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ALMA finds double star with weird and wild planet-forming discs



IMAGE: This artist's impression shows a striking pair of wildly misaligned planet-forming gas discs around both the young stars in the binary system HK Tauri. ALMA observations of this system have... view more

Credit: R. Hurt (NASA/JPL-Caltech/IPAC)

BOWLING GREEN, O.--From movies to television, obesity is still considered "fair game" for jokes and ridicule. A new study from researchers at Bowling Green State University took a closer look at weight-related humor to see if anti-fat attitudes played into a person's appreciation or distaste for fat humor in the media.

"Weight-Related Humor in the Media: Appreciation, Distaste and Anti-Fat Attitudes," by psychology Ph.D. candidate Jacob Burmeister and Dr. Robert Carels, professor of psychology, is featured in the June issue of Psychology of Popular Media Culture.

Carels and Burmeister explained they designed the study to determine the nature of adults' favorable and unfavorable reactions to weight-related humor in TV and film, and to determine whether these reactions are related to preexisting negative attitudes toward obese people in general.

"Although disparaging jokes about physical disability, religion and ethnicity are often considered to be in poor taste or not politically correct, obesity stands out as a condition that is commonly made fun of in entertainment media," Burmeister said. "There has been very little research on what viewers think about this kind of humor."

Participants watched seven video clips from popular film and TV shows featuring weight-related jokes. Then they rated each clip on a number of factors, including how funny, mean, offensive, motivating and harmful they found each one. The clips represented the most common stereotypes about overweight individuals: lazy, unattractive and unintelligent. They also rated how sad, upset, angry and happy the videos made them.

Additionally, they answered questions about their attitudes and beliefs about obesity including dislike for overweight people, belief in the controllability of body weight and belief in stereotypes about obese people.

Not surprisingly, the participants' dislike for obese persons and their belief in disparaging stereotypes about obesity were associated with higher levels of appreciation for weight-related humor. Burmeister and Carels wrote that these findings are consistent with previous research that found associations between appreciation of sexist humor with sexist attitudes and beliefs.

Surprisingly, distaste for the clips did not equal a lower level of dislike for obese individuals. The researchers felt this could suggest that finding weight-related h

Unlike our solitary Sun, most stars form in binary pairs -- two stars that are in orbit around each other. Binary stars are very common, but they pose a number of questions, including how and where planets form in such complex environments.

"ALMA has now given us the best view yet of a binary star system sporting protoplanetary discs -- and we find that the discs are mutually misaligned!" said Eric Jensen, an astronomer at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, USA.

The two stars in the HK Tauri system, which is located about 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Taurus (The Bull), are less than five million years old and separated by about 58 billion kilometres -- this is 13 times the distance of Neptune from the Sun.

The fainter star, HK Tauri B, is surrounded by an edge-on protoplanetary disc that blocks the starlight. Because the glare of the star is suppressed, astronomers can easily get a good view of the disc by observing in visible light, or at near-infrared wavelengths.

The companion star, HK Tauri A, also has a disc, but in this case it does not block out the starlight. As a result the disc cannot be seen in visible light because its faint glow is swamped by the dazzling brightness of the star. But it does shine brightly in millimetre-wavelength light, which ALMA can readily detect.

Using ALMA, the team were not only able to see the disc around HK Tauri A, but they could also measure its rotation for the first time. This clearer picture enabled the astronomers to calculate that the two discs are out of alignment with each other by at least 60 degrees. So rather than being in the same plane as the orbits of the two stars at least one of the discs must be significantly misaligned.

"This clear misalignment has given us a remarkable look at a young binary star system," said Rachel Akeson of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in the USA. "Although there have been earlier observations indicating that thistype of misaligned system existed, the new ALMA observations of HK Tauri show much more clearly what is really going on in one of these systems."

Stars and planets form out of vast clouds of dust and gas. As material in these clouds contracts under gravity, it begins to rotate until most of the dust and gas falls into a flattened protoplanetary disc swirling around a growing central protostar.

But in a binary system like HK Tauri things are much more complex. When the orbits of the stars and the protoplanetary discs are not roughly in the same plane any planets that may be forming can end up in highly eccentric and tilted orbits [1].

"Our results show that the necessary conditions exist to modify planetary orbits and that these conditions are present at the time of planet formation, apparently due to the formation process of a binary star system," noted Jensen. "We can't rule other theories out, but we can certainly rule in that a second star will do the job."

Since ALMA can see the otherwise invisible dust and gas of protoplanetary discs, it allowed for never-before-seen views of this young binary system. "Because we're seeing this in the early stages of formation with the protoplanetary discs still in place, we can see better how things are oriented," explained Akeson.

Looking forward, the researchers want to determine if this type of system is typical or not. They note that this is a remarkable individual case, but additional surveys are needed to determine if this sort of arrangement is common throughout our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

Jensen concludes: "Although understanding this mechanism is a big step forward, it can't explain all of the weird orbits of extrasolar planets -- there just aren't enough binary companions for this to bethe whole answer. So that's an interesting puzzle still to solve, too!"



[1] If the two stars and their discs are not all in the same plane, the gravitational pull of one star will perturb the other disc, making it wobble or precess, and vice versa. A planet forming in one of these discs will also be perturbed by the other star, which will tilt and deform its orbit.

More information

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in Europe by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and in East Asia by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan. ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.

This research was presented in a paper entitled "Misaligned Protoplanetary Disks in a Young Binary Star System", by Eric Jensenand Rachel Akeson, to appear in the 31 July 2014 issue of the journal Nature.

The team is composed of Eric L. N. Jensen (Dept. of Physics & Astronomy, Swarthmore College, USA) and Rachel Akeson (NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, IPAC/Caltech, Pasadena, USA).

ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world's most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 15 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world's most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the world's largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is the European partner of a revolutionary astronomical telescope ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. ESO is currently planning the 39-metre European Extremely Large optical/near-infrared Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become "the world's biggest eye on the sky".


* Research paper:

* NRAO press release about HK Tauri results:

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* The ALMA Photo Book In Search of our Cosmic Origins - The Construction of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array:

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Eric L. N. Jensen
Lead Scientist, Swarthmore College
Philadelphia, USA
Tel: +1 610-328-8249

Rachel Akeson
NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, IPAC/Caltech
Pasadena, USA
Tel: +1 626-395-1812

Charles E. Blue
Public Information Officer, National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Charlottesville, USA
Tel: + 1 434 296 0314
Cell: +1 202 236 6324

Richard Hook
Public Information Officer, ESO
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6655
Cell: +49 151 1537 3591

umor to be mean or offensive has little to do with how much people like or dislike obese persons generally.

The researchers felt the lack of an association between the dislike of obese people and distaste for the videos could have more to do with how strongly the respondents believe in negative stereotypes of obese individuals. The more strongly people believed that obesity was a controllable condition, the less aversion they had for the humor.

In the study, Burmeister and Carels wrote that by being able to blame targets of humor for their obesity, viewers are able to feel less upset by potentially offensive jokes.

"Some theories of humor suggest that we laugh at unfortunate events more when they happen to people we don't like," said Burmeister. "People with obesity are often stigmatized and blamed for their weight, which might be related to why viewers feel comfortable laughing at jokes about a character's weight, even if the jokes are a bit mean-spirited."

The study also found that an individual's Body Mass Index was associated with his or her appreciation of weight-related humor. This suggests that humor directed at an obese target's weight might remind viewers of their own weight and the negative feelings that may be associated.

Those who disliked the weight-related humor were less likely to believe in disparaging stereotypes about obesity, consistent with the opposite association between humor appreciation and belief in disparaging stereotypes.

