When the spanish navy was a scientific research value global (II): Vincente Tofiño-San Miguel, the mathematician teacher to great spanish explorers.

 

Source: http://www.gotofino.com/

 

Vincente Tofiño was born on September 6, 1732 in Cádiz (Spain) and died there in 1795. He was orphaned at the age of fourteen when his father, an army officer, was killed at the Battle of Plasencia on June 15, 1746. 

Vincente Tofiño entered the Navy in 1750. By 1755, he had reached the rank of Lieutenant, had taught himself the first fifteen books of Euclid, and had become a specialist in artillery. A subsequent appointment as Teacher of Mathematics at the Naval Academy, also in 1755, began a thirty year naval career in which he climbed to the rank of Brigadier General (Rear Admiral).

A potrait of Brigadier Vicente Tofino-San Miguel (source: Naval Museum of Madrid)

 

Throughout his military career, Vincente Tofiño acquired his reputation as an astronomer and mathematician. He travelled, extensively, and with much sea duty, in the Mediterranean area, especially Italy. His chief claim to fame as a cartographer and hydrographer was the careful and detailed survey (with officers he trained), between 1783 and 1788, of the ports and coast of Spain, and the North African shore. This fame led to his being frequently consulted by the Ministers of State, and to his election as correspondent of the Spanish Academy of History and of the French and Portuguese Academies of Science.

This work of astronomy at the Royal Observatory supposed his election as correspondent of the Académie Royale des Sciences (France).

 

...more information at:

 

http://www.tofinotime.com/history/captain-vincente-tofino-how-tofino-got-its-name.htm

 

http://books.google.es/books/about/Observaciones_astronomicas.html?id=4P3ZPAAACAAJ&redir_esc=y

 

 

 

Two new classes of planets were discovered: gas dwarfs and mega-Earths

Source: Discover Magazine

The universe, we’re learning, is a crowded place — which made it all the more appropriate that the latest findings about exoplanets were delivered today to a crowded press conference at the American Astronomical Society’s 224th meeting. The most intriguing discoveries provide evidence for two new types of planets that don’t exist in our solar system: gas dwarfs and mega-Earths. These two classes mix up the general rule of thumb that planets are either small and rocky or large and gassy — adding their mirror images, small-gassy and large-rocky combinations respectively.

 

In so doing, the findings overturn scientists’ assumptions about how a planet’s size predicts its composition, and thus about where we might find habitable worlds.

 

 

 

...more information at: http://bit.ly/1n5Uszb

 

 

When the spanish navy was a scientific research value global (I): Jorge Juan & Antonio de Ulloa, "the gentlemans of the fixed point"

A portrait of Antonio de Ulloa y de la Torre-Guiralt 

Jorge Juan-Santalices's portrait.

Source: The Maritime Voyage of Jorge Juan to the Viceroyalty of Peru (1735-1746). By Enrique Martínez-García (Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas) & María Teresa Martínez-García (Kansas University).

 

"One of the most famous scientific expeditions of the Enlightenment was carried out by a colorful group of French and Spanish scientists—including the new Spanish Navy lieutenants D. Jorge Juan y Santacilia (Novelda 1713-Madrid 1773) and D. Antonio de Ulloa y de la Torre-Giralt (Seville 1716-Isla de León 1795)—at the Royal Audience of Quito in the Viceroyalty of Peru between 1736 and 1744. There, the expedition conducted geodesic and astronomical observations to calculate a meridian arc associated with a degree in the Equator and to determine the shape of the Earth. The Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris, immersed in the debate between Cartesians (according to whom the earth was a spheroid elongated along the axis of rotation (as a "melon")) and Newtonians (for whom it was a spheroid flattened at the poles (as a "watermelon")), decided to resolve this dispute by comparing an arc measured near the Equator (in the Viceroyalty of Peru, present-day Ecuador) with another measured near the North Pole (in Lapland). The expedition to the Equator, which is the one that concerns us in this note, was led by Louis Godin (1704-1760), while Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) headed the expedition to Lapland"...

 

Although such data had consequences for navigation and cartography, the motivation was not simply utilitarian. Also it was part of an intellectual revolution in which advances in mathematics were developed in parallel to philosophical disputes: some theories and postulates of the living and the dead stood to be elevated or disproved.

 

 

...more information at:

http://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/15737/1/Gentlemen_of_the_Fixed_Point_Cover_Introduction.pdf
 

http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/02/11/inenglish/1360594669_501867.html

 

http://www.dallasfed.org/assets/documents/research/economists/martinez-garcia_travesia.PDF

 

 



The ultimate solar system could contain 60 Earths without breaking the laws of physics

A red dwarf star could support 24 habitable, Earth-sized planets.
 

A star system with four gas giants could support 36 habitable worlds.

 

A binary star system supporting 60 habitable planets.

 

Source: New Scientist

 

Why settle for one habitable planet, when you can have 60? An astrophysicist has designed the ultimate star system by cramming in as many Earth-like worlds as possible without breaking the laws of physics. Such a monster cosmic neighbourhood is unlikely to exist in reality, but it could inspire future exoplanet studies.

Sean Raymond of Bordeaux Observatory in France started his game of fantasy star system with a couple of ground rules. First, the arrangement of planets must be scientifically plausible. Second, they must be gravitationally stable over billions of years: there is no point in putting planets into orbit only to watch them spiral into the sun.

...more information at: http://www.newscientist.com/







The Birth of Stars

 

Source: NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Violent birth announcement from an infant star! This Hubble space telescope image is of a young star that is cloaked in a haze of goldel gas and dust.

More information at: http://go.nasa.gov/1mS5kAF