniverse efforts have yielded a number of scientific papers, proving that real science can arise from crowdsourcing. The latest Planet Hunter paper, which will be published in the highly ranked Astrophysical Journal, credited more than 40 citizen scientists, a collaboration that does credit both to them and to the professional scientists they worked with.
On this day in 1493, a misidentification:
A Mermaid” by John William Waterhouse, 1901
Manatee
…Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, sailing near the Dominican Republic, sees three “mermaids”–in reality manatees–and describes them as “not half as beautiful as they are painted.” Six months earlier, Columbus (1451-1506) set off from Spain across the Atlantic Ocean with the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, hoping to find a western trade route to Asia. Instead, his voyage, the first of four he would make, led him to the Americas, or “New World.”
From Google-a-Day, a question about Madison Square Garden: “The first fight ever held in the Madison Square Garden ring was lost by what former and future champ?”