Want to watch/read an entertaining and inspiring three-part discussion covering the frontier of astronomy? All you need to do is follow this link to the article and videos at Discover Magazine [1]. The participants include Saul Perlmutter, Debra Fischer, Mike Brown and Andrea Ghez, in a panel moderated by Discover’s Phil Plait. It’s lively, accessible and mind-blowing.
Here are a few of my favorite quotes:
[2][Debra Fischer]
We started out with a solar system where many planetesimals were forming, and that evolved into a system where all the stable niches are filled. To me that’s one of the most exciting discoveries in this field.
[Mike Brown]
[I]t’s the small objects that really matter. The small ones are little particles that sit in the outer solar system, and they’re gravitationally swept around by planets. The analogy I like is that these objects in the outer solar system are the blood splattered on the wall after some horrendous murder. I love this analogy—it’s disturbing, but I love it. As Debra just suggested, there might have been additional planets that used to be here in our solar system [but were ejected due to gravitational instability]. The bodies have all been removed.
[Andrea Ghez]
The question that I started off with was, I thought, very simple. It was just “Is there a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way?” But one of the things I love about science is that you always end up with new questions. What happened with my research is that the stars we studied to prove that there was a black hole turned out to be very young. Young stars have absolutely no right to be next to a black hole because a black hole should shear them apart. We have no idea how these stars formed. So that’s one of the major questions we’re trying to address today: “How do baby stars form next to this completely inhospitable object?”
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