Be sure to join us on Monday the 21st of August 2017 from 9:30AM to 11:30AM for ‘The Great UCLA Eclipse’ at UCLA’s Court of Sciences. A partial Solar Eclipse (~60 percent coverage) will be visible at UCLA and we would like to showcase exceptional research and our collaboration between Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, Astronomy Live! and The Optical Society (UCLA Chapter).

Solar telescopes will be set up (weather permitting) for you to get to safely see this eclipse. FREE,FUN and open to the public! 300 Solar Eclipse glasses will be given away, first come, first served to the public as well!

Stay tuned to this page for more details, and be sure to use hashtag #UCLAeclipse on your social media!

UCLA EPSS Professor Margaret Kivelson has won the 2017 Gerard P. Kuiper Prize, the highest award given to planetary scientists from the American Astronomical Society’s Division For Planetary Sciences. The Kuiper Prize is given for Outstanding Contributions to Planetary Science.

From the AAS news release:

“The Gerard P. Kuiper Prize for outstanding contributions to planetary science goes to Margaret G. Kivelson (University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Michigan) for her work studying Jupiter’s magnetospheric plasmas to understand the interiors of planets and their moons. Kivelson’s pioneering discoveries of an ocean inside Jupiter’s moon Europa and a magnetic field generated by neighboring Ganymede showed us that these icy bodies are not inert but dynamic worlds. Her insights have spurred us to recognize that habitability need not depend on proximity to the Sun in the traditional habitable zone. As a direct result of Kivelson’s advancements, we now recognize that the ocean worlds of the outer solar system may represent our best chances for discovering life beyond Earth.”

The Institute for Planets and Exoplanets has signed an international collaboratory effort to bring expert scientists from the Macau Institute of Science & Technology (MUST) to meet, interact, and work alongside scientists at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in order to foster growth among varying scientific fields and strengthen partnership amongst the scientific community.

Abstract: An undiscovered ~10 Earth mass planet in our solar system has been hypothesized to explain the orbital characteristics of about a dozen of the most distant Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) and Inner Oort Cloud Objects (IOCs). I’ll present the observational evidence for the planet and explain why the evidence is unlikely to be due to observational bias. I’ve used the known KBOs and IOCs as an input for over two thousand dynamical simulations run on the Northern Arizona University High Performance Computing Cluster. These simulations suggest a probable search area for the planet of just a few hundred square degrees, about the apparent size of your outstretched hand against the sky. This fall, we should be able to confirm or rule out the hypothesized planet using Hyper Suprime-Cam on the Subaru 8 meter telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii and the Dark Energy Camera on the Blanco 4 meter telescope in Chile. Regardless of its discovery, additional distant KBOs and IOCs will be found and will help constrain future predictions.

Abstract:
Compared to the Sun and to the gas+dust composition of the interstellar medium from which the solar system formed, the Carbon and Nitrogen content of the bulk silicate Earth (mantle+hydrosphere+atmosphere) is reduced by several orders of magnitude, relative to Silicon. Evidence from primitive bodies as a function of distance from the Sun suggests that at least part of this depletion must occur early in the process of planetesimal assembly. With pioneering infrared and (sub)mm observations such as those enabled by ground-based 8-10m class telescopes (and in future the James Webb Space Telescope) and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), we can now examine the principal volatile reservoirs of gas rich disks as a function position within the disk and evolutionary state. Key to these studies is the concept of condensation fronts, or ‘snow lines,’ in disks – locations at which key volatiles such as water, carbon monoxide, or nitrogen first condense from the gas. This talk will review the observational characterization of snow lines in protoplanetary disks via both gas and dust tracers, especially recent ALMA observations, and highlight the laboratory astrophysics studies and theoretical investigations that are needed to tie the observational results to the delivery of volatiles to planetary surfaces in the habitable zones around Sun-like stars.

I present a new dust modeling analysis on active asteroid P/2010 A2, which was successful to reproduce the morphological evolution of the dust cloud over seven years. Interestingly, no object has been detected at the dust ejection point of this model in any observations. This result suggests that the precursor asteroid was shattered by an impact, leaving only the debris cloud.

]]>0Dave Milewskihttp://planets.ucla.edu/?p=126992017-04-27T22:09:30Z2017-03-31T18:34:01ZTalk Title: Lurking in the Shadows: Long Period Gas Giant Planets as Tracers of Planet Formation

Abstract: Over the past decade surveys using a variety of techniques have uncovered a diverse array of exoplanet systems. Many of these new systems are difficult to explain within the framework of standard planet formation theories, and have forced theorists and observers alike to re-evaluate their narratives for planet formation and migration. For example, direct imaging surveys have discovered a growing population of extremely young, planetary-mass companions at separations of > 100 AU, which pose significant challenges to in-situ formation models. The rotation rates of these young giant planets provide a unique window into the late stages of accretion, and can provide clues to past formation histories as well as present-day properties such as planetary atmospheric composition or the presence of moons and rings. In this talk I will discuss my work using radial velocity, direct imaging, and high-resolution spectroscopy techniques to study long period gas giant planets as tracers of formation and migration histories of planetary systems.

A Global Climate Model (GCM) is a convenient and powerful tool for studying any planetary atmosphere.
I will give three examples of its application for Mars and Venus.
First, I will explain how the modeling of water ice clouds unravels the water cycle on Mars, today and in its recent past.
Then, I will present techniques to reconcile a GCM with observations, in particular inside Martian dust storms.
Finally, I will tackle the modeling of mysterious gigantic gravity waves recently seen on Venus.

Abstract: I will discuss recent progress in modeling a number of important regimes in planet formation. First I will report on recent developments in the disk instability model for giant planet formation, which is attractive to explain extrasolar gas giants on wide orbits. I will show how new Lagrangian hydrodynamical techniques can solve the long standing issue of non-convergence of the critical cooling for disk fragmentation. The same hydro method allows to study the combination of self-gravity and MHD turbulence in disks, offering the intriguing possibility that angular momentum dissipation by MRI may promote gravitational instability. I will then discuss planetesimal formation scenarios, introducing a new drag-vorticity instability whereby vortices in disks can generate long-lived, large enhancements of dust density which could be the precursors of planetesimals. This scenario is alternative to the conventional streaming instability and can take place starting from a wider range of initial properties of the dust layer. Finally, with the help of a novel sub-grid model for the coagulation and fragmentation of dust grains implemented in our multi-fluid code, we show how the common practice of simulating only single grain sizes can lead to incorrect results for the transport of dust through the disk.

Lucio Mayer is Professor of Computational and Theoretical Astrophysics at the Center for Theoretical Astrophysics and Cosmology of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He obtained his PhD in Astrophysics in 2001 from the University of Milan (Italy), while working also at the Max Planck Institut für Astrophysik in Garching, and at the Computational Cosmology Institute at Durham University in UK, was then a postdoc at the University of Washington in Seattle until 2003, subsequently was awarded the Zwicky Prize Fellowship at ETH Zurich, and then became faculty at the University of Zurich in 2006 (tenured since 2012). He and his team have made contributions in a range of areas where state-of-the-art supercomputer simulations are demanded, from galaxy formation and the structure of dark matter halos to the origin and merging of supermassive black holes, from self-gravitating protoplanetary disks to planet formation and migration. He is one of the group leaders of the National Center for Competence in Research “PlanetS” in Switzerland, the largest European network focused on exoplanet studies.

]]>0Dave Milewskihttp://planets.ucla.edu/?p=126932017-04-18T00:26:05Z2017-03-31T18:26:41ZTalk Title: A Young K-Ar Age of Jarosite in the Mojave 2 Sample at Gale Crater, Mars

Abstract: Although the relative timing of surface processes on Mars is relatively well constrained, the absolute timing of these events remains uncertain due to the inherent limitations of crater counting geochronology. The Curiosity rover has the demonstrated ability to measure the bulk K-Ar ages of rocks; an age of 4.21±0.35 Ga was measured early in the mission. A recent sample collected by Curiosity contains a relatively large proportion of jarosite, so a two-step heating experiment was conceived to allow separate measurement of the plagioclase (detrital) and jarosite (authigenic) ages. The low-temperature step (authigenic) yields a bulk age of 1.72 [+0.34, -0.30] Ga, while the high temperate step revealed a plagioclase age of 3.5 [+0.8, -0.6] Ga. The unexpectedly young age of the authigenic materials suggests relatively recent fluid flow in Gale Crater.