NASA Confirms Planet Similar to DOCTOR WHO's Gallifrey

"I'm from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous..."
-- The Tenth Doctor, DOCTOR WHO: "Voyage of the Damned"

Time War, Shmime War...The Doctor's home planet of Gallifrey exists.  Sort of.

An article in the Register states that NASA came across what it calls a "transiting circumbinary multi-planet system," which means two worlds orbiting two suns, using its Kepler telescope designed for locating planets.  The Register compares them to "Doctor Who’s Time Lord homeworld [of] Gallifrey – or alternatively the luxury-planet-builders’ planet Magrathea [from] The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy."

The fictional planet Gallifrey is located within a binary star system in the constellation of Kasterborous at "galactic coordinates ten-zero-eleven-zero-zero by zero-two from galactic zero centre" some 250 million light years away from Earth.  It first appeared in the final Patrick Troughton Doctor Who story "The War Games" in 1969, where the fugitive Second Doctor was finally brought home to stand trial for stealing his Type-40 TARDIS and interfering with the time/space continuum.  The planet remained unnamed until the Jon Pertwee story "The Time Warrior" in 1973 and was later revealed to have been destroyed somehow during the events of a mysterious "Time War" first mentioned in the Christopher Eccleston story "The End of the World" in 2005.

The Register quotes Jerome Orosz, associate professor of astronomy at San Diego State University, who was the lead author of the study.  "Each planet transits over the primary star," said Orosz, ":giving unambiguous evidence that the planets are real."

The discovery of "Gallifrey" was first reported in January but the full study report has just been published in the journal Science.  The new system has been named Kepler 47 and has two stars circling each other every 7.5 days.  One of them is similar in size to our sun, whereas the other is approximately one third its size.  The inner planet, Kepler-47b, is three times the size of Earth, making it the smallest known transiting circumbinary planet, and it orbits the stars every 49 days.  The second, Kepler-47c, lies in the habitable zone around the two suns.  According to the Register, Kepler-47c is "slightly larger than Uranus and circles its stars every 303 days, making it the longest transiting planet currently known.  The whole system lies about 5,000 light years away in the Cygnus constellation."

Of course, Whovians already know that the appearance of Gallifrey isn't exactly unprecedented.  After all, it did return briefly in 2009 during the final David Tennant story "The End of Time"...

Gallifrey rises!


 

Vulcan Wins Pluto Moons Contest Thanks to Shatner & Nimoy

The contest result was most logical.

According to the Associated Press, the two-week contest to name two of Pluto's recently-discovered moons has ended with Vulcan as the victor.  The name, suggested by Star Trek actor William Shatner, received close to 200,000 votes thanks to online appeals to fans by Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, who played the half-Vulcan, half-human Spock.

"174,062 votes and Vulcan came out on top of the voting for the naming of Pluto's moons. Thank you to all who voted!" Shatner posted on Twitter once the final count was released.

In an email to the Associated Press, Nimoy commented "If my people were emotional, they would say they are pleased."

In Roman mythology, Vulcan is the god of fire and lava from volcanoes and the nephew of Pluto, lord of the underworld.  As for Star Trek mythology, the planet Vulcan is Spock's homeworld and was recently destroyed in the 2009 film Star Trek.

Coming in at second place with nearly 100,000 votes was Cerberus, name for the three-headed dog in Roman mythology that guarded the gates to the underworld.  Pluto's three bigger moons are named Charon, Nix and Hydra.

There is, however, a chance that neither Vulcan nor Cerberus could be officially designated as names for the new moons, currently known as P4 and P5.  The contest was conducted by SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., the research base for the primary moon hunter. Ten astronomers who made the discoveries will take the voting results into account, as they decide what will be the two best names.  The International Astronomical Union has the final say, and it could be another month or two before an official announcement.

Mark Showalter, the leader of the teams who discovered the mini-moons, said Monday he's leaning toward the popular vote.  Although, Showalter pointed out that asteroids thought to orbit close to the sun are called vulcanoids, and there could be confusion if a moon of Pluto was named Vulcan.  Vulcan, it turns out, was the name given in the 19th century to a possible planet believed to orbit even closer to the sun than Mercury, but no such planet was found.  In addition, Showalter said that Vulcan is associated with lava and volcanoes, while distant Pluto is anything but hot.

As for Cerberus, an asteroid already bears that name, so Showalter suggested the Greek version, Kerberos, would work instead.  Styx, the river to the underworld, came in at third place in the competition with almost 88,000 votes.

Shatner's second Star Trek choice for a name, the Romulan homeworld Romulus, failed to make the cut because an asteroid already has a moon by that name, along with a moon named Remus.

The Challenger Disaster: 25 Years Later

Exactly twenty-five years ago today on January 28, 1986, the American space program suffered one of its greatest losses when the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into STS-51-L, the twenty-fifth shuttle mission, killing all seven crew members.

I first learned about the disaster in my junior year at Medina Senior High School when several classes were called into the library to watch the news reports on a television wheeled out on a cart.  In what became one of the defining moments of Generation X, we were bombarded over and over again with the recorded footage of what we thought at the time was an explosion but was actually rapid disintegration producing a giant ball of vapor and gases.  Obviously, the tone was set for a very dark day, which was capped off when we went home later and watched President Reagan as he addressed the nation about the disaster on TV instead of giving his scheduled State of the Union address.

Until that day, my interest in space and the shuttle program had been minimal at best.  I would see footage from various missions every so often when my parents were watching the news, but casually shrugged them off in a typical teenager way.  The next day, however, my parents got me a copy of The Plain Dealer newspaper out of Cleveland and I practically devoured the front section which had detailed coverage of the disaster.  I still have that same entire newspaper today.

My interest in space exploration and astronomy continued when my family visited the Kennedy Space Center during one of our trips to Orlando, Florida.  I brought back a number of souvenirs, including a great hardcover book on NASA's history and a picture of the Challenger crew (as shown above) that currently hangs in my basement writing room.  And being a Star Trek fan, I was very glad to see this dedication at the beginning of the November 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home...

And of course, I was overjoyed when after what seemed like forever at the time, NASA finally resumed shuttle launches with the "Return to Flight" on September 29, 1988 with the Space Shuttle Discovery's STS-26 mission.  I would end up following shuttle missions for a number of years afterward, saddened once more with the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, but glad to see Discovery return us to space again in 2005.  I'll be there on February 24th, April 19th and June 28th for the final missions of Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis respectively, and I'll be there to see where we go next.