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KU astronomer helps confirm first-ever planet found orbiting white dwarf star
LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas astronomer played a key role on the team that today announced the first-ever discovery of a planet orbiting a white dwarf star. The finding, published in Nature, shows the likely presence of a Jupiter-sized planet, named WD 1856 b, orbiting the smaller star remnant every 34 hours.
New book guides educators, shares successes in transition from STEM to STEAM
LAWRENCE — In recent years, there has been a growing push to include arts in the widely accepted STEM focus in American education. Yet, making such a transition requires time, training and, perhaps most importantly, a willingness to explore new ways to teach science, technology, engineering and math. Two University of Kansas scholars have edited a new book designed to help guide educators, administrators, schools and communities in shifting to STEAM.
The Commons announces shift to virtual format for Red Hot [Remote] Research in fall 2020
LAWRENCE — Red Hot Research will return this fall in a different setting. The series, sponsored by The Commons at the University of Kansas, will shift to a digital channel for connecting scholars to their peers across disciplines. The first event, on Care & Aging, will take place at 4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 18.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected], @BrendanMLynch
KU astronomer helps confirm first-ever planet found orbiting white dwarf star
LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas astronomer played a key role on the team that today announced the first-ever discovery of a planet orbiting a white dwarf star. The finding, published in Nature, shows the likely presence of a Jupiter-sized planet, named WD 1856 b, orbiting the smaller star remnant every 34 hours.
“This planet is roughly the size of Jupiter, but it also has a very short orbital period — a year on this planet is only 1.4 days, so it’s quickly whipping around its white dwarf star,” said Ian Crossfield, assistant professor of physics & astronomy at KU, who is a co-author on the paper.
A white dwarf is the vestige of a star, like our sun, that has ballooned into a red giant then collapsed back into a dense, dim core that’s often about the size of Earth; so this planet is much larger than what’s left of its star. The process usually devours orbiting planets — but not in the case of WD 1856 b, which appears somehow to have avoided destruction.
“This tells us white dwarfs can have planets, which is something we didn’t know before,” Crossfield said. “There are people who now are looking for transiting planets around white dwarfs that could be potentially habitable. It’d be a pretty weird system, and you’d have to think about how the planets actually survived all that time. But it’s a big universe. Now we at least know some kinds of planets can survive and be found there, so that gives greater support and greater interest in continuing the search for even smaller planets around these white dwarfs.”
At first, WD 1856 b captured astronomers’ interest when they noticed a possible transiting object with NASA’s TESS Space Telescope survey.
“TESS finds a planet by looking at a star, and it measures how bright the star is continuously for weeks,” he said. “If a planet is orbiting the star, and if the planet passes between you and the star, some of that star’s light is going to be blocked. Then the star will get brighter again as the planet passes — we call this the ‘transit’ of the planet. And so, TESS looks for transiting exoplanet satellites. It tells you that something is there — but it doesn’t necessarily tell you what it is because it could be another dim star passing in front instead of a planet.”
To help the international team of scientists confirm if WD 1856 b indeed was a planet orbiting the white dwarf, Crossfield studied the object’s infrared emissions with NASA’s now-defunct Spitzer Space Telescope in the months leading up to the satellite telescope’s decommission.
“For this white dwarf object, it’s tough to measure the mass of it — so we knew how big it was, but not how heavy it was,” he said. “This new object could have been a small star or a big planet. The way we could tell the difference was to look and see — is this thing emitting infrared light as well? If it’s a star, stars are generally hotter than planets and it should be glowing in the infrared. But if it’s just a planet, planets are generally colder than stars and so there should be a little or no infrared light. What our Spitzer data showed is there’s basically no infrared light at all. And the depths of these transits are identical between the TESS data and our Spitzer datasets. That really put the final nail in the coffin that this thing is almost certainly a planet, rather than a star.”
WD 1856 b is located about 80 light years away in the northern constellation Draco. The team behind the paper believes the gaseous planet was pulled in by the white dwarf’s gravity long after the star had dwindled down from its red giant phase — otherwise the planet would have been obliterated in its current orbit.
Asked if the discovery of the first planet orbiting a white dwarf meant the Earth stood a chance of surviving the sun’s red-giant phase in the distant future, Crossfield said it remained unlikely.
“In around five billion years our sun will become a white dwarf. There’s a lot of open questions about whether planets can survive the process of a star inflating up to become a red giant, swallowing up some of the inner planets, and then shrinking back down and just being left over as the white dwarf again. Can planets actually survive that — or is that impossible? And until now, there weren’t any known planets around white dwarfs.”
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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
New book guides educators, shares successes in transition from STEM to STEAM
LAWRENCE —In recent years, there has been a growing push to include arts in the widely accepted STEM focus in American education. Yet, making such a transition requires time, training and, perhaps most importantly, a willingness to explore new ways to teach STEM. Two University of Kansas scholars have edited a new book designed to help guide educators, administrators, schools and communities in shifting to STEAM.
“Challenges and Opportunities for Transforming from STEM to STEAM Education,” edited by Kelli Thomas and Douglas Huffman, associate professor and professor of curriculum & teaching at KU, gathers research in the shift to STEAM from around the globe to help those making the move to include arts with science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The growing emphasis now being placed on creative problem-solving is intended not only to enhance education but to encourage a more diverse array of young people in seeking careers in STEAM fields.
“There has been a national movement to add the ‘A’ to STEM for arts,” Huffman said. “In recent years, we have been seeing more research from scholars and movement from administrators to include the arts in STEM, and collecting that work was the impetus for this book.”
“Opportunities and Challenges” is designed to guide those tasked in making transitions, the teachers in classrooms implementing such changes, administrators leading the teachers, scholars interested in STEAM education and teacher educators preparing the next generation of teachers. Throughout, the book’s chapters share examples of successes and potential roadblocks of those currently making the change and the evolution in how each subject can be taught. Divided into four sections — learning environments, STEAM in schools and districts, beyond the classroom and teacher education — the book is available in full or purchasable by chapter.
The book points out how the A in STEAM is intended not necessarily as a call to place more focus on traditional art classes in school curriculums but to emphasize the asset creativity and creative problem-solving can be in STEM fields. While the approach does advocate for the value of traditional arts, it also points out the value of skills such as design in the fields of architecture and engineering, to cite just one example.
“Thinking about how the arts can be added to STEM can really show how creativity can be integrated in problem-solving in all of its fields,” Thomas said. “The notion of arts is more than what people often think of when they think about arts. It’s visual art, music, dance, literature and others. Much more than just an ‘art class.’”
Throughout its four sections, chapters written by experts in numerous educational disciplines focus on designing STEAM learning environments, tools to mediate learning and self-assessment in STEAM work, artistic biotechnology, models for integrating arts and STEM, perspectives from school leaders in making the transition to STEAM, integrating the Maker Movement in schools, how youths thrive with design thinking and STEAM education, Black students STEAMing through dance, integrating STEAM in pre-service teacher education, using arts in science and engineering models, and developing relationships among schools, land and partners.
Throughout each chapter, the authors explore research and theory but outline real-world challenges and successes of schools making the transition as well. For example, in one chapter, Thomas and Huffman share the story of two schools that successfully made the transition and identify five features essential to making such a change: Intentional efforts from districts to gain buy-in from teachers and administrators, adequate time for teacher learning through authentic professional development, community connections, mutual decision making between teachers and administrators, and flexible budget planning and allocation.
While there may not be a national mandate or requirement to add arts to STEM education, there is a growing national consensus on the value of creative problem-solving and emphasis on fields such as design and engineering that can benefit from an artistic approach. With that in mind, “Challenges and Opportunities for Transforming From STEM to STEAM Education” aims to guide and inform those making the transition in schools, classrooms, labs, universities and communities across the country.
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Contact: Emily Ryan, Biodiversity Institute, 785-864-6923, [email protected], @TheCommonsKU
The Commons announces shift to virtual format for Red Hot [Remote] Research in fall 2020
LAWRENCE — Red Hot Research will return this fall in a different setting. The series, sponsored by The Commons at the University of Kansas, will take place over Zoom and feature most of the trademark elements of the traditional in-person event as it shifts to a digital channel for connecting scholars to their peers across disciplines.
Red Hot [Remote] Research will continue as a regular Friday event, beginning at 4 p.m. and featuring research from disciplines across the university around core themes. Each session will feature five presenters sharing short talks on an area of focus within their work. The series will continue to open the door for new ways of understanding work through discussion across perspectives.
The first event is scheduled for 4 p.m. Sept. 18 and will focus on Care & Aging. Subsequent sessions are scheduled for Oct. 9 on Rural/Urban, Oct. 23 on Gender & Representation and a special session Oct. 28, hosted in conjunction with a series of events KU has planned to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Additionally, one Red Hot Graduate Research session, an opportunity for graduate students to share their work with colleagues across campus, will be presented remotely Nov. 20.
In keeping with the goals of this series, presenters are asked to consider how other disciplinary perspectives could contribute to their research, the likely next steps for the research and challenges that they face in conducting the research. In turn, audience members are asked to, from their own perspectives, offer insights, questions and ideas.
Check The Commons’ website for Zoom registration information: https://thecommons.ku.edu/coming-events. The full list of faculty and graduate student presenters is available in the online version of this press release.
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