Tuesday, January 8th, 2013 By Mitchell Clark, B.Comm. for Profit Confidential
You can?t say that trading action in the stock market is robust these days, because there?s so much uncertainty in the global economy. But one sector of the stock market still offers big price moves, and you could argue it is highly uncorrelated to the broader market. This sector is biotechnology stocks?a group with strong institutional participation, where you can make big gains or lose your shirt in a hurry.
Over the years, I?ve noticed that biotechnology stocks benefit from rolling momentum. A stock might jump on FDA approval or good clinical results, but there can often be an ?after news? price move as investors get to know the story a little better and pile into the action. Momentum or piggyback trading is a worthwhile trading strategy with biotechnology stocks. You can?t predict clinical results, but you can ride the news after they hit the wires.
On several occasions in this column, we have looked at Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ/ALXN), which has been, and should continue to be, a stock market darling. This stock has a habit of going up, and it has proven to recover from every single pullback that it has experienced on the stock market. (See ?One of the Best Areas for Profit in this Trader?s Stock Market.?) Alexion is a liquid biotechnology stock that?s a great stock for traders. The company only has one drug in the marketplace?but it?s in very high demand. The company?s stock market chart is featured below:
Chart courtesy of www.StockCharts.com
Another one of many biotechnology stocks that are building momentum on the stock market right now is Ligand Pharmaceuticals Incorporated (NASDAQ/LGND). This company has a ton of news-flow, and investors like it. This stock bounces around quite a bit, but the company is doing all the right things with its drug development. This is a small-cap company that I think is going places. Ligand?s stock market chart is below:
Chart courtesy of www.StockCharts.com
Biotechnology stocks are not for the faint of heart. Basically, I view the sector like precious metals or small-cap technology?all are risk-capital investments. One of the strongest stock market sectors over the last couple of years has been biotechnology stocks, and this is very evident in the NASDAQ Biotechnology Index, which has been a powerhouse wealth creator since 2009.
Government legislation has made drug development a little easier in the U.S., and this has helped biotechnology stocks tremendously. I don?t know where the stock market will end up this year, but I?m not expecting much. However, I remain fond of biotechnology stocks because of the strong institutional participation within the group, the positive industry demographics, and a solid outlook for the healthcare sector going forward. This is a stock market sector for disciplined traders. Right now, I?d say biotechnology stocks have the best trading action in the entire marketplace.
LG made tentative inroads into the Google TV space last year with only two available sets, but here at CES 2013, the company's announced plans to expand the line to seven additional models. The sets, which range in size from 42 to 60 inches, feature LG's Cinema Screen display at full 1080p resolution with 240Hz refresh rate and are also 3D capable. For input options, consumers will have ports for HDMI (4x) and USB 2.0 (2x) along with wired ethernet (WiFi is also supported). The company's custom Magic Remote has also seen some improvements as the buttons for navigation have all been moved further up, allowing users a more comfortable one-thumb experience. And from the time we spent holding it, it seems that slight change does help enhance overall in-hand comfort. As for new additions to the remote's layout, LG's added in dedicated buttons for voice control and its Prime Time Quick Smart Guide which brings up an overlay of currently airing programs and remaining air time. There's no pricing available at this time, but we do know these sets will hit the market in Q1 of this year.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) ? Saudi Arabia's top cleric on Friday warned against the mixing of the genders, saying it poses a threat to female chastity and society, as the kingdom prepares for the first time to grant women seats on the country's top advisory body.
Delivering his traditional Friday sermon, Grand Mufti Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al-Sheik said authorities must adhere to Shariah, or Islamic law, by ensuring men and women are separated as much as possible at all times. The cleric's comments come just weeks ahead of allowing women to be members of the 150-member Shura Council, the country's top advisory body.
Since 2006, women have been appointed as advisors to the council ? an appointed, consultative body that has the authority to review laws and question ministers but cannot propose or veto legislation. There are currently 12 female advisors, but they do not have a right to vote in the assembly.
The move by King Abdullah to allow women a voice on the Shura Council is part of a larger reform effort by the monarchy to give women greater space in the public sphere. Last year, the kingdom began enforcing a law that allows women to work in female apparel and lingerie stores.
Religious leaders, including the grand mufti, have spoken out against such reforms.
The country is guided by an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam called Wahhabism. In the kingdom, women cannot travel, work, study abroad, marry, get divorced or gain admittance to a public hospital without permission from a male guardian ? typically a husband, brother, father or uncle.
While Al-Sheik has spoken out in support of granting women the right to vote in 2015 alongside men in the nation's only open elections, he has criticized the decision to allow women to work in apparel stores, saying that it puts them in contact with men unrelated to them.
"It is necessary for women to be separated from men as much as possible, because this great religion protects the chastity of women against evil and corruption," Al-Sheik told worshippers at the Imam Turki mosque in Riyadh.
While his Friday sermon focused mainly on corruption in the kingdom, the grand mufti stressed that it is forbidden in Islam for a woman to stand before a man unveiled, warning that to do so will destroy the morals and values of society. The veil in Saudi Arabia refers to the full face covering worn by most women in the ultraconservative kingdom.
The Saudi government has not said how many women will be given seats on the Shura Council. Some local papers have suggested that women would be separated from the men in the assembly hall by a barrier, while others have suggested that women communicate via an internal video system.
However, those pushing for reform point to a recent council session where the country's top female official, deputy Education Minister Nura al-Fayez, sat in a full face veil and took part in the dialogue alongside the men.
"It sends a message to the conservatives that this is the example for women's participation in the Shura Council," Hatoon Al-Fassi, a columnist and professor of women's history in King Saud University said, adding that it also suggests this is what the king supports.
She said she is among many in Saudi Arabia who are rejecting a symbolic presence of women in the assembly.
"At the end we are not behind the scenes," Al-Fassi said. "We are asking for equality and for half of the council, or what is 75 seats."
Al-Fassi and other Saudi women have been pushing the government for social reforms and greater rights for women, including allowing women the right to drive and for the dissolution of male guardianship laws. Saudi women have staged protests defying the driving ban.
She said that there is pressure from the religious establishment to keep to a minimum the number of seats for women in the advisory body.
"I believe that the religious establishment will insist on forcing its opinion to resist the kingdom's progressive reforms, but as women we are insisting on building society hand in hand."
A critically endangered mammal thought to be extinct in Australia since the last ice age may still exist there, a new study suggests.
That speculation comes from the discovery that at least one long-beaked echidna, an egg-laying mammal thought to exist only in New Guinea, was found in Australia in 1901 and that native Aborigine populations reported seeing the animal more recently. The 1901 specimen, described in the Dec. 28 issue of the journal Zookeys, had been shot and stuffed and was lying in a drawer, long forgotten, in the Natural History Museum in London.
"What's amazing about this study is it all hinges on a single specimen, and it's a very well-documented specimen that was collected in 1901 in Australia," said study co-author Kristofer Helgen, a zoologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. "It's taken until 2013 for myself and the team to really unbury the specimen from the cabinets of the Natural History Museum of London."
Primitive mammal
Monotremes, which include bizarre little mammals like the duckbill platypus, lay eggs like reptiles but feed their babies milk. They may have diverged from all other mammals as far back as the Triassic Period, which lasted from about 248 million to 206 million years ago. [ Image Gallery: Photos of Bizarre Monotremes ]
While short-beaked echidnas and duckbill platypuses still live in Australia, the long-beaked echidna, the largest monotreme in the world, was thought to live only in rain forests of New Guinea. The secretive creature, which can weigh up to 20 pounds (9 kilograms), is listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Forgotten in a drawer
Scientists knew the spiny, nocturnal creatures once inhabited Australia but thought it died out after the last ice age, between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago, when New Guinea and Australia were one continent, Helgen said.
Helgen said he was visiting the Natural History Museum in London to look at its collections when he happened upon a skinned long-beaked echidna that was neatly tagged with the species name and where it was discovered.
It turns out that in 1901, an Australian naturalist named John Tunney shot the echidna on Mount Anderson, a mountain in a vast, arid and sparsely populated region of northwest Australia, while on an expedition for a British collector. Tunney, who was trained in taxidermy, stuffed and delivered the specimen, which was later bequeathed to the Natural History Museum. There it lay forgotten for a century.
Once they realized the echidna had been spotted in recent history, the team went back to aboriginal communities in the West Kimberley region. Some of the women remembered watching their parents hunt long-beaked echidnas.
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"They remembered that there used to be an echidna in the area that was much larger, and they pointed to pictures of the modern long-beaked echidna from New Guinea," Helgen told LiveScience.
Still out there?
The new findings raise the possibility that the long-beaked echidna is still out there in Australia, and scientists should lead an expedition to find it, Helgen said. But the elusive, critically endangered creatures are difficult to spot even in New Guinea. They venture out at night, avoid humans and curl up into a spiky, unidentifiable ball at the first sign of danger, he said.
The discovery not only points to the importance of maintaining museum collections, it radically changes the picture of long-beaked echidnas, said Christopher Norris, a museums specialist at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the study. The New Guinea rain forest where long-beaked echidnas are normally seen is dramatically different from the rocky, arid scrubland of the Kimberley, Norris told LiveScience.
"It overturns our ideas about how this particular animal lives," he said.
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Finding Chicago's food gardens with Google EarthPublic release date: 3-Jan-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Susan Jongeneel sjongene@illinois.edu 217-333-3291 University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences
Urban agriculture is promoted as a strategy for dealing with food insecurity, stimulating economic development, and combating diet-related health problems in cities. However, up to now, no one has known how much gardening is taking place in urban areas. Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a methodology that they used to quantify the urban agriculture in Chicago.
John Taylor, a doctoral candidate working with crop sciences researcher Sarah Taylor Lovell, was skeptical about the lists of urban gardens provided to him by local non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
"Various lists were circulating," he said. "One of them had almost 700 gardens on it."
On closer inspection, however, many of these "gardens" turned out to be planter boxes or landscaping and were not producing food. On the other hand, Taylor suspected that there were unnoticed gardens in backyards or vacant lots.
"There's been such a focus on community gardens and urban farms, but not a lot of interest in looking at backyard gardens as an area of research," Lovell agreed. An accurate map of these sites would be helpful for advocacy groups and community planners.
Taylor uploaded the lists from the NGOs into Google Earth, which automatically geocoded the sites by street address. He used a set of reference images of community gardens, vacant lot gardens, urban farms, school gardens, and home food gardens to determine visual indicators of food gardens.
Using these indicators and Google Earth images, he examined the documented sites. Of the 1,236 "community gardens," only 160, or 13 percent, were actually producing food.
Taylor then looked at Google Earth images of Chicago to locate food production sites. This work took more than 400 hours over an 8-month period. He identified 4493 possible sites, most of which were residential gardens of 50 square meters or less, and visited a representative sample of gardens on vacant land to confirm that they were really producing food.
All the large sites and a sample of the small sites were digitized as shapefiles (digital vector storage formats for storing geometric location and associated attribute information) in Google Earth. These shapefiles were imported into Arc Map 10, a geographic information system (GIS) mapping tool, to calculate the total area.
The final estimate was 4,648 urban agriculture sites with a production area of 264,181 square meters. Residential gardens and single-plot gardens on vacant lots accounted for almost three-fourths of the total.
To map the gardens onto community areas, the shapefiles were joined with 2010 Census tract shapefiles and shapefiles of 77 community areas and neighborhoods from Chicago's GIS portal. The tract information was subsequently joined with the Census Bureau's 2005-2009 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates of demographic and housing characteristics.
The maps showed that garden concentration varied by neighborhood. "Chinatown, Bridgeport was kind of a hot spot," Taylor said. Both of these neighborhoods have large Chinese-origin populations. Even outside those areas, many of the larger gardens were associated with households headed by people of Chinese origin. Neighborhoods in the northwest with large numbers of Polish and Eastern and Southern European immigrants also had a high density of backyard gardens.
They were not all growing the same kind of food. "There are distinctions between these cultural groups because the crops they select are sometimes from their home areas in addition to the suite of crops we can all grow in our backyards," Lovell explained.
As people move across borders, they often bring seeds with them. "In a Mexican neighborhood where we were working, a lot of people grow a tropical corn that is 12 to 16 feet high," Taylor said. "It's grown not for the ears of corn but for the leaves, which are used to make tamales."
He noted that many older African-Americans in Chicago who came north during the Great Migration from the south from the early 1900s to the 1970s remember farming and growing up with gardens. "They are almost reproducing in miniature in their backyards the southern landscape and gardening practices that they associated with their youth," he said.
Garden type varied by neighborhood as well. Home food gardens are concentrated in the northwest, where people tend to live in detached houses. Vacant lot gardens are concentrated in the economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in the south and west sides, as are the community gardens.
Lovell said that, in some communities, more than half of the lots are vacant, and making use of them could be a huge opportunity. Chicago has a program that allows people living next to a vacant lot to purchase it at a fraction of what it would normally cost.
The results of this study suggest that both backyard gardens and vacant lot gardens contribute substantially to Chicago's total food production.
"Home gardens actually contribute to food security," Taylor said. "They're underappreciated and unsupported." He noted that people grow not only for themselves but for their neighbors as well, which is particularly important in food deserts where fresh produce is in short supply.
"There is also potential for empowering people because they are using their own space to deal with their own food security concerns," Lovell added.
###
The study, "Mapping public and private spaces of urban agriculture in Chicago through the analysis of high-resolution aerial images in Google Earth" by John R. Taylor and Sarah Taylor Lovell, published in Landscape and Urban Planning, is available online at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016920461200237X.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Finding Chicago's food gardens with Google EarthPublic release date: 3-Jan-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Susan Jongeneel sjongene@illinois.edu 217-333-3291 University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences
Urban agriculture is promoted as a strategy for dealing with food insecurity, stimulating economic development, and combating diet-related health problems in cities. However, up to now, no one has known how much gardening is taking place in urban areas. Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a methodology that they used to quantify the urban agriculture in Chicago.
John Taylor, a doctoral candidate working with crop sciences researcher Sarah Taylor Lovell, was skeptical about the lists of urban gardens provided to him by local non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
"Various lists were circulating," he said. "One of them had almost 700 gardens on it."
On closer inspection, however, many of these "gardens" turned out to be planter boxes or landscaping and were not producing food. On the other hand, Taylor suspected that there were unnoticed gardens in backyards or vacant lots.
"There's been such a focus on community gardens and urban farms, but not a lot of interest in looking at backyard gardens as an area of research," Lovell agreed. An accurate map of these sites would be helpful for advocacy groups and community planners.
Taylor uploaded the lists from the NGOs into Google Earth, which automatically geocoded the sites by street address. He used a set of reference images of community gardens, vacant lot gardens, urban farms, school gardens, and home food gardens to determine visual indicators of food gardens.
Using these indicators and Google Earth images, he examined the documented sites. Of the 1,236 "community gardens," only 160, or 13 percent, were actually producing food.
Taylor then looked at Google Earth images of Chicago to locate food production sites. This work took more than 400 hours over an 8-month period. He identified 4493 possible sites, most of which were residential gardens of 50 square meters or less, and visited a representative sample of gardens on vacant land to confirm that they were really producing food.
All the large sites and a sample of the small sites were digitized as shapefiles (digital vector storage formats for storing geometric location and associated attribute information) in Google Earth. These shapefiles were imported into Arc Map 10, a geographic information system (GIS) mapping tool, to calculate the total area.
The final estimate was 4,648 urban agriculture sites with a production area of 264,181 square meters. Residential gardens and single-plot gardens on vacant lots accounted for almost three-fourths of the total.
To map the gardens onto community areas, the shapefiles were joined with 2010 Census tract shapefiles and shapefiles of 77 community areas and neighborhoods from Chicago's GIS portal. The tract information was subsequently joined with the Census Bureau's 2005-2009 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates of demographic and housing characteristics.
The maps showed that garden concentration varied by neighborhood. "Chinatown, Bridgeport was kind of a hot spot," Taylor said. Both of these neighborhoods have large Chinese-origin populations. Even outside those areas, many of the larger gardens were associated with households headed by people of Chinese origin. Neighborhoods in the northwest with large numbers of Polish and Eastern and Southern European immigrants also had a high density of backyard gardens.
They were not all growing the same kind of food. "There are distinctions between these cultural groups because the crops they select are sometimes from their home areas in addition to the suite of crops we can all grow in our backyards," Lovell explained.
As people move across borders, they often bring seeds with them. "In a Mexican neighborhood where we were working, a lot of people grow a tropical corn that is 12 to 16 feet high," Taylor said. "It's grown not for the ears of corn but for the leaves, which are used to make tamales."
He noted that many older African-Americans in Chicago who came north during the Great Migration from the south from the early 1900s to the 1970s remember farming and growing up with gardens. "They are almost reproducing in miniature in their backyards the southern landscape and gardening practices that they associated with their youth," he said.
Garden type varied by neighborhood as well. Home food gardens are concentrated in the northwest, where people tend to live in detached houses. Vacant lot gardens are concentrated in the economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in the south and west sides, as are the community gardens.
Lovell said that, in some communities, more than half of the lots are vacant, and making use of them could be a huge opportunity. Chicago has a program that allows people living next to a vacant lot to purchase it at a fraction of what it would normally cost.
The results of this study suggest that both backyard gardens and vacant lot gardens contribute substantially to Chicago's total food production.
"Home gardens actually contribute to food security," Taylor said. "They're underappreciated and unsupported." He noted that people grow not only for themselves but for their neighbors as well, which is particularly important in food deserts where fresh produce is in short supply.
"There is also potential for empowering people because they are using their own space to deal with their own food security concerns," Lovell added.
###
The study, "Mapping public and private spaces of urban agriculture in Chicago through the analysis of high-resolution aerial images in Google Earth" by John R. Taylor and Sarah Taylor Lovell, published in Landscape and Urban Planning, is available online at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016920461200237X.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Since we started using computers in school for teaching and learning it has been an assumption that the school would provide the technology. For a decade, schools were jostling for funding to get more computers. Now most schools have a student:device ratio of 1:1. What hasn?t changed in many schools, is the 20th Century assumption that the technology students use at school, should be provided by the school.
I think it now makes more sense for that responsibility to be handed back to students and parents. I think we should expect students to bring their own technology, just as we expect them to bring their own uniform, stationary, PE gear, musical instruments and other requisites.
Last decade that would have been an unreasonable suggestion. In the past, a computer was expensive (and the more portable, the more expensive it was). Software was also very expensive. Installing and updating software could be complicated if parents were not very comfortable around computers. In addition there was the issue of viruses and other malware which schools could keep a lid on, only if they wrested the responsibility (and right) of management from the kids. Then of course, students needed to print out their work (how else could they hand it in?), so each device had to be configured to access network printers. Plus in a multiuser environment, students need somewhere to save and back up their work other than on the local hard drive, hence network storage was necessarily provided, too.
But now many of those technological premises are all but gone:
Hardware is considerably cheaper now in real terms than it once was, and in a surprising twist, the most affordable devices are now also generally the most portable! (MacBook Pro > MacBook Air > iPad > iPad mini).
Most software is now free or cheap. This is especially true on the iPad but there are also many freeware, shareware and Web 2.0 options for laptops.
Malware is of little concern on iPads, chromebooks or Apple laptops.
Installing and updating software ? which once could be too complicated for some parents ? is now relatively straightforward (and on the iPad is a cinch).
Printing work out on paper for submission to the teacher is a practice that we should be discouraging (It?s now the second decade of the 21st Century! Instead of asking our students to print work, we should be expecting them to publish it online to a real audience).
Storage was once provided by the school on a server. These days, there are plenty of cloud options (DropBox, Box, iCloud, SkyDrive, Google Drive, to name a few) not to mention USB flash drives which are now priced as stationary rather than technology.
Relinquishing responsibility for provision of technology to students/parents, saves schools a LOT of time and money in tech support, freeing up technicians to work on improving the network (instead of maintaining computers) while giving the students more control, familiarity and ownership of their devices.
2. Pedagogy
In addition to those practical reasons for a BYOD policy, I think there are good pedagogical reasons, too. ?There is still in many of us, a compulsion to have all our students using the same software, to do the same task at the same time, and a feeling that we ourselves should have mastered whatever software we are having our students use. ?In the past, when there was a scarcity of computers and you had to book a computer lab two weeks in advance, it made a lot of sense to operate that way. But not any more. ?I think as we go forward into this decade, teachers should be delegating the responsibility for choice of tools to students and focussing less on the technology itself and more on the learning processes that are taking place in the class. ?The very diversity of tools in a BYOD classroom will encourage (even force) that into being.
(See also earlier post on 20th Century assumptions that are ripe for challenging.)
Jan. 3, 2013 ? Look up at the night sky and you'll see stars, sure. But you're also seeing planets -- billions and billions of them. At least.
That's the conclusion of a new study by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that provides yet more evidence that planetary systems are the cosmic norm. The team made their estimate while analyzing planets orbiting a star called Kepler-32 -- planets that are representative, they say, of the vast majority in the galaxy and thus serve as a perfect case study for understanding how most planets form.
"There's at least 100 billion planets in the galaxy -- just our galaxy," says John Johnson, assistant professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech and coauthor of the study, which was recently accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. "That's mind-boggling."
"It's a staggering number, if you think about it," adds Jonathan Swift, a postdoc at Caltech and lead author of the paper. "Basically there's one of these planets per star."
The planetary system in question, which was detected by the Kepler space telescope, contains five planets. The existence of two of those planets have already been confirmed by other astronomers. The Caltech team confirmed the remaining three, then analyzed the five-planet system and compared it to other systems found by the Kepler mission.
The planets orbit a star that is an M dwarf -- a type that accounts for about three-quarters of all stars in the Milky Way. The five planets, which are similar in size to Earth and orbit close to their star, are also typical of the class of planets that the telescope has discovered orbiting other M dwarfs, Swift says. Therefore, the majority of planets in the galaxy probably have characteristics comparable to those of the five planets.
While this particular system may not be unique, what does set it apart is its coincidental orientation: the orbits of the planets lie in a plane that's positioned such that Kepler views the system edge-on. Due to this rare orientation, each planet blocks Kepler -32's starlight as it passes between the star and the Kepler telescope.
By analyzing changes in the star's brightness, the astronomers were able to determine the planets' characteristics, such as their sizes and orbital periods. This orientation therefore provides an opportunity to study the system in great detail -- and because the planets represent the vast majority of planets that are thought to populate the galaxy, the team says, the system also can help astronomers better understand planet formation in general.
"I usually try not to call things 'Rosetta stones,' but this is as close to a Rosetta stone as anything I've seen," Johnson says. "It's like unlocking a language that we're trying to understand -- the language of planet formation."
One of the fundamental questions regarding the origin of planets is how many of them there are. Like the Caltech group, other teams of astronomers have estimated that there is roughly one planet per star, but this is the first time researchers have made such an estimate by studying M-dwarf systems, the most numerous population of planets known.
To do that calculation, the Caltech team determined the probability that an M-dwarf system would provide Kepler-32's edge-on orientation. Combining that probability with the number of planetary systems Kepler is able to detect, the astronomers calculated that there is, on average, one planet for every one of the approximately 100 billion stars in the galaxy. But their analysis only considers planets that are in close orbits around M dwarfs -- not the outer planets of an M-dwarf system, or those orbiting other kinds of stars. As a result, they say, their estimate is conservative. In fact, says Swift, a more accurate estimate that includes data from other analyses could lead to an average of two planets per star.
M-dwarf systems like Kepler-32's are quite different from our own solar system. For one, M dwarfs are cooler and much smaller than the sun. Kepler-32, for example, has half the mass of the sun and half its radius. The radii of its five planets range from 0.8 to 2.7 times that of Earth, and those planets orbit extremely close to their star. The whole system fits within just over a tenth of an astronomical unit (the average distance between Earth and the sun) -- a distance that is about a third of the radius of Mercury's orbit around the sun. The fact that M-dwarf systems vastly outnumber other kinds of systems carries a profound implication, according to Johnson, which is that our solar system is extremely rare. "It's just a weirdo," he says.
The fact that the planets in M-dwarf systems are so close to their stars doesn't necessarily mean that they're fiery, hellish worlds unsuitable for life, the astronomers say. Indeed, because M dwarfs are small and cool, their temperate zone -- also known as the "habitable zone," the region where liquid water might exist -- is also further inward. Even though only the outermost of Kepler-32's five planets lies in its temperate zone, many other M dwarf systems have more planets that sit right in their temperate zones.
As for how the Kepler-32 system formed, no one knows yet. But the team says its analysis places constraints on possible mechanisms. For example, the results suggest that the planets all formed farther away from the star than they are now, and migrated inward over time.
Like all planets, the ones around Kepler-32 formed from a proto-planetary disk -- a disk of dust and gas that clumped up into planets around the star. The astronomers estimated that the mass of the disk within the region of the five planets was about as much as that of three Jupiters. But other studies of proto-planetary disks have shown that three Jupiter masses can't be squeezed into such a tiny area so close to a star, suggesting to the Caltech team that the planets around Kepler-32 initially formed farther out.
Another line of evidence relates to the fact that M dwarfs shine brighter and hotter when they are young, when planets would be forming. Kepler-32 would have been too hot for dust -- a key planet-building ingredient -- to even exist in such close proximity to the star. Previously, other astronomers had determined that the third and fourth planets from the star are not very dense, meaning that they are likely made of volatile compounds such as carbon dioxide, methane, or other ices and gases, the Caltech team says. However, those volatile compounds could not have existed in the hotter zones close to the star.
Finally, the Caltech astronomers discovered that three of the planets have orbits that are related to one another in a very specific way. One planet's orbital period lasts twice as long as another's, and the third planet's lasts three times as long as the latter's. Planets don't fall into this kind of arrangement immediately upon forming, Johnson says. Instead, the planets must have started their orbits farther away from the star before moving inward over time and settling into their current configuration.
"You look in detail at the architecture of this very special planetary system, and you're forced into saying these planets formed farther out and moved in," Johnson explains.
The implications of a galaxy chock full of planets are far-reaching, the researchers say. "It's really fundamental from an origins standpoint," says Swift, who notes that because M dwarfs shine mainly in infrared light, the stars are invisible to the naked eye. "Kepler has enabled us to look up at the sky and know that there are more planets out there than stars we can see."
In addition to Swift and Johnson, the other authors on the Astrophysical Journal paper are Caltech graduate students Timothy Morton and Benjamin Montet; Caltech postdoc Philip Muirhead; former Caltech postdoc Justin Crepp of the University of Notre Dame; and Caltech alumnus Daniel Fabrycky (BS '03) of the University of Chicago. The title of the paper is, "Characterizing the cool KOIS IV: Kepler-32 as a prototype for the formation of compact planetary systems throughout the galaxy." In addition to using Kepler, the astronomers made observations at the W. M. Keck Observatory and with the Robo-AO system at Palomar Observatory. Support for all of the telescopes was provided by the W. M. Keck Foundation, NASA, Caltech, the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, the National Science Foundation, the Mt. Cuba Astronomical Foundation, and Samuel Oschin.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by California Institute of Technology. The original article was written by Marcus Woo.
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Journal Reference:
Jonathan J. Swift, John Asher Johnson, Timothy D. Morton, Justin R. Crepp, Benjamin T. Montet, Daniel C. Fabrycky, Philip S. Muirhead. Characterizing the Cool KOIs IV: Kepler-32 as a prototype for the formation of compact planetary systems throughout the Galaxy. Astrophysical Journal, 2012; (submitted) [link]
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Public release date: 3-Jan-2013
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