Andromeda Child

The Wonders of Andromeda

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:37:00 +0000

How the Andromeda Galaxy reveals itself through standard sized binoculars (say 10x50s). For reasons that are mainly due to the human eye's sensitivity to low colour light levels, deep sky objects such as galaxies and nebulae appear as in greyscale through both binoculars and telescopes. This is due to their low surface brightness... we've all been spoilt by DSLR camera and CCD images!

ANDY FLEMING takes a look at a constellation everyone can see without optical aids, and how at a dark site if you follow the instructions you’ll observe the most distant object you’ll ever see with your naked eyes: the Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda.

Okay, so I’ll admit it. I share the typical mammalian trait of laziness including when it comes to observing the night sky. I also exhibit a modicum of tightness when it comes to spending money on equipment in our damp and cloudy climate. So I’ll use the excuse straight away of two eyes being better than one, and say that even with my superb eight inch Newtonian reflector, my enjoyment of the night sky still comes primarily from a pair of 10 x 50 Super Zenith binoculars that I purchased for a fiver at a local car boot sale. They are light, portable and require no setting up.

These binoculars have, over the past four years facilitated access to some stunning clestial sights, often when the use of my telescope has been impractical, such as when I’ve been out walking our dogs, or during those all-too-brief clear spells. They are also nicely portable for a quick to get away from the worst of the Teesside light pollution.

One of my favourite constellations is Andromeda, well it has to be hasn’t it... just consider the title of my blog. And I thought that the time had come to pay homage to this constellation upon which my literary internet presence is based.

How to locate the Constellation of Andromeda in the night sky. Image courtesy of Stellarium Planetarium Software (screen dump).

The constellation of Andromeda is located in an interesting part of the sky, being flanked celestially by the constellations of Cassiopeia, Pegasus, and Perseus. It is a circumpolar constellation which means it can be viewed the whole year long in mid-northern climes. It also possesses a rather interesting legend that has been passed down to us from antiquity, infact it is one of the most famous of all the Greek celestial legends. It’s also a fascinating constellation because within it is located the spectacular great spiral galaxy M31 visible with the naked eyes and the other giant spiral galaxy along with the Milky Way in our local cluster. It is the most visible galactic deep sky object seen from the northern hemisphere.

And so to that fascinating Greek legend which has it that Perseus, killer of the Gorgon, Medusa, had a glance that could turn anyone to stone. He also possessed an unfair advantage, as the gods had provided him with a pair of winged sandals and a shield that he could use to locate Medusa (thus looking only at her reflection, and not the Gorgon herself). After neatly slaying Medusa, Perseus was returning home when he saw the beautiful Princess Andromeda, inexplicably tied to a post on the seashore. It turned out that Andromeda’s mother, Queen Cassiopeia, had fallen foul of the sea god Poseidon, and as a punishment, Cetus, a monster had been sent to ravage the country. King Cepheus, after consulting an Oracle was told that the only way to placate Neptune was to sacrifice his daughter to the monster.

However, a timely appearance was made by Perseus who turned the beast to stone and then married Andromeda. All the major players in this fairly unique happy-ending were thus cast into the sky by the Greeks, and all can be seen around Andromeda. Even the sea monster, Cetus, is on view, although he was relegated to the status of a harmless whale! Such are the outcomes of Greek myths!

And so to the jewel that is Princess Andromeda’s crown, the Andromeda Galaxy, and my easy instructions for its location at-a-glance. Bear in mind that to view this object with the naked eyes you do need to view the night sky at a reasonably dark site. You will have difficulty observing it in the centre of an urban area... the suburbs or local countryside will prove to be much more successful.

How to locate the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) in the night sky. Image courtesy of Stellarium Planetarium Software (screen dump).

Firstly look for the constellation of Cassieopia, the great ‘W’ in northern hemisphere skies. Once again like Andromeda it is a circumpolar constellation at mid northern latitudes. Well below Cassieopia, and slightly to the right, in an area devoid of bright stars, you will see one lonesome bright orange star, the double star Mirach (Beta Andromeda). Star hop up and slightly to the right two faint stars (Mu and Nu Andromeda) are visible. Slightly to the right of Nu is a faint star-like speck – that’s the Andromeda Galaxy (Messier object 31, or just M31). This of course is not the only method by which to find our closest galactic neighbour, but it’s the one that I personally find easiest.

But take a look at it through any common or garden binoculars and you’re in for a jaw-dropping sight. What you see is a large hazy nebulous-looking entity that in fact is a part of a gargantuan star city containing hundreds of billions of stars... it is the central bulge of this fabulous spiral galaxy. Some more details are revealed with a telescope with a low power eyepiece, but in truth I’ve always found M31 a disappointing telescope target – it’s definitely far better with binoculars due to their intrinsically larger field of view.

As you view our beautiful galactic neighbour, consider that its distance from the Earth is approximately 2.5 billion light years. In other words light the fastest thing we know with a huge velocity of 186,000 miles per second has taken 2.5 billion years to reach our eyes from the Andromeda Galaxy. The light from it we see today left M31 before humans had evolved from apes! In motorway terms its distance is a staggering 14,750,000,000,000,000,000 miles! In space it's a long way between service areas!

There is one final twist in this tale of cosmic distances. The Andromeda Galaxy is on the move – and quickly at 120 kilometres per second. And it’s coming towards us! In 3 or 4 billion years from now our own Milky Way and M31 will merge in a celestial show of galactic cannibalism. Will our solar system and the Earth survive?

Mars The Wonderworld: We’re Just 3.5 Billion Years Too Late!

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 20:33:00 +0000

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took this snapshot of Mars 11 hours before the planet made its closest approach to Earth on August 26, 2003. The two planets were 34,648,840 miles (55,760,220 km) apart. This image was made from a series of exposures taken with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. Photo credit: NASA/J. Bell (Cornell U.) and M. Wolff (SSI).

Evidence is mounting that Mars was once a wet and warm world, similar to the early Earth. What went wrong with the Red Planet -- is it possible that future explorers may find fossils from a more habitable time -- indeed did microbial life survive until the present time? ANDY FLEMING investigates.

Once upon a time there were two adjacent planets orbiting a run-of the-mill star in one of the arms of an unremarkable spiral galaxy. Both were warm, both were wet, both had substantial atmospheres, both had vulcanism, both had oceans, seas and rivers, and both were in or on the edge of their star’s habitable zone. Life, we are certain began on one, but on the other – well we’re not too sure. The planets in question are of course the Earth and Mars.

Everyone is fascinated by Mars. From an earlier less-informed age, science fiction by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs, or the imagined canals of astronomer Percival Lowell has fired our imagination, and has ensured that the Red Planet now has a special place in both our hearts and popular folklore. The real Mars is even more fascinating however, and the planet’s formation and history can be the subject of some fascinating speculation. Mars is still one of the few places in the solar system that humans can think realistically about exploring on foot.

Did life arise on Mars in its early past like it did on Earth? Even more speculative, did life arise on one planet, only to be transported by ejecta to the other after an asteroid impact? Many scientists think that life, well microbial life at any rate, protected from cosmic rays and a fiery entry into the Earth’s atmosphere inside a space rock can traverse the vast distances between planets. One of the meteorites discovered on the snows of the Allen Hills of Antarctica showcased by NASA in 1996, and confirmed as Martian by isotopic analysis, contains tantalising crystal structures that may be either chemical in origin or fossilised bacteria (albeit very small bacteria!). Meteorite ALH84001 may surprise us yet.

A vast ocean covered the northern lowlands of Mars some 3.5 billion years ago, suggest planetary scientists.

Will future geologists as they explore Mars discover fossils in the sedimentary rocks that are so indicative of the planet’s wet and warmer past? Did creatures swim in the seas and rivers of Mars – were they washed up on the now high and dry fossilised Martian beaches that we’ve identified with our Mars orbiters? Did they take the ultimate white-knuckle ride over waterfalls to dwarf Niagara in the Vallis Marineris, a gargantuan canyon the width of North America? As the late NASA astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan (1994) speculated, “Now that would be a world to explore – unfortunately we are four billion years too late!”

Whether such speculation turns out to be confirmed, things started to go wrong about 3.8 billion years ago, about the time life got started on Earth. Mars is about half the size of the Earth so its interior began to radiate heat to space much more quickly and its core began to solidify. Without a molten iron core acting as a dynamo, any magnetic field surrounding the planet started to dissipate exposing the atmosphere and surface to the Sun’s charged particles. Any tentative carbon cycle would grind to a halt too -- despite having the largest volcano in the solar system (Olympus Mons), vulcanism would cease, and with it any possibility of recycling the planet’s carboniferous rocks.

In addition, with its gravity and hence escape velocity only 40% that of the Earth, and with no protective ozone layer, ultra violet radiation would pummel the Martian atmosphere disassociating water and carbon dioxide molecules into their constituent atoms with hydrogen and oxygen drifting off into space. With steadily decreasing atmospheric pressure, the Martian greenhouse effect would be thrown into reverse. Temperatures would plummet, the planet’s remaining water would freeze either in permafrost or subterranean glaciers, and life, if it had existed would be forced to retreat into the last protected under- the-surface niches and habitats.

Is it still there, hiding in the caves of Mars or in the subsurface soils, clays and rocks, away from the desiccated, radiation-fried environment above? Is this the cause of the methane out gassing detected by NASA – or does this possible bio-signature have chemical or volcanic origins?

We know from a plethora of studies in some of the most inhospitable places on Earth such as Antarctica, deep in the oceans, in sulphurous volcanic springs, even in nuclear reactors and in solar radiation-saturated NASA hardware brought back by astronauts from the surface of the Moon that extremophiles are tenacious in the extreme! Once life has a foothold, extinguishing it is phenomenally difficult.

A view of the boulder-strewn field of red rocks reaches to the horizon nearly two miles from Viking 2 on Mars' Utopian Plain. Image credit: NASA

However, NASA/JPL’s’s two Viking spacecraft that touched down in mid-1976 gave inconclusive results in their analysis of the Martian soil. Gases were exchanged when a nutrient soup was added to the soil, but no organic molecules were found on the Martian surface. However, the Vikings were designed to detect only a small subset of possible life – that found on the Earth. There’s no guarantee that extraterrestrial bugs will adhere to terrestrial rules.

NASA/JPL’s Mars Science Laboratory is slated for launch in 2011, and with a battery of on-board tests and equipment may start to provide some more substantial tantalising evidence of the signatures of life. Previous unmanned spacecraft have participated in NASA’s “follow the water” initiative --both the Spirit and Opportunity Mars Exploration Rovers have found abundant evidence of sulphate rocks formed in water and stratified sedimentary rocks exposed on the Martian surface. The Mars Phoenix lander found copious amounts of water ice underneath its landing site, and evidence of perchlorate-saturated water condensed on its legs.

Mars is still a fascinating, enigmatic and lovely world with wonders aplenty to keep our robot emissaries, and eventually astronauts busy for decades and centuries to come. Its river channels, waterfalls, lakes and seas may now be desiccated, and its warmest days may be barely above the freezing point of water, but finding life on the Red Planet has been a dream of humanity for centuries. And sometimes dreams come true.

Bibliography

Sagan, C., Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Random House, (November 1994)

Astronomy for Everyone: Jupiter-fest!

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 17:06:00 +0000

The innermost of Jupiter's Galilean satellites, Io, superposed in front of the gas giant planet. To the left of Io is a dark spot that is Io's own shadow. A solar eclipse would be seen from within the shadow spot on Jupiter. Viewed from planet Earth, similar shadows of Jupiter's large moons can often be seen crossing the giant planet's disk. (Credit: NASA/Cassini spacecraft imaging, 2004)

In this edition of Astronomy for Everyone, ANDY FLEMING reports that our solar system’s largest planet right now is providing some stunning views in the night sky.

It was during the evening as we drove back along a tree-lined country road after an interesting public talk at our local planetarium, that the receding clouds revealing a stunning large bright object on the eastern horizon that seemingly was following the motion of our car through the hedges.

On our ten minute journey it became very apparent why, to the uniformed observer, an apparition of this celestial object at times bears all of the classic features of an unidentified flying object. To those in the’ astronomical know’ however there’s no doubt that this is the king of the entourage of our Sun’s eight planets... Jupiter. It’s the fourth brightest object in our night sky and there is only one other planet that’s even brighter and that’s Venus. They can’t be confused as Venus being closer to the Sun is always in the west near our star at dusk.

The view of Jupiter through a small telescope, along with its four Galilean moons.

Repeated observations over the course of one evening reveal, just like Galileo Galilei discovered in the seventeenth century, that these tiny objects are in motion orbiting this huge planet. They are Jupiter’s four largest moons; it’s so called Galilean satellites after their discoverer and are named Io, Callisto, Ganymede and Europa. They’re all fascinating and enigmatic worlds in their own right, and they suggested to Galileo that the Earth is not at the centre of the heavens, thus laying bear the conceit of the geocentricism. Later discoveries concluded that this mini solar system contains many more moons, and new ones are regularly discovered, the present total being sixty three. Through binoculars it’s also apparent that Jupiter is a disk, another clue to it being another world, rather than a star.

However you observe it telescopically, Jupiter is a treasure trove, and a small refractor will show the planet’s beautiful ever-changing and fast-moving clouds and their bands, a result of immense jet streams in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. A larger refractor or reflector will allow observations of the solar system’s largest storm... its great red spot, which is infact a huge anti-cyclone or area of high pressure that has been observed in the planet’s atmosphere for the past four hundred years.

Jupiter has no solid surface, and with the volume of the planet being the equivalent of over 1,300 Earth’s many scientists regard it as a failed star with the right elemental constituents in its atmosphere but with too low a gravity to ignite nuclear fusion. Infact, its gravity is still so strong that it is a powerful source of radiation and its ionising effects are felt even as far away as the orbit of Saturn. Jupiter also generates much internal heat. Indeed, if it had been a few times larger it would have qualified as a brown dwarf star. It’s a massive ball of hydrogen and helium gas with traces of contaminants such as ammonia and methane at frigid temperatures, these latter two gases being responsible for providing the beautiful colours in its atmosphere. Delve further down in its atmosphere and the immense pressures dictate that these gases liquefy. Delve even deeper down to the planet’s core and scientists believe that lurking at the centre is a ball of liquid hydrogen surrounding a rocky core.

I am lucky enough to own two telescopes, an eight inch custom-built Newtonian reflector and a four inch Celestron 102SLT ‘go to’ refractor. Although more details of Jupiter’s atmosphere are available using the better light gathering capabilities of the larger instrument, my favourite views of Jupiter are now through my new refractor. Using the same eyepieces they’re sharper and the clarity is far better...my favourite views are through a 26mm Plössl eyepiece with a double magnification Barlow lens.

Fancy taking a peek at the fifth planet from the Sun and our solar systems largest? Well now is a great time especially for observers in mid northern latitudes. As I write this in early December, Jupiter is high in the sky by mid-evening and is a magnificent sight.

Unlike its 2010 apparition when it barely made 10 degrees above the southern horizon which made observing difficult due to the Earth’s atmospheric turbulence, it is now high in the sky and really bright at magnitude -2.6. As an added bonus, unlike in 2010 (when it had disappeared) the south equatorial band is now showing up strongly again.

So get yourself outside and try detecting the bands and the moons with binoculars. With a telescope, try sketching the positions of the four Galilean moons relative to Jupiter. Date and time your sketch and download and use free planetary software such as Stellarium to discover which moon is which. The king of the planets has wonders aplenty to keep you busy for hours.

The Light-Not-So-Fantastic!

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 09:44:00 +0000

The projected increase in light pollution is all too apparent in the above graphics.

ANDY FLEMING takes a look at one of the scourges of the twenty first century: light pollution, and looks at the health and environmental problems it causes.

Take a look at the above graphic. It shows something that is having a profound and adverse effect on the Earth's wildlife and come to that, human life. The chart on the left shows the measured light pollution, the wasted light and hence electricity being lost to space in 1998. The worst pollution is represented by the pink and red areas, the least light pollution emanating from the areas marked in blue. Move on to the situation for 2025, just fourteen years hence, and see how the situation has deteriorated.

Getting worse: the growing threat to amateur astronomy is detailed in the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England's Dark Skies project whereby members of the public were invited to report how many stars they could see within the well known constellation of Orion, The Hunter. (Credit: CPRE).

Light pollution is defined as stray or wasted light that results from ill-fitted street lights, security lights, industrial lighting and public lighting around shopping malls, showrooms and public buildings. Light pollution despoils one of the greatest of natural wonders that I remember from my childhood, and available now in only a handful of remote rural locations such as north west Scotland, Dumfries and Galloway and Kielder Forest. It's bad news for children who are denied the educational value and beauty of the night sky and it's bad news too for amateur astronomers throughout urban Europe and the USA who are denied the stunning views of galaxies, nebulae and other deep sky objects. The enjoyment of star spotting pales into insignificance however compared to the serious health and environmental implications of light pollution. Like many forms of pollution its true negative effects are only just becoming apparent in terms of the affect on the disorientation and hibernation of animal and bird life and the disruption to human sleep patterns and rhythm, with all the implications for stress and ill-health that it brings.

This photograph graphically illustrates the well lit streets of San Francisco, but this appalling example of urban light pollution means that only a handful of stars, planets and the Moon will be visible in the city's skies.

To any rational person, it seems incredible that simultaneously to the major G7 economies such as the UK, US, Germany and Japan facing a growing serious energy shortage, government, private and commercial institutions and individuals should be wasting expensive electrical power in such a profligate manner. Because make no mistake: the horrible orange sky-glow now present in all urban areas is a waste of electricity, is costing a fortune and contributing to the ever growing concentration of carbon dioxide it the Earth's atmosphere. Put simply, wasted photons (particles of light) equal wasted electricity which means predominantly wasted scarce fossil fuels and more greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, many politicians are not apparently rational people because in my mind, certainly in the UK, just like in the ineffective regulation of the media, water and rail industries, politicians of all hues have conspired to produce weak and ineffective regulation via OFGEM in the electricity generating industry. Don't get me wrong: I fully support local authorities switching off or turning down unnecessary street, dual carriageway and motorway lighting (why do rural motorways need hundreds of thousands of streetlights when every vehicle by law should have serviceable headlights?), private companies switching off floodlighting of premises and private individuals switching off unnecessary security lighting (that has dubious benefits in terms of security anyway), but the basic economics of the power supply industry, and indeed any private industry is completely at odds with the needs of the environment.

The job of the power companies is to satisfy their share holders by selling more power, not less, just as the aim of Coca Cola is to sell more bottles of the drink and not less. I'm not suggesting a command economy in power generation like North Korea or China with the state deciding on who gets what power, and in any case, their environmental record is even worse, but it can't be beyond the realms of human ingenuity to devise a power supply market that includes the needs of the environment and yet does not depend on hundreds of square miles of wind turbines or new nuclear power stations, with all the long terms security, health and environmental risks that the latter involves, not to mention the unresolved problem of the long term storage of atomic waste.

If something isn't done, and certainly in the UK, done soon then the lights are going to go out. The twenty per cent increase in gas and electricity charges announced this week by a couple of the privatised companies is only the start. Adoption of wind turbines and expensively subsidised nuclear power will only escalate such charges.

The cartel now operating in the power industry in the UK that leads to increases in both price and carbon dioxide emissions needs to be tackled head on. The old publicly accountable gas and electricity boards charged with both generating and saving power without the profit motive are starting to look appealing once again, as we move into an age of power austerity.

More information about light pollution and how you can contribute to its reduction:

The British Astronomical Association's Campaign for Dark Skies

Campaign to Protect Rural England - Dark Skies

International Dark Sky Association

Real Astronomy Under Velvet Black Skies!

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:43:00 +0000

ANDY FLEMING reminisces about his first experience of astronomical observing with a telescope at a dark sky location deep inside the North Yorkshire Moors National Park.

It is one of life’s subtle ironies that thanks to our industry and high technology that in other ways brings so many benefits to our everyday lives, one of the greatest of all natural wonders, has been lost to the majority of our country’s population. We’re talking, of course about a velvet-black night sky dotted with countless stars, nebulae, and galaxies. Truth be told, it is not our technology that denies us this most beautiful of natural spectacles, but our shameful and profligate waste of our natural resources and energy. Namely, of course, it is light pollution, coupled with industrial pollutants, vehicle emissions and particulates. It is a severe problem where I live in the UK's Tees Valley, where industry at Teesmouth illuminates our horizons with the glare of a thousand artificial sodium vapour suns.
If you’re lucky, and located in a dark, secluded corner of such a conurbation, you can just about succeed with the “Ursa Minor test” and pick out all of the stars in that constellation down to Magnitude 5 with the naked eye (albeit with averted vision). We won’t be unduly negative about such abodes however – there are still wonders aplenty to be seen from back gardens including double stars, the planets, galaxies and planetary nebulae, and of course the stunning and lovely Great Nebula in the Sword of Orion. But they are washed out, shadows of themselves even through a telescope, reminiscent of a television set with the contrast dramatically reduced. They are awe-inspiring, but we have doubtless been robbed of much of the awe.

Spiral galaxies M81 (also known as NGC 3031 or Bode's Galaxy), and M82/NGC 3034, the edge-on Cigar Galaxy.

An initial tour of the gorgeous black skies of a location such as the North Yorkshire Moors National Park, or any dark site therefore creates a soaring sense of wonder and awe – an uplifting surge of sheer excitement that will never be forgotten. Of course, an enjoyable tour of anything requires a good and learned tour guide with a well-planned itinerary, and in this respect my 12 year old son David and myself were lucky enough to share our first dark sky observing session with a fellow member of the Cleveland and Darlington Astronomical Society (CaDAS) Rob Peeling - in late October 2008.

Our rendezvous with Rob was to be Snilesworth Moor, close to Osmotherly, in the UK's North Yorkshire Moors National Park, just off the A19 trunk road, where the ancient Drover’s road south to Sutton Bank parts company with the metalled road to Ryedale and Helmsley. Sure enough, Rob was already at our destination at the appointed meeting time of 8.00pm. We were beneath the mighty Black Hambleton Moor, Rob’s superb12” Dobsonian already in position and online to the heavens. We had chosen the coldest night so far that autumn for our tour of the local Cosmos – a chilling minus three degrees according to the car’s external thermometer. Of course, it was so cold precisely because the sky was totally cloudless, and the seeing exceptional.

M57/NGC6720 The Ring Nebula in Lyra.

We shook hands with Rob, and within seconds, as our eyes started to adapt to the pitch blackness, untold celestial wonders aplenty started to encroach on our naked eye view. The total blackness was punctuated only by very distant lights in the northern part of the Vale of York, and a couple of red aircraft warning beacons on the Bilsdale West Moor television tower, one of the most exposed structures in the land, and about eight miles distant to the north east. As we looked skywards with our naked eyes, just as promised in countless astronomy textbooks, was the stupendously stunning Milky Way, our home galaxy, it’s disk full of a myriad of stars traversing their way east-west right through the hearts of the constellations of Lacerta, Cygnus, Perseus and Cassiopeia. Would we be able to see the furthest the unaided human eye can see on a clear night? Could we really see two million light years to the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) with our eyes alone? And if so would it be spectacular? At home, it’s so easy (due to other stars being bleached out by light pollution) to find our old friend, the orange/yellow Magnitude 2 guide star Mirach (beta Andromedae), we first used to track down M31 a couple of years ago with binoculars. But under these superb skies there were just so many stars that Mirach was lost.

M33/NGC598, the Triangulum Galaxy.

However, once beta Andromedae was found, amazingly, we didn’t need mu and nu Andromedae , because intrusively visible above Mirach, and offset to the right a little was an elongated smudge of beautiful pale light, perhaps half a degree or more in diameter. Here was M31, not a point, but the central bulge of our sister spiral galaxy, amazingly seen looking like a galaxy, with the naked eye.If this wasn’t enough, even more unbelievably, virtually equidistant below and slightly to the left of beta Andromedae near alpha Triangulum was another much fainter smudge. With goosebumps and a lump in our throats, and a quick confirmation from Rob, we realised that remarkably we were viewing the diffuse Triangulum Galaxy (M33/NGC598). We hurriedly looked at these two magnificent galaxies through binoculars – M31 being elongated by well over the width of a couple of degrees and M33, virtually face on looking absolutely stunning.

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It was time to assemble our telescope, an 8.5 inch f4.5 Newtonian reflector. Our equipment also included a 9mm Orthoscopic eyepiece, a 28mm Plossl and a x2 Barlow, which combined give a decent portfolio of viewing. As previous to this amazing night out in the National Park, we had been graced with several reasonably clear evenings, and as this wonderful telescope had seen frequent use at home, I was concerned that wind-blown dirt and particulates had entered the instrument and been deposited on the primary mirror from our trusty Silver Birch, and Apple Tree at the rear of our garden. Indeed there was considerable dirt on the mirror, and to rectify this problem I had painstakingly removed and cleaned the mirror with de-ionised water and cotton wool. We would soon discover that this work, subsequent re-collimation and eyepiece cleaning had paid dividends.

M27/NGC6853, the Dumbbell Nebula.

We first visited a couple of stunning planetary nebulae - the Dumbbell (M27) that we had so proudly found at home after Rob’s clear and concise instructions. Then it was off to the Ring Nebula in Lyra (M57), and the Blue Snowball. We took a peek at the beautiful double star Albireo in Cygnus – wonderfully resolved into its striking blue and yellow constituents. Next, Rob set us a challenge, using his instructions, we were to locate successfully the faint Ghost of Mirach Galaxy. Our next port-of-call was the beautiful face-on spiral galaxy M33 in Triangulum that we had earlier seen with our unaided eyes and then our binoculars. Its beautiful spiral structure was well apparent – so too were it’s bring star forming regions in its outer spiral arms. Not too far away we viewed M110/NGC205 – one of M31’s satellite galaxies.

Next it was off to Bode’s Nebulae, incorrect nomenclature of course – they are the beautiful Magnitude 6.9 spiral galaxy M81/NGC3031 and of course the Magnitude 8.4 virtually edge on “Cigar Galaxy” M82/NGC3034. These two gems are relatively easy to locate, even though they were fairly low down in the north by star-hopping using Dubhe (alpha Ursa Majoris) and Polaris, and then from Rob’s “The Cheese” asterism of three stars slightly to the left and down from these galaxies in your field of view.

It was time for a personal detour to the lovely Double Cluster NGC869 in Perseus, visible from our location with the unaided eye, beautiful through binoculars and jaw-dropping through our telescope. A myriad of stars to inebriate one’s retina. Other splendours we observed included Globular Clusters M15/NGC7078,M103/NGC581 near Ruchbah in Cassiopeia, the Crab Nebula (M1/NGC1952) the remnant of the supernova witnessed by ancient Chinese astronomers in1054AD, and easy to locate in a dark sky near zeta Tauri. As we observed it’s structure one thought about the rapidly rotating tiny neutron star at its centre whose almost artificial atomic-clock-regular spinning jets of radiation were first discovered at Cambridge University in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell and labelled LGM (Little Green Men) on her print-out. It was, of course the first pulsar to be identified.

The constellation of Orion. Visible in the Hunter's belt is M42, the Great Nebula star forming region.

As time passed we saw bloated red Betelgeuse and Meissa rise, followed by the whole enchilada of the winter constellation of Orion the Hunter, always reminding one of approaching Christmas. It was difficult to restrain our impatience at waiting to observe the beauty in the hunter’s sword, but of course, it was well worth the wait. The Great Nebula M42, was awesome, that huge reflection nebula of gas and dust reminding us all of how every star and planet, including the Sun, the Earth and indeed all living things, including ourselves for that matter, came to be. Indeed this whole area of the sky from Alnilam, Alnitak and Mintaka through to M42 and M43 is a wondrous sight to behold with nebulosity galore – hot, young stars, such as those in the Trapezium – illuminating and exciting the atoms, molecules and clouds of gas and dust from which they were born.

Veil Nebula NGC 6960/6979/6992/6995, Cygnus SNR, Cygnus Loop.

We saw many more objects that wonderful evening, but for brevity’s sake I will end on an even higher note for ourselves – three objects that had previously eluded us at our stage of observing, but to which we were effectively guided by Rob. Firstly, the beautifully intricate filaments of the supernova remnant, the Veil Nebula (NGC 6960). Bearing witness to the final collapse and obliteration of a massive star, far larger than our Sun, this beautiful stellar death shroud bears witness to the fact that out of one of the Cosmos’s most destructive events outstanding beauty arises. Of course, much more than visual beauty has been created. The progenitor star of NGC 6960 expelled into the Cosmos the ingredients to make new stars when it detonated. It also expelled heavier elements that one day, millions of years from now will create planets and rocky worlds, and possibly sentient beings, who like us have imagination, intelligence and consciousness and who can observe and endeavour to understand the Cosmos from which they were made.

Our last two targets were very much in our nearby cosmic vicinity – the two mighty gas giant worlds of Uranus and Neptune. Under such conditions, and with a superb guide, Uranus was an easy target to find, it’s beautiful blue/green orb being an easy giveaway. Blue Neptune with its oceans of methane and hydrogen was considerably more difficult to find due to it’s low declination in the south west as it was not long from setting. Rob made a considerable attempt to find the large satellite of this last outpost of the Sun’s entourage of planets, the pink-snow covered Triton, but to no avail. Hardly a disappointment considering the plethora of other wonders we enjoyed that evening, which also included several meteors emanating from their radiant in Taurus.

At 11pm, despite multiple layers of clothing, but with the thermometer still falling and it becoming intensely cold, it was with heavy hearts that we disassembled our telescopes and headed back to Teesside. In conclusion, in all of our serious observing it was our best ever evening under the stars.

To those readers who have never experienced a truly dark sky, and who are sceptical of the difference it makes to observing the heavens, forget a day out, treat yourself to a night out with the stars instead. With naked eyes, binoculars, or a telescope, literally – there’s nothing on the Earth that can beat it!!!

20/20 Vision? How Far Can You See?

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 18:15:00 +0000

M31, The Andromeda Galaxy, the furthest object we can see with our naked eyes, and the closest large galaxy to our own Milky Way (Credit: NASA/Robert Gendler)

ANDY FLEMING investigates the furthest object that we can see with our naked eyes You may be very surprised at what it is, and its distance from us!

Think that you’re doing well seeing the mountain range 50 miles away? Think again, the answer’s astronomical!

Reckon you’ve got good eyesight huh? Twenty-twenty vision right? So what’s the furthest you can see on a clear day?? A car registration plate at 30 yards? Ships ten miles out at sea on the horizon, or possibly a range of distant mountains 80 miles away.

Well, consider this: the furthest you can see with your unaided eyes is 1.475x10^19 or 1.475 multiplied by ten to the power nineteen miles or 14,750,000,000,000,000,000 miles followed by sixteen zeros (miles)! And you thought that the budget deficit was gargantuan! In astronomy, we only concern ourselves with miles when talking about ‘small’ distances, such as those between the inner rocky worlds of our own inner solar system. By the time we get to the gas giants and beyond its astronomical units or AU. One AU is 93,000,000 miles, the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun. Bring on interstellar distances, or indeed inter-galactic or inter-galactic group distances and we’re talking light years, the distance that light travels in one year.

The object we’re talking about here by the way while we digress into astronomical numbers is the Andromeda Galaxy, Messier object 31 or simply M31. It’s the nearest large galaxy to our own Milky May, and if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere it’s on display in a night sky near you now. Truth be told, you don’t have to worry too much about light pollution to see it either. Suburban skies will show it as a faint star while using averted vision in the constellation of Andromeda, the Princess.

How to locate the Andromeda Galaxy, M31

When we look at the night sky, we see every moon, planet, star and galaxy not as they are – but as they were. Your eyes are time machines – your binoculars and telescopes even more so. We view the ‘Andromeda Nebula’, which the great American astronomer Edwin Hubble realised was a galaxy or ‘island universe’ in its own right (and not a tenuous interstellar nebula of gas in our own galaxy), as it was 2.5 billion years ago, before homo sapiens first walked the Earth. (continued below).

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To find the Andromeda Galaxy, I firstly look for the constellation of Cassieopia, the great ‘W’ in northern hemisphere skies. It’s a circumpolar constellation in mid northern latitudes which means it’s visible throughout the year. Well below Cassieopia, and slightly to the right, in an area devoid of bright stars, you will see one lonesome bright orange star, the double star Mirach (Beta Andromeda). Star hop up and slightly right two faint stars (Mu and Nu Andromeda), and slightly to the right of Nu is a faint star like speck – that’s M31. But take a look at it through some common or garden 10x50 binoculars and you’re in for a jaw-dropping sight. What you see is a hazy ball of stars, the central bulge of this fabulous spiral galaxy.

Some more details are revealed with a telescope with a low power eyepiece, but to be quite honest I’ve always found M31 a disappointing telescope target – it’s definitely far better with binoculars due to their intrinsic larger field of view.

As you view our beautiful galactic neighbour, there is one final twist in this tale of cosmic distances. The Andromeda Galaxy is on the move – and quickly at 120 kilometres per second. And it’s coming towards us! In 3 or 4 billion years from now our own Milky Way and M31 will merge in a celestial show of galactic cannibalism. Will our solar system and the Earth survive?

The answer is quite academic really as our Sun is already getter hotter. Our planet will be uninhabitable 300 million years hence, and in any case by the time of the merger our Sun will have exhausted its supply of hydrogen fusion fuel and will be on the way to becoming a bloated red giant. The Earth will have long since been burned to a crisp.

So the next time someone asks you how far you can see on a clear day, surprise them with the only correct and astounding answer.

When It Comes to Stars... Size Matters!

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 09:44:00 +0000

This illustration compares the different masses of stars. The lightest-weight stars are red dwarfs. They can be as small as one-twelfth the mass of our Sun. The heaviest-weight stars are blue-white super giants. They may get as large as 150 solar masses. Our Sun is between the lightweight and heavyweight stars. The red giant star at the bottom of the graphic is much larger than the other stars in the illustration. Its mass, however, can range from a fraction of the Sun's mass to a few solar masses. A red giant is a bloated star near the end of its life. In this brief phase, a star's diameter expands to several times its normal girth. (Credit: NASA, ESA and A. Feild (STScI).

Little stars and big stars may twinkle, but they're certainly not equal. While some are much smaller than our own Sun, others are many thousands of times larger. In this fascinating article, Andromeda Child's ANDY FLEMING investigates the huge variety of stars in terms of their the sizes, masses and luminosities.

One of the really awesome and mind-blowing aspects of astronomy is the sheer immense scale of the distances between planets, stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters. Our everyday terrestrial notions of scale, size, and distance must be discarded, even if we just consider a transit between the Earth and Mars. Kilometres first fall as units of measurement, then astronomical units (AU)(one AU is the distance between the Earth and Sun).... when we start to consider interstellar distances we have to look at light years as units of measurement (the distance that light travels in one year).

If distances become truly ‘astronomical’, then it comes as no surprise that likewise sizes and masses follow suit. We all think that the Sun is massive, and it is, with a radius of 695,990km, this is 109 times that of the Earth. With a mass of 1.989x10^30 kg, the Sun has the equivalent of 333,000 Earth masses, and yet it is still just a run-of-the-mill yellow dwarf class G2 star. As the diagram above shows, although there are many considerably smaller than the Sun (very common red dwarf stars) such as our nearest neighbour Proxima Centauri, there are also stars very much more massive.

The largest and most luminous star known is VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant located in the constellation Canis Major. At between 1,800 and 2,100 solar radii (approximately 2,750,000,000km across), it is a single star nearly 5,000 light years away from the Earth, and quite probably the largest star in our galaxy. To gain some perspective of its size, if the Earth were to be represented by a sphere one centimetre in diameter, the Sun would be represented as a sphere with a diameter of 109 centimetres, at a distance of 117 meters. At these scales, VY Canis Majoris would have a diameter of approximately two kilometres!

Of course, this is all very interesting information, and will certainly entertain your friends, but a star’s size is intrinsically involved in determining attributes such as its luminosity, colour, temperature and lifespan. Put simply, when it comes to stars, size really does matter!

Generally speaking, the larger a star the greater its mass, and hence the more its gravity. High mass stars with stronger gravity have greater pressure in their cores, greater pressure leads to higher temperatures and these lead to much faster nuclear fusion reactions, whereby the star’s hydrogen fuel is converted into helium, with the release of massive amounts of energy. This energy creates a radiation pressure, and while gravity tries to contract the star, this radiation pressure simultaneously tries to expand it... the result is a stable hydrostatic equilibrium which can last for millions, if not billions of years.

However, once a star runs out of hydrogen fuel and starts to fuse helium into even heavier elements, this equilibrium cannot continue, and it won’t be long before the star is no longer what could be regarded as a normal stellar main sequence object. Because high mass stars burn their fuel much, much quicker due to the greater core pressure caused by gravity, they live relatively short lives... they live fast and die young as supernovae... they are the James Dean of the stellar zoo.

A highly informative video that graphically illustrates the different types of stars, and the huge variation in their masses, sizes and luminosities.

A star such as Rigel, in the constellation of Orion, a hot blue supergiant with a diameter sixty times that of the Sun, has a mass of seventeen times that of our star, and hence 40,000 times its luminosity. Under its massive core pressure, its nuclear fusion reactions will race away, it will quickly run out of fuel, and hence it will live for only 20 or 30 million years. Our Sun on the other hand has enough hydrogen fuel to burn at its leisurely pace for ten billion years or more... small red dwarfs with lower pressure and lower temperatures will undergo nuclear fusion for much longer. With smaller mass and less gravity, Proxima Centauri for example will live for at least 20 to 30 billion years.

An interesting consequence of a star’s size and temperature is its brightness. Generally speaking, a larger mass star main sequence star, having a higher temperature will be bluer in colour, while a smaller, cooler star will be redder... the inverse of the colour conventions used on our devices warning of hot or cold temperatures!

So the next time you gaze at brilliant blue white Rigel, white Sirus, or yellow Arcturus with your telescope or binoculars, you’re looking at stars in decreasing masses and sizes. And remember – when it comes to stars, size really does matter!

To learn more about the lives of stars, astronomy and how we came to be, go on... treat yourself to a fantastic book by Brian May, Chris Lintott and Sir Patrick Moore from Amazon, the world's biggest bookstore and the name you know you can trust! Click the image below:

Saturn: Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Skies

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 18:27:00 +0000

NASA's robot spacecraft Voyager 2 made this image of Saturn as it began to explore the Saturn system in 1981. Saturn's famous rings are visible along with two of its moons, Rhea and Dione which appear as faint dots on the right and lower right part of the picture. Astronomers believe that Saturn's moons play a fundamental role in sculpting its elaborate ring system. (Credit: NASA, Voyager 2).

ANDY FLEMING takes a look through his telescope at his favourite night sky object, our solar system's beautiful ringed gas giant planet Saturn and its entourage of moons.

If there is one celestial object that is both readily visible in even the worst light polluted skies, and yet full of the astronomical “wow” factor, it has to be Saturn, our solar system’s beautiful ringed gas giant planet. For anyone new to telescopic observing, Saturn is usually an early and easy target. The planet has fascinated me for a long time, revealing an interesting bright disk when viewed through my 10x50 binoculars, but definite tantalising “handles” or “ears” when viewed with some old 12x50s - very much in accordance with Galileo’s findings in the early seventeenth century. It yearns for greater magnification… Saturn is like an old friend to me, both often gracing our skies and never failing to impress when other planets, like Mars, often fail.

When I first saw Saturn through by 200mm f4.5 Newtonian Reflector, I was unprepared for the awesome views of the planet as revealed through a large, quality telescope with a sturdy mount. Through a 26mm Plossl eyepiece, the planet is small, very bright, with clearly visible rings, and at least one of its family of moons is visible (Titan, of course). Using the x2 Barlow and Plossl, the whole system becomes much more striking, with another couple of specks of moons coming into view (Rhea, the planet’s second largest and Tethys). Saturn has a family of nearly sixty moons in tow, and to really enjoy this “mini solar system” a 9mm eyepiece gives a great view, the Cassini Division and the A and B rings coming clearly into view. Close inspection of the planet itself shows a slight shadow on the disc, cast by its beautiful ring system. There are a few cloud bandings visible on the planet’s disc – these bands however, are much less pronounced than those of Jupiter.

It is truly amazing to think, as you view the solar system’s second largest plane, that it is a staggering 1.3 billion kilometers away – indeed the light reaching your eyes from Saturn has taken over an hour and a half to reach Earth. It kind of gives you some idea of astronomical distances, as in cosmic terms, Saturn isn’t even next door – it’s in another room in our house!

Images of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Left: From the mankind's most distant, controlled spacecraft landing comes a colour photograph of the rock-strewn surface of the moon (courtesy NASA/ESA/Cassini-Huygens). Right: An artist's concept shows a mirror-smooth lake of ethane on the surface of the smoggy moon. (courtesy NASA)

Returning to its moons, the largest, Titan has already been visited by a robotic emissary from Earth, in the form of the ESA Huygens lander, which along with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has revealed an amazing world of orange skies, ice rock, mountains and possible liquid ethane lakes, that starting with the great Carl Sagan has fascinated astronomers for years. This enigmatic tiny little world appears to have a definite brownish hue through the telescope using the Barlow and my 9mm orthoscopic eyepiece, due to its bizarre hydrocarbon atmosphere. Indeed, it is the only moon in the Solar system with an atmosphere (one and a half times as dense as that of the Earth) – a pre-biotic atmosphere of tholins in icy stasis – an almost Earth-like atmosphere, frozen in time before life got going. Titan has weather too – it rains liquid ethane and methane on Titan – yes it’s that cold!

Based on data from the Cassini spacecraft, researchers are now arguing that liquid water reservoirs exist only tens of metres below the surface of Saturn's small but active moon Enceladus. The exciting results centre around towering jets and plumes of material erupting from the moon's surface. The plumes originate in the long tiger stripe fractures of the south polar region pictured here. Clearly an important step in the search for water and the potential for the origin of life beyond planet Earth, such near-surface reservoirs of water would be far more accessible than, for example, the internal ocean detected on the Jovian moon Europa.

Observing Titan, you envisage those boulders and rocks of solid ice from the Huygens photographs, and you think about Cassini’s scans of this tiny world. You suddenly realise Titan is not just a small disk in your telescope - it’s a place -we’ve been to Titan! The air is starting to chill, but before I pack away the equipment, I observe other minute specks of light around Saturn. Averted vision shows them to be even brighter – they are more of Saturn’s family of moons, including Rhea and Tethys again, and Dione and possibly even Enceladus! I think of venting water and ice inhaled by Cassini, and I wonder how liquid water possibly exists within such a deep freeze as the Saturnian system. I think of Cassini’sevidence for a deep subsurface water ocean on Titan, kept liquid by the immense gravitational tidal forces of Saturn. And I think how the Lord of the Rings has wonders aplenty to keep mankind fascinated for decades and centuries to come…

Did Monks Witness a Violent Medieval Impact on the Moon?

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:15:00 +0000

Lunar crater Giordano Bruno (Credit: NASA)

Did the monks of Canterbury witness a violent impact event on the Moon in 1178AD? And did the event lead to the formation of a well known crater? ANDY FLEMING investigates.

If you take a look through binoculars at the lunar surface on any moonlit night, you will be immediately reminded of the routine planetary violence that has created its surface that we see today. Over billions of years our Moon (and for that matter, the Earth) has been pummelled by countless asteroids, comets and meteorites, principally throughout the Period of Heavy Bombardment about 3.9 billion years ago, but also right up to the present Epoch. Unlike the Earth however, with no plate tectonics, vulcanism or weathering, the Moon’s surface provides a pristine record of its impact history, and its recent history includes supplementary written records of events on the lunar surface.In 1178, the chronicler Gervaise of Canterbury took down the depositions of five monks who had claimed to have seen a strange spectacle on the lunar surface:

"This year on the 18th of June, when the Moon, a slim crescent, first became visible, a marvelous phenomenon was seen by several men who were watching it. Suddenly, the upper horn of the crescent was split in two. From the mid point of the division, a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out over a considerable distance fire, hot coals and sparks. The body of the Moon which was below, writhed like a wounded snake. This happened a dozen times or more, and when the Moon returned to normal, the whole crescent took on a blackish appearance."

In 1976, in the journal Meteoritics, an astronomer from the State University of New York, Jack Hartung, investigated the claim, eventually putting forward the hypothesis that what the monks had infact witnessed was a meteor impacting the Moon. Indeed, Gervaise’s account, if true, is unique. There is no other account either in antiquity or during modern times of such a large lunar impact and resultant explosion. Sure, there are frequent Transient Lunar Phenomena, even witnessed during the NASA’s Apollo programme – the result of possible outgassing, small impacts or electrostatic effects. Indeed, there is a fascinating account of an impact in December, 2005 from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre (MSFC) at:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/22dec_lunartaurid.htm

This was possibly a Taurid meteor. Spectacular MSFC video footage of another small impact in June 2006 is available at:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/13jun_lunarsporadic.htm

That the monks of Canterbury witnessed something is fairly certain, and Gervaise was clear that they were prepared to place their reputations ‘on the line’.

Carl Sagan on asteroid impacts in an episode of the PBS documentary series 'Cosmos'. Here he details the account given by Gervaise of Canterbury and the monks in 1178 of a possible asteroid impact on the Moon.

Certainly on the date in question, the Moon was in the sky, revealing itself as a thin crescent.

Hartung’s hypothesis can be tested. Scientists have calculated that given the naked eye description of the event, a crater of at least 10 kilometres in diameter would have resulted, along with eject rays emanating up to 100 kilometres from the impact site. Its position would be at latitude near 45° north and longitude near 90° east.

A candidate crater was soon found in the form of Giordano Bruno, named after the sixteenth century astronomer and philosopher. Amateur astronomers can observe this crater with telescopes during periods of exceptionally favourable libration in the far north east of the Moon’s disc; however it is usually on the far side. In October 1959 the Soviet Lunik III Mission photographed the crater, and found its diameter to be approximately 20 kilometres, with a ray system to rival that of Tycho’s (this is despite the crater rim diameter being only one fifth that of Tycho).

So is Giordano Bruno crater 832 years old? Interestingly, no one is certain about its age. The usual dating method of surveying subsequent craters both within it, and on its ejecta blanket certainly suggests this is a ‘young’ crater. But by ‘young’ these results show an age of anywhere between one and ten million years. However, if these subsequent small craters turn out to be secondary cratering from the main impact event that formed Giordano Bruno, then its age is once again thrown into doubt.... it could be much younger.

There are however, further objections to Hartung’s hypothesis. Such an impact on the Moon should have showered the Earth with secondary meteorites in a fantastic firework display. And yet there are no records in European, Chinese or Arab chronicles of such a ferocious and stunning meteor storm. In 2008, a further survey by scientists analysing high resolution images of the crater and its surrounding area, acquired by the Terrain Camera on board the Japanese lunar orbiter SELENE (Kaguya), estimated that it formed more than one million years ago, but again this discounts secondary cratering.

The controversy will finally be put to rest when radiometric age dating of impact melt rocks at the crater is returned by the next generation of lunar explorers. Whatever the monks of Canterbury saw on that warm summer June evening in 1178, whether it was an impact on the Moon, or a meteor exploding in the Earth’s upper atmosphere it certainly was a spectacular sight.

This post was first published on Andromeda Child on February 9, 2011.

The Splendour of Orion the Hunter!

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 20:41:00 +0000

The Orion Nebula, one of the most brilliant star-forming regions in our galaxy. Other, newly-discovered regions like the Orion Nebula could help astronomers determing the chemical composition of our galaxy. Image Credit: APOD/Hubble Space Telescope

ANDY FLEMING starts tothink about late autumn and the rise of his favourite night sky constellation: Orion the Hunter.

The constellation of Orion is one of the most magnificent spectacles in our night

sky. It is one of the brightest constellations, defying the worst light

pollution. Lying on the celestial equator, it is visible to the unaided eye in

northern skies on an evening from late autumn to early spring, so I thought that I would publish a post right at the start of the Orion viewing season! What’s really nice about Orion is

that it actually resembles the object it’s named after - the hunter in Greek

mythology. The whole constellation is full of bright stars and deep sky objects,

the former being visible with just the naked eye, many of the latter being visible

with a good pair of binoculars or a small telescope.

I often enjoy a speedy tour of the bright objects in Orion, starting in the north east

with Betelgeuse, alpha Orionis, a variable red supergiant and one of the largest

stars known. At magnitude 0.6, it is a beautiful yellowy-orange colour and looks

stunning however you view it. This star is only 600 light years from the Earth,

and has an age of only 8.5 million years. However due to its immense mass

(950 times that of the Sun) and size (its diameter if located in our Solar System

would be larger than that of the orbit of Mars), astrophysicists predict that it will

explode within the next thousand years (indeed, it may have already done so).

Further north west and defining the hunter’s head is Meissa, a multiple

magnitude 3.4 star, and then it is down to Bellatrix, a 1.6 magnitude multiple star

marking Orion’s right shoulder. To the west, pi Orionis marks out the centre of

the hunter’s shield shining at magnitude 3.7. Straddling the centre of the

constellation is the asterism known as Orion’s belt, three multiple stars easily

visible to the naked eye. They are embedded nebulosity, visible through a

telescope in dark skies. From south east to north west, they are Alnitak, Alnilam

and Mintaka (shining at magnitudes 1.7, 1.8 and 2.3 respectively). Alnitak is

surrounded by reflection nebulae, which includes the Horsehead Nebula, very

difficult to see, without filters or CCDs.

The constellation of Orion, the Hunter. Notice the nebulosity in the star forming region around the sword.

For me, the most beautiful part of the constellation is the sword, which to the

naked eye looks like three stars, the middle of which looks distinctly hazy and

cloud-like. This of course is the Orion Nebula, M42 or NGC1976, 1,300 light

years away and the closest large region of star formation to the Earth. It is a

diffuse nebula, and deep in its centre is a young open cluster called the

Trapezium, first discovered by Galileo in 1617. I find it stunning enough through

binoculars, but through the telescope with a 20mm Plossl eyepiece it looks

absolutely superb – it is incredible to think that you are looking at infant stars. I

enjoy looking at M42 with a moderate eyepiece, a trade-off of course – a slightly

larger field of view still retains the overall structure of the nebula.

Marking out the hunter’s right foot is Rigel, beta Orionis, a blue supergiant that

looks beautiful through my binoculars. It is almost always the brightest star in the

constellation and in our region of the Milky Way at apparent magnitude 0.2.

Rigel is almost 800 light years away and has a mass seventeen times that of our

Sun. Finally, Saiph marks out Orion’s left ankle, readily visible at magnitude 2.

In addition to being stunningly beautiful, Orion is a useful constellation for starhopping

to locate other celestial objects. To begin, our solar system is located in

a minor spiral arm of the Milky Way called the Orion spur, wedged between the

major Sagittarius and Perseus arms, and so named for its proximity to the stars

in the constellation. Draw a line through Orion’s belt, and follow it south east,

and you come to the unmissable Sirius, lead star in Canis Major, one of Orion’s

faithful hounds. Follow the same line north east and you will come to Aldebaran,

the brightest star in Taurus.

With so much on offer to view with modest equipment, it is not surprising that

Orion is my favourite constellation. Go out and take a look at the hunter this autumn as the year draws on!

A Symphony of Science - A Glorious Dawn featuring Carl Sagan

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 10:16:00 +0000

The Symphony of Science is a musical project headed by John Boswell designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form.

The project owes its existence in large measure to the wonderful work of Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steve Soter, of Druyan-Sagan Associates, and their production of the classic PBS Series Cosmos, as well as all the other featured figures and visuals.

Boswell's first video in the Symphony of Science series is 3 minutes, 34 seconds long and features Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking. Samples include clips from Cosmos (1980) and Stephen Hawking's Universe (1997). On September 21, 2009, Unruly Media, a viral video tracking service, began to chart the popularity of the video. At the end of the first week of October, the video had received 800,000 views, and by the end of the month, more than a million. By the end of 2009, the video had surpassed 2 million views.

The title takes its name from the chorus spoken by Carl Sagan, remixed from an episode of Cosmos:

"A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the Milky Way"

Third Man Records released the single of "A Glorious Dawn" on November 9, 2009, in honour of the 75th anniversary of the birth of Carl Sagan. The one-sided single was created by United Record Pressing in a unique "Cosmos Colored Vinyl", limited pressing of 150 copies; it was then re-pressed on regular vinyl in a larger run. The flipside is etched with a copy of the diagram found on the Voyager Golden Record.

Visit the Symphony of Science website at:

http://www.symphonyofscience.com/

Are We Living In A Multiverse?

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 10:11:00 +0000

A familiar face from TV science documentaries, and author of Parallel Worlds, Dr Michio Kaku.

ANDY FLEMING reviews a superb popular cosmology book about the origins and fate of the universe that in the process speculates that our Universe may not be alone.

You know it's a really good book when you get round to reading it for a third time. Such is Parallel Worlds - The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos" by theoretical physicist and PBS/History/Discovery Channel star Dr Michio Kaku. I first read this superb book, very readable for the layperson four years ago, and it's as good today as it was back then.

The ground covered by Kaku in this book is astonishing -- it is no less than the coverage of the development of cosmology from its beginnings in antiquity right up to the theory of the multiverse, and the fact that our universe may be just one of an infinite number, each possessing physical forces and constants with different strengths to ours. The fact that the publication is targeted at the lay person (who may have little knowledge of cosmology and astronomy), makes the remit even more remarkable.

Kaku is one of the co-founders of a branch of String Theory and as such, one may start to read the book with the misconception that its contents will be biased towards the perspective of this particular theory. However, this is not the case, and the reader is firstly treated to a commendably objective history of astronomy, classical physics and the Copernican/Galilean Revolution, relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, and the discovery of dark energy and dark matter, along with some extremely well written explanations and diagrams. The overriding power of modern cosmology in explaining the universe -- the marriage of the study of large scale objects such as galaxies groups, with that of very small scale subatomic particles is a growing theme throughout the book, and includes a superb explanation of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, and culminates in a discussion of the Standard Model, Inflation, and the five eras of the development of our universe.

Kaku gives an elegant account of the breaking of symmetry of the physical forces a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and how String Theory can reconcile gravity with the electro-weak and strong nuclear forces, hence providing a theory of everything. Like many other physicists, he is hopeful that the evidence for supersymmetry and many of the sub-atomic particles predicted by String Theory may be forthcoming when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN reaches full power in 2010 or 2011. He certainly hopes so -- the discovery of the graviton, the Higgs particle, and minute black holes will mean many physicists have not been traversing a blind alley for the past forty years!

Of course, an integral part of String Theory are extra spatial dimensions and Kaku develops this, and speculates on whether it will be possible to detect these. The book puts our everyday notions of time and reality to the test, and examines the fate of the universe as it expands exponentially, speculating that after trillions of years of such expansion and subsequent cooling, conditions will be unable to sustain intelligent life. Kaku also speculates on the possibility of whether given enough time, and if we don't destroy ourselves first, we can ascend through the types of advanced civilisation to reach a point where we can harness the power of stars and galaxies and enter another universe where conditions are once again favourable for life.

Perhaps the most startling revelation is that the Copernican Theory of Mediocrity may apply to our universe. The values of the universal constants and forces may, after all, be arbitrary, and a random result of symmetry breaking in a certain way at the time of the Big Bang. For example, Kaku shows how if one decreases the general strength of gravity by an infinitesimally small amount clouds of hydrogen will not coalesce into stars, planets and galaxies and life would not exist. Increase gravity and stars will burn and die too quickly, never allowing the time for planets and life to evolve.

Kaku documents a stark choice facing physicists, either our universe has been created in a way conducive to the development of complexity and ultimately life itself (the anthropogenic principle), or we live in a multiverse of universes --- by an infinitesimally small chance we just happen to live in one of the few habitable universes. Kaku eloquently shows how astro-physics, philosophy and even religion are drawn together at this point.
In conclusion, Parallel Worlds is a fascinating insight into current cosmological theory and models, and sheds light on many of the dilemmas and discoveries with which astrophysicists and cosmologists are now grappling. By its very nature, any book involving cosmology will become dated rapidly, and this book will probably be no exception (especially when the LHC comes up to full power). However Dr Kaku should be complemented in a superb attempt to portray contemporary cosmological and physical theories in a highly interesting and readily understandable way.

The book contains an excellent glossary of cosmological and physical terms, and there is little mathematics. For me anyway, it's the sort of book which, once started, you simply can't put down!

Go on, treat yourself to a fascinating and astonishing read by ordering Parallel Worlds at Amazon, the online book retailer you know and trust!

Take a Look at The Great Bear!

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:48:00 +0000

The beauty of the night sky... the Big Dipper or Plough, an asterism that is part of Ursa Major, the Great Bear.

ANDY FLEMING takes a look at one of the Northern Hemisphere's most well known constellations, the Great Bear.

If there's one constellation in the Northern Hemisphere that most living there learnt as a child, it's The Plough, or Big Dipper. Truth be told, it's not actually a constellation at all, it's called an asterism -- a pattern of stars seen in Earth's sky which is not an official constellation. Like constellations, they are composed of stars which, while they are in the same general direction, are not physically related, often being at significantly different distances from Earth. The Big Dipper (named after the huge soup ladle farmers' wives would use to serve up to the farm hands at the end of a busy day's work), is actually part of a sprawling constellation called Ursa Major, home to wonders aplenty in terms of deep sky objects.

Here though, we're going to just concentrate on the Big Dipper itself. To those in North America, Europe and Asia, both it, and indeed Ursa Major itself, is a circumpolar constellation, meaning it is visible every night throughout the year -- its stars never set.

And so to a tour of the stars of this asterism, all visible with the naked eye, in all but the most appalling light pollution. Binoculars will start to reveal its true beauty, and a small telescope will give superb details of the multiple star members.

Starting in the top right hand corner of the bowl of the ladle, Dubhe (Alpha Ursae Majoris (α UMa / α Ursae Majoris)) is the second-brightest star in the constellation of Ursa Major, and is about 124 light years away. It is typical of a red giant, an evolved helium-burning star. It is also a multiple star, orbited by a main sequence companion, Dubhe B, at a distance of about 23 astronomical units (AU), as well as a close pair, Dubhe C, at a distance of about 8000 AU.

Journeying anticlockwise, we come to Merak (Beta Ursae Majoris (β UMa / β Ursae Majoris)). Both it and Dubhe are familiar to northern hemisphere observers as the "pointer stars" in the Big Dipper, and a line connecting them and moving north extends to Polaris, located at the north Celestial Pole in this epoch. Merak is fairly typical for a main sequence star of its type, although being slightly hotter and larger than our own Sun, it shines several times brighter. The star is surrounded by a cooling disk of dust, much like those discovered around Fomalhaut and most notably Vega. No planets have been discovered orbiting Merak, but the presence of the dust indicates they may exist or be in the process of forming.

Moving to the left of the bowl we come to Phad or Phecda (Gamma Ursae Majoris (γ UMa / γ Ursae Majoris)). It is an average main sequence star not unlike our Sun, although somewhat hotter, brighter and larger.

At the top left of the bowl is Megrez (Delta Ursae Majoris (δ UMa / δ Ursae Majoris)). Megrez has an apparent magnitude of +3.32 making it the dimmest of the seven stars in the Big Dipper. Located 81 light years away, it is a bluish-white main sequence star. It has two faint companions, the 11th magnitude Delta Ursae Majoris B, 190 arcseconds away, and the 10th magnitude Delta Ursae Majoris C, 186 arcseconds away.

Moving to the left, we first come to Alioth (Epsilon Ursae Majoris (ε UMa / ε Ursae Majoris)). It is the brightest star in the entire constellation of Ursa Major, at magnitude +1.76. It is the star in the tail of the bear closest to its body, and thus the star in the handle of the Big Dipper closest to the bowl. Historically, the star was frequently used in celestial navigation in the maritime trade, because it is listed as one of the 57 navigational stars.

Further out along the handle of the Big Dipper, we arrive at Mizar (ζ UMa / ζ Ursae Majoris), 78 light years away. It is a quadruplet system of two binary stars, with an apparent magnitude is +2.23. Its name comes from the Arabic mÄzar, meaning a waistband or girdle.

With normal eyesight one can make out a faint companion just to the east, named Alcor, or 80 Ursae Majoris, at magnitude 3.99. Mizar and Alcor together are sometimes called the "Horse and Rider," and the ability to resolve the two stars with the naked eye is often quoted as a test of eyesight, although even people with quite poor eyesight can see the two stars. The two stars lie three light-years apart, and though their proper motions show they move together, it was long believed they do not form a true binary star system, but simply a double star. New data reveals Alcor actually is itself a binary, consisting of Alcor A and Alcor B, and that this binary system is most likely gravitationally bound to Mizar, bringing the full count of stars in this complex system to six.

Lying at the end of the handle is Alkaid (Eta Ursae Majoris (η UMa / η Ursae Majoris)). It has apparent magnitude +1.9, and is a young bluish-white main sequence star, and burning at 20,000 kelvins it is one of the hotter stars visible with the naked eye.

So go and enjoy the Big Dipper, arm yourself with some 10x50 binoculars, and see how many double stars you can resolve in this lovely asterism!

SETI @ 50!

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:19:00 +0000

Arecibo Radio Telescope, Puerto Rico, used in SETI Experiments

It's always nice to know of things marginally older than oneself.... and in this case its the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). It is 50 years since the great Dr Frank Drake did the first SETI experiment of the modern era at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Greenbank, West Virginia launching science's attempt to ascertain whether, assuming homo sapiens can be defined as 'intelligent', there is any other such intelligent life in the Cosmos.

Frank, who is currently involved in "The Carl Sagan Center for the Study of life in the universe" at the SETI Institute in California, defined the famous Drake Equation, in an attempt to at least approximate the number of intelligent civilisations in the Milky Way galaxy:
where:
N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;
and
R* = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fℓ = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

Over the years some of the terms have been refined... we know the rate of star formation in the Milky Way each year (equivalent to three solar masses)... we're starting to get a handle on the number of stars with planets (at least 10-15%).... perhaps even Earth mass planets in the habitable zones of stars. The rest of the terms we don't know... we still only know of one genesis of life here on Earth, and hence can only make educated guesses for the remaining terms. It's staggering to think though that the Earth is 4,500,000,000 million (4.5 billion) years old, and yet we have only possessed radio technology for a century (0.000006% of the Earth's age!)

It's really a case of quantifying and plugging in either your optimism or pessimism to get N to equal any number from one to, in the case of Carl Sagan, a million. Many scientists are of the opinion that life may be common in the Cosmos, but intellegent life may be comparatively rare. Perhaps, like us, it is the norm that intelligent life develops the atom bomb at the same time as radio astronomy. Perhaps its passions and beliefs cannot co-exist with its technologies, and intelligent aliens self destructs soon after they develop nuclear fission.

Over the last 50 years there have been some enigmatic alerts from the SETI programmes, most famous of which has been the 'wow' signal, detected by the Ohio Stae University team in 1977. Goose bumps they may cause, but without independent acquisition and verification of the signals, they're not worth the pixels on the computer screens.

SETI goes from strength to strength, and since NASA funding was withdrawn by the US Congress in 1992 (apparently politicians aren't interested in the greatest question of all), the SETI Institute has gained private funds, even from Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen who is helping to fund the Allen Telescope Array, 290 kilometres north east of San Francisco. Where once a couple of channels could be analysed in Project Osma... millions and then billions of channels will be checked simultaneously. Why restrict yourself to the frequency of the emission of neutral hydrogen... we certainly transmit narrow band signals all over the spectrum? And then of course there's Optical SETI.... does ET use laser communications. Whether it's the ATA or Arecibo, you can even take part in SETI@Home.... let your computer analyse radio telescope data in this UC Berkeley distributive computing programme.

And what do I think? I'm 100% behind SETI - it costs so little and either way the answer will be profound. It's the greatest question of all: are we alone? Of course, there are some people who think we've already been visited and the aliens are already amongst us. But without any evidence, not one thruster or spacesuit or alien burger carton, I'll stick with famous scientists past and present such as Frank Drake, Gill Tarter, Seth Shostak and Carl Sagan who take the difficult route... and endeavour to answer this greatest of questions scientifically.

Can We Really Understand the Universe?

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 21:54:00 +0000

As physicists at the Large Hadron Collider report finding neutrinos seemingly travelling faster than the speed of light, ANDY FLEMING wonders whether we're smart enough to ever really know how the universe works.

There was a young lady named Kite

Whose speed was much faster than light.

She left home one day

In a relative way

And returned on the previous night.

Further to the news on Thursday that scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Switzerland had recorded virtually massless sub atomic particles called neutrinos travelling at superluminal speeds (with the caveat that most scientists are treating the results with scepticism at the moment; read my previous post here), I kinda started to dwell on some major philosophical questions about life, the universe and everything else (well the subtitle of this blog is Musings from a Universe of Thoughts isn't it?).

As I had my Aristotle moment, the really nice thing about philosophy is that without the over bearing responsibility of any scientific evidence it does allow you to dream up some hypotheses that to many people may seem down right counter-intuitive and perhaps even utterly unthinkable. Now let me say from the outset that my view of the cosmos is a scientific one. This is despite not being a scientist: my foray into science revolves around amateur astronomy and surviving garage explosions with a chemistry set in my youth. But I recognise fully that we have so many beneficial things in our lives for which we can thank the scientific enterprise as initiated by Kepler and Galileo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Science, rather than religion or pseudo science and mysticism well and truly brings home the technological 'bacon'.

And that 'bacon' is everything from antibiotics to plasma screen televisions, and I'm sure, eventually a cure for cancer. My real heroes aren't pop music, movie or sports so called 'celebrities', but the unsung heroes of modern science who work for a better understanding of the universe and through it the plethora of technological devices, medicines and products that have transformed our society from alchemy and witchcraft to solar power and stem cell research, all in the space of five hundred years. And ultimately I'm a real sceptic.

But just for one moment, let's think the unthinkable and let's assume that the physicists at the LHC, and before them at the Fermilab Tevatron in the United States really did calibrate their machines correctly and those naughty minute neutrinos really were travelling faster than 186,000 miles per second, what we thought was the cosmic speed limit. Some really uncomfortable things scientifically then begin to happen. For starters, as you travel nearly at the speed of light, time slows down relative to those you leave behind on Earth, at the speed of light itself (c) it stops completely, and something travelling faster than light like the neutrinos start to travel backwards in time. Put simply, the neutrinos are detected before they were generated. Imagine finishing a train journey before you boarded the train, or seeing the result of betting on the 3.20pm at Wincanton before the horses were let out of the starting gate. Profitable , but weird eh? And it breaks one of the accepted cornerstones of physics, the causality principle that states causes should precede effects.

Not just that Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, his theory of gravity and spacetime along with his famous equation E=mc^2 that states the equivalence of mass and energy would need to be completely redrawn. That would be just the start: then there's the conservation of energy and the Laws of Thermodynamics... it just goes on. Although you'd have the power of Captain Kirk with warp speed at your disposal, it would all nonetheless make you wonder whether we really knew the universe at all.

But hang on a minute, back at our subliminal reality we still ask the same question: Do we know the universe, and anyway what makes humans sanctimoniously think that we have the brain capacity to one day fully understand the universe anyway?

A so-called 'theory of everything' still eludes us and despite theoretical advances in String Theory we're stuck with Einstein's Theory of General Relativity for the very big and Quantum Physics with its 'Standard Model' of particles for the very small and never the twain shall meet. They're both exquisitely accurate and simulataneously exquisitely incompatible. When they're merged it's singularities and infinities and beyond. And physicists just hate infinities.

What makes us think we're smart enough to figure it all out? Perhaps we just don't have enough logic gates in our brains, we just don't have the bits to number crunch. Go down the evolutionary tree a notch or two and a monkey may be an intelligent animal but however it's trained Differential Calculus will always be way beyond its brain's processing power.

So what makes us think we're capable of figuring out the human equivalent to the monkey's task: the gargantuan edifice and understanding of a Theory of Everything, a more-or-less full understanding of how the universe works. Simple: it's because of our machines to come.

Ultimately our machines and artificial intelligence will outsmart us and complete the task for us. Already, primitive quantum computers utilising the bizarre world of sub atomic particles promise exponential leaps in processing power. Our machines are already becoming our appendages and will one day replace us completely: after all, I for one am literally lost without my GPS, iPad2 and laptop. Isaac Asimov was right. These machines will self-replicate, evolve and colonize the galaxy and universe... so called 'von Neumann machines'. And if the CERN experiments are correct they'll do it in style at super liminal speeds, going backwards in time too.

Which makes you wonder, just like Stephen Hawking wonders: where are those time travellers from the future? Reality, however you define it can be a real bummer at times!

Earth Rendezvous for Dead NASA Spacecraft

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 13:30:00 +0000

Nasa's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) expected to hit the Earth this week. Photograph: AP.

As a NASA spacecraft makes an uncontrolled fall to the Earth, scientists say there is a 1 in 3,200 chance of debris striking someone.

A dead spacecraft that is in an uncontrollable descent to Earth will re-enter the atmosphere on Friday evening or Saturday morning UK time, according to NASA's latest analysis.

Most of the bus-sized Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) will burn up in the atmosphere, but more than half a tonne of debris is predicted to get through.

The falling spacecraft is expected to begin its final descent to Earth sometime between the hours of noon and midnight US Eastern time on Friday (between 5pm Friday and 5am Saturday British Summer Time), according to an update released by the US space agency on Wednesday.

The satellite will not be passing over North America at the time of re-entry, but NASA said it was too early to predict the time and location with more certainty.

The space agency anticipates that 26 potentially hazardous parts, weighing a total of 532kg, could remain intact and hit the Earth. The debris will spread along an estimated 500-mile corridor of the Earth's surface.

UARS will burn up in the atmosphere, but more than half a tonne of debris is predicted to get through.

Most likely by far is that the remains of the satellite will drop into the ocean, or be strewn across one of the planet's most desolate regions, such as Siberia, the Australian outback or the Canadian tundra.

Noting that safety was its top priority, NASA declared the odds of someone being struck by a falling part of the spacecraft at one in 3,200. There are no confirmed injuries from man-made space debris and no record of significant property damage from a falling satellite.

"Most of the Earth's surface is covered by water or is uninhabited, so nobody tends to even see this kind of debris when it does land," Hugh Lewis, a space debris expert at Southampton University.

"Those pieces that do survive re-entry have slowed down a lot, but they are still travelling quite fast. Because of their size, they would do significant damage if they hit a structure or a person, but the chances of that happening are remote," he added.

When NASA's Skylab fell to Earth in 1979, the space agency put the risk of personal injury at 1 in 152, with the odds of the defunct space station striking a city much higher. The partially-controlled Skylab missed its expected impact site in South Africa and crash-landed in Australia.
Full story here

Source: The Guardian

Speed-of-light Experiments threaten Einstein at CERN

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:17:00 +0000

The neutrinos are fired deep under the Italian Alps at Gran Sasso.

Scientists said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than light - a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's fundamental laws of the universe.

Puzzling results from CERN, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists - because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.

Neutrinos sent through the ground from CERN toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.

The result - which threatens to upend a century of physics - will be put online for scrutiny by other scientists.

In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims.

"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.

"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told the BBC.

"When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'"

Full story on the BBC News Website

Why Astrologers Talk a Load of Old Taurus

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 15:07:00 +0000

ANDY FLEMING glances a sceptical eye at astrologers, and concludes astrology is a load of old rubbish.

Now call me an over-ethical, over-moralistic sceptical kill-joy but there's one thing that gets right up my nose and that's charlatanry.

Now take astrology for instance. Astrologers seem to be almost part of the establishment, and indeed in some respects they are... the fate of kings and empires and their decisions quite often lay in the hands of well-paid court astrologers. Even today everyone from Russell Grant to Mystic Meg enjoys making a nice little earner from this so-called 'subject' what in reality is a load of old mumbo jumbo. There are thousands of websites, blogs and regular newspaper and magazine columns all professing to foretell the future on the basis of what position the planets were in against the twelve constellations of the zodiac in the night sky. Even Ronald Regan's wife Nancy consulted an astrologer... worrying when her husband held his trembling finger on the nuclear button.

I suppose I get especially tetchy about his bunkem because as an amateur astronomer I'm quite often labelled as an 'astrologer'... indeed I've even been asked for horoscopes before! Sometimes people ask how long I've been involved with astrology. And indeed, astrology shares the same roots as astronomy, but the dichotomy of the two subjects occurred with the birth of the scientific method, with thanks especially to Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe and Galilieo Galilei. Whereas astronomy is mankind's oldest science with its theories open to constant peer review, falsifiability, verification and repeatability, there is no such scrutiny when it comes to astrology.

From a scientific standpoint, indeed from any standpoint, what possible effect can the position of Mars (not the bringer of war but the red planet) in the constellation of Taurus have on the life chances of a newborn baby. The gravity of the surgeons in the birthing room would have many more times the effect than that of the red planet at least thirty five million years distant, no more than a small disk of light in the sky.

And if you're going to be gullible, why limit yourself to just twelve signs of the zodiac when there is another one astrologers forget to publicise? Yep that's right, poor old Ophiuchus is excluded.

Anyway, here's someone who can demolish all of the pillars of astrology much more effectively and quickly than myself, the late NASA Astronomer Dr Carl Sagan, in an excerpt from his fabulous PBS television series Cosmos:

Astronomy for Everyone: Venus - The Earth's Evil Twin

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 11:01:00 +0000

NASA's Pioneer Venus Orbiter captured this ultraviolet image of Venus in 1979. Credit: NASA/JPL

ANDY FLEMING takes a look at the Earth's closest planetary neighbour, Venus. Looking stunning with the naked eye or through binoculars, it may be the Earth's twin planet, but it's an evil twin with surface conditions defining planetary hell.

There is always a tranche of phone calls to newspapers from unwary members of the general public when Venus is bright and on display in either our evening or morning skies, shortly after sunset, or before sunrise. Especially to anyone who is driving west it appears to move with your vehicle, and I suppose it is not surprising that to anyone who doesn't know the night sky, it could be an unidentified flying object.

Venus is bright, very bright and after the Sun and the Moon it is the brightest object in the night sky with a maximum apparent magnitude of -4.4. This is of no surprise: the planet is the second rock from the Sun at only 108 million kilometres, and at closest opposition is only 38 million kilometres away from the Earth. These two attributes plus its high reflectivity or albedo due to its clouds of sulphur dioxide are the reasons for its brightness.

Surface of Venus, taken by Venera 13 Soviet Spacecraft.

Just like little Mercury, although not so fast or as elusive, Venus hugs our star... that's why you only see it for a period after sunset, or for a period before sunrise. Anyone who tells you that they observed Venus in the small hours of the morning is mistaken -- for this to happen it would simply be two far away from the Sun.

Venus shows crescent, gibbous quarter and full phases, just like our Moon, and these were first observed by Galileo who realised that for this to happen, Venus had to be orbiting the Sun, not the Earth. Indeed Venus is very close to the Sun at the moment and you will have difficulty locating it in the rapidly increasing sunrise.

To the naked eye Venus resembles a very bright star, but as it's a planet, it doesn't twinkle, instead it shows a yellowy-white disc through binoculars. Ironically due to its orbit, Venus shows a full disc when on the opposite side of the Sun to the Earth. Seen in its full phase through a 26mm eyepiece for example it looks spectacular... even more so if you drop down in size to something like 9mm. If you catch it as it's about to set in the twilight, it often looks a very beautiful glowing orangey colour as the reflected sunlight from the planet is scattered in our atmosphere. Conversely, Venus has its largest angular size when it is in crescent phase (closest to the Earth).

Don't expect to see any features on this planet. You may be lucky and see some very faint cloud bands, but Venus is indeed a hellish place... it is indeed the Earth's evil sister. Although roughly the same mass as Earth, the planet is enshrouded in a crushingly dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide one hundred times the pressure of that on Earth. It's a runaway greenhouse gone mad with temperatures of 470 degrees Celsius, which is hot enough to melt tin. It's a salutary reminder of what happens when a planetary climate goes berserk, when a planet is slightly closer to the Sun, when there are no plate tectonics and when the carbon cycle releases most of the carbon in the rocks into the atmosphere instead. The result: a desiccated arid planetary oven where water molecules disassociate and the planet's hydrogen is lost to space.

Venus also rotates retrograde, which means the sun rises in the west. Because Venus rotates so slowly, its atmosphere moves in global-scale weather patterns, producing distinctive u-shaped clouds. Ferocious winds in the upper atmosphere reach speeds of 370 kilometres per hour.

So when Venus adorns the morning or evening sky, go out and enjoy the planet, but remember as you view from our comparative Earthly heaven, you're looking at planetary hell.

Tatooine-like Planet Discovered

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 21:29:00 +0000

This artist's concept illustrates Kepler-16b, the first planet known to definitively orbit two stars--what's called a circumbinary planet. This image is copyrighted by NASA/JPL-Caltech.

A planet with two suns may be a familiar sight to fans of the Star Wars film series, but not, until now, to scientists. A team of researchers has discovered a planet that orbits around a pair of stars!

Their remarkable findings will be published in the September 16th edition of Science.

This is the first instance of astronomers finding direct evidence of a so-called circumbinary planet. A few other planets have been suspected of orbiting around both members of a dual-star system, but the transits of the circumbinary planet have never been detected previously.

The team, led by Laurance Doyle of the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe at the SETI Institute, used photometric data from the NASA Kepler space telescope, which monitors the brightness of 155,000 stars.

They found the binary star system by detecting a system where the stars eclipsed each other from the perspective of the Kepler spacecraft. These stars have two eclipses: A primary eclipse when the larger star is partially blocked by the smaller star and a secondary eclipse where the smaller star is fully blocked by the larger star.

But the researchers also noticed other times when the brightness of the two stars dropped, even when they were not in an eclipse position. This pattern suggested that there was likely a third object involved. The fact that these so-called tertiary and quaternary eclipses recurred after varying intervals of time, and were of different depths, indicated that the stars were in different positions in their orbit at each instance. This result showed that the tertiary and quaternary eclipses were being caused by something circling both stars, and not an object circling one or the other star.

Measurements of the variations in the timing of all four types of eclipses, resulting from the mutual gravitational interactions of the two stars and the third body, demonstrated that the third object was, indeed, a planet. Their work indicates that the planet is less massive than Jupiter, possibly comparable in mass to Saturn, and that the larger of the two binary stars is smaller than our Sun.
“This discovery is stunning,” Boss said. “Once again, what used to be science fiction has turned into reality.”

Funding for the Kepler Discovery mission was provided by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Various researchers were funded by the NASA Kepler Participating Scientist program, NASA Hubble Fellowship grants awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for research in Astronomy Inc. for NASA, support from the NASA Origins program, and the Hungarian OTKA grant.

Source: Carnegie Institution for Science

SETI Back Online in its Quest to Answer the Greatest of All Questions

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:24:00 +0000

SETI's Allen Telescope Array, Hat Creek, California.

ANDY FLEMING reports on a reprieve for the multi million dollar Allen Telescope Array and the SETI Institute's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Some readers may be aware that mankind's enterprise to seek out other intelligent life in the cosmos, SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) had its plug pulled earlier this year, as reported here.

Well the good news is that thousands of people thought that the search was important enough to continue, and the SETIstars appeal to raise $200,000 to re-open the Allen Telescope Array has been a success. This huge array of fifty radio telescopes located at Hat Creek, California was funded from a sizeable donation from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The array is operated by the SETI Institute, Mountain View, California and the University of California at Berkeley's radio astronomy department. But the funding had dried up following cuts to the university's budget and a decrease in private donations to the SETI Institute. Had new funding not been obtained the SETI search would once again have been limited to limited telescope time at facilities such as the giant Arecibo antenna in Puerto Rica.

Happily, mankind's only serious scientific effort to answer the greatest of all questions, "are we alone?" can resume, as reported here. However, following the story over the summer I've been shocked at the vitriol and glee from the opponents of SETI at the plight of its efforts to probe the Milky Way galaxy to ever greater distances with the new array in the hope of detecting an artificial radio signal from other solar systems.

The US Congress pulled NASA funding for SETI in the early 1990s, so all of its modest funding comes now from private individuals and organisations. No tax payer's interests are harmed in its continuation and its modest running costs surely are worth it on the off-chance they succeed in detecting an alien radio or laser signal. The Institute also conducts much valuable work in astrobiology and planetary science, in addition to scientific public outreach.

SETI opponents regard the enterprise as religion and not science and in their vitriol often claim its supporters are often romantics who've been too heavily influenced by Carl Sagan's novel Contact. But given enough time and patience SETI may yet prove the ETI radio communication hypothesis correct, and I hope that they do. Because to have permanently cancelled its search due to a lack of funds would have been a sad endictment of the failure of humanity's collective imagination in dealing with the greatest question of all... despite the SETI search being a miniscule fraction of the amount spent globally on armaments, conflict, entertainment, sport and celebrities. An answer either way would have profound ramifications in our quest as a species to ascertain who we are, and from where we came.

For those of us who think that intelligent life does indeed exist somewhere else in our galaxy, has discovered radio and laser communications, and isn't here already having travelled to and crashed to Earth in UFOs, it's good luck SETI!

Alien Life More Likely on ‘Dune’ Planets

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 15:28:00 +0000

A new study finds that desert worlds, like the planet Arrakis in the sci-fi classic "Dune" might be the more common type of habitable planet in the galaxy, rather than watery planets such as Earth.

Desert planets strikingly like the world depicted in the science fiction classic "Dune" might be the more common type of habitable planet in the galaxy, rather than watery planets such as Earth, researchers suggest.

Their findings also hint that Venus might have been a habitable desert world as recently as 1 billion years ago.

Nearly everywhere there is water on Earth, there is life. As such, the search for life elsewhere in the universe has largely focused on "aqua planets" with a lot of liquid water on their surfaces — either terrestrial planets largely covered with oceans, such as Earth, or theoretical "ocean planets" completely covered by a layer of water hundreds of miles deep, somewhat like thawed versions of Jupiter's moon Ganymede.

To be habitable, aqua planets must orbit their stars in a so-called "Goldilocks zone" where they are neither too hot nor too cold. If they are too far from the Sun, they freeze; if they are too close, steam builds up in their atmospheres, trapping heat that vaporizes still more water, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect that boils all the oceans off the planet, as apparently happened on Venus. Eventually, such planets get so hot, they force water vapor high enough into the atmosphere for it to get split into hydrogen and oxygen by ultraviolet light — the hydrogen then escapes into space, the oxygen likely reacts with the molten surface and gets incorporated into the mantle , and the planet's atmosphere loses all its water over time.

Instead of aqua planets with abundant water on their surfaces, researchers investigated what "land planets" might be like, ones with no oceans and vast dry deserts, but perhaps oases here and there. The planet Arrakis depicted in science fiction classic "Dune" is one exceptionally well-developed example of a habitable land planet, said planetologist Kevin Zahnle at NASA Ames Research Center. Arrakis is essentially a bigger, warmer, sparsely inhabited version of Mars with a breathable oxygen atmosphere and polar regions cool and moist enough to have small water icecaps and morning dew.

Read the full story on the Astrobiology magazine website.

Carl Sagan - A Life in the Cosmos

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 09:55:00 +0000

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Carl Sagan was one of the key popularisers of science in the twentieth century. ANDY FLEMING reviews the life of a remarkable astronomer, astrobiologist, NASA/JPL key figure and scientist who believed passionately about bringing scientific knowledge and scepticism to the general public.

It's incredible to think that it's nearly fifteen years since the world lost a most remarkable astronomer, pioneer astrobiologist and populariser of science - Carl Sagan.

A son of Jewish immigrants to the United States, Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he spent his childhood developing an interest in astronomy. A high achiever, he studied physics at the University of Chicago, gaining a master's degree in 1956, before being awarded a doctorate there in 1960 in astronomy and astrophysics. He then lectured at Harvard University until 1968, when a move to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York beckoned. In 1971 this became a full-time professorship that included the directorship of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. He also took an increasing interest in pioneering astrobiology and publicising the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). During this period, he also became an Associate Director of the Centre for Radio Physics and Space Research at Cornell, and later was instrumental in lecturing at Cornell in scepticism and critical thinking.

Carl Sagan's gold anodised plaque affixed to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft (courtesy NASA, JPL).

Such an academic career would have been amazing in itself, but Sagan had been heavily involved in the US space program since the 1950s -- including his celebrated briefings of the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon. However, of utmost interest to this most talented of scientists was planetary science and the increasing number of NASA robotic missions to neighbouring planets in the solar system. Indeed, he was responsible for many of the biology and chemistry laboratory packs placed on these unmanned probes. He also gained worldwide attention for his idea of placing gold-anodised unalterable universal messages, onto unmanned spacecraft destined to leave our solar system. These included Pioneer 10 and 11, launched in 1972 and 1973 respectively. In the albeit slim hope of these emissaries of mankind one day millions of years from now being located by extraterrestrial intelligence, the plaques were developed further, and along with the Golden Record of Sounds of the Earth, were again attached to the Voyager unmanned probes launched to investigate the outer solar system in 1977.

Sagan's scientific research achievements and discoveries about other planets in our solar system, and their applicability to the Earth were immense. He was, for example pivotal to the discovery of Venus's high surface temperature of 500 degrees Celsius and its crushing atmospheric pressure, this data being gained from the planet's radio emissions. Whilst working for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena he was involved in the design and management of the first Mariner missions to Mars. Mariner 2 would later confirm Sagan's analysis that Venus was indeed the Earth's Evil Twin, and not the balmy paradise which was the conjecture of many scientists in the early 1960s. Through his studies of Venus and its runaway greenhouse effect, he identified man-made carbon dioxide emissions on the Earth as a possible cause of climate change. He was also a staunch opponent of the Cold War arms race, justifying his views by research into the effects of nuclear winter – one of the after effects of a full superpower nuclear exchange.

Sagan was the first scientist to hypothesise that Saturn's moon Titan may possess lakes and oceans of liquid methane or ethane, and that the reddish haze of this moon's atmosphere was a result of complex organic molecules. This would be confirmed after Sagan's death by the Cassini probe and associated Huygens Titan lander. He also hypothesised that Jupiter's moon Europa had a subsurface ocean of liquid water. This he thought possible, under an ice sheet in such low temperatures, because of the heat from Europa's volcanism, resulting from the massive tidal stresses on the moon due to its close proximity to the gas giant.

His other achievements included work on the seasonal changes on the surface of Mars, including what he correctly identified as windstorms, at a time when many other scientists regarded them as vegetation. His interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life led him into demonstrating how amino acids, the building blocks of life, can be produced by irradiating basic organic chemical compounds found in abundance in our solar system's gas giant planets and their many moons. In conjunction with this he also assisted Dr Frank Drake (who formulated the now famous Drake Equation complete with its now decreasing number of variables for calculating the total number of intelligent extra-terrestrials capable of interstellar radio communication in the Milky Way) in writing the Arecibo Message, beamed to the Hercules Star Cluster (M13) in 1974, with the aim of informing extraterrestrials about Earth. Sagan was also a founder member of the Planetary Society, an organisation that promotes the active involvement of the worldwide public in planetary exploration and new forms of propulsion such as the Solar Sail.

However, above all, it is Sagan's immense legacy of science advocacy, and in particular his many ground-breaking public science education publications and documentaries that earned him worldwide public acclaim, in particular Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Heavily influenced by the success of the Jacob Bronowski's BBC series The Ascent of Man (1974), PBS commissioned Sagan to produce (along with collaborators Steven Soter and Ann Druyan) this epic documentary series.

Carl Sagan on the set of the PBS series Cosmos: A Pesonal Voyage. Here he discusses the planet Saturn and its rings.

As one of the true popularisers of astronomy and science, Sagan relished the opportunity. The result was an inspiring, lavish and totally exquisite thirteen-part series, first broadcast in 1980 and viewed (according to the NASA Office of Space Science) by over 600 million people in over 60 countries worldwide – still the most-watched science documentary series ever. It thus comes as little surprise that the series was immediately awarded an Emmy and Peabody Award. As Druyan notes it is a fitting tribute to the foresight of her late husband, that even the recent digital re-mastering of the entire series required little updating regarding factual content.

Watch episode one of Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean:

The power of Cosmos lies in Sagan's inspirational delivery of its main contention -- our oneness with the Cosmos. To view Cosmos is one of the most spiritually uplifting experiences, made all the more remarkable because it is a science series. For example, it explains how we and all the creatures with which we share the Earth are all made of star stuff, from the elements in our own bodies including the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood, to the carbon in each and every cell. Whilst the first light elements such as hydrogen and helium were formed at the time of the Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the heavier elements, such as nickel, copper, iron and oxygen were synthesised in the nuclear furnaces of long-dead stars, many of which became supernovae. The heavy chemical elements were a product, once this first generation of stars had used all of their hydrogen nuclear fuel.
Sagan movingly sums up the whole process in the introduction to both the series and the book that in effect, the Cosmos, is all that is, all that has been, and all that ever will be. Through a process of nearly fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution, and later Darwinian Natural Selection, humans evolved and became a very special part of this cosmos. In effect, through mankind, the cosmos has evolved its very own intelligence and consciousness – star stuff harvesting star light and enquiring about its own existence.

In taking complex scientific theories and concepts such as Special Relativity, Darwinian Selection and Atomic Theory and presenting them in a correct, yet readily understandable form, without the need for complex mathematics, Sagan realised the importance for mankind's future wellbeing of the public's understanding of science and involvement in what both he and Druyan termed the Scientific Enterprise. Despite making scientific knowledge easily accessible to a the general public he received many criticisms from the scientific elite, many no doubt jealous of his deserved celebrity status, or annoyed at his attacks on vested interests. His explanation in Cosmos of Special Relativity, Journeys in Space and Time, remains one of the most eloquent and understandable introductions to the subject, enticing the reader or viewer to delve deeper.
The issue of scientific advocacy repeatedly appears throughout Sagan's many books including Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space and The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. He uses the example of the destruction of Ptolemy II's Great Royal Library in Alexandria in 415AD, and the murder of Hypatia, its last librarian and the world's first female mathematician by the mob, as an example of what can happen when knowledge is kept secret by a ruling elite. The result of the destruction of the Great Library, and the Ionian civilisation centuries before was the loss of knowledge of incalculable value amassed over a thousand years, and the start of a dark epoch in human history. This epoch was characterised by mysticism, bigotry, racial and religious extremism and hatred and witchcraft, ending only with Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Tyco Brahe and Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno (many of whom even in the seventeenth century were being persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church, and indeed in the case of Bruno murdered for the heretic act of speculating about a galaxy brimming with extra-solar planets and extraterrestrials).

Neither has the threat to our present civilisation from ignorance evaporated. In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan notes how we (in western civilisation) have contrived to produce advanced societies based primarily on high technology and science where only a small fraction of the population has any scientific knowledge. This, according to Sagan, coupled with the growth in religious extremism, racial hatred, superstition, the supernatural and pseudoscience is a recipe for disaster, and one, given our advanced weaponry will sooner, or later, explode in our faces.

Carl Sagan posing with a model of the Viking Mars lander in Cosmos.

Sagan appeals to scientists and science enthusiasts alike to become advocates for the subject. Instrumental in both the Viking landings on Mars in the summer of 1976 and the Voyager missions to the outer planets in the 1980s, he uses the Voyager 1 Pale Blue Dot photograph of the Earth as an example. Senior administrators at NASA did not want to waste resources re-configuring the spacecraft to take a photograph of the Earth from six billion kilometres. Sagan appealed above their heads citing the immense public interest of the photograph. After all, he stated the US public was funding NASA and as paymasters they had a right to witness what would become one of the most famous photographs of all time – the Earth as a pale blue mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. It is by no means certain that humanity will avoid self-destruction either through environmental degradation or through weapons of mass destruction (and there are more than adequate quantities still available).

Carl Sagan's Reflections On A Mote of Dust... his poignant account of humanity true coordinates in space and time. Here, he reads one of the most poignant excerpt from his book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.

In both Cosmos and Pale Blue Dot, Sagan speculates that simultaneously to gaining interstellar communications ability, civilisations also gain atomic physics, and perhaps more-or-less immediately use nuclear weapons to engage in self destruction. Perhaps this is why we have not been visited by ET. Or, as Sagan says, perhaps ET is constantly dealing with its self-generated environmental degradation. But above all else, Sagan, in all his science advocacy is an optimist and believes that humanity can and will rise above the challenges posed by our very nature, the juxtaposition of our technology with beliefs, and the disasters that nature can throw at the Earth, such as asteroid impacts. It will be achieved, he says, by the same scientific enterprise with its proven successful method of critically independently verified facts and theories, not by superstitions, ufology or mysticism.

Scientists have made astonishing leaps forward in the past 400 years, for example in technology and medical sciences -- infact in virtually every area of modern advanced industrial society. Compare that, Sagan says, with what other areas of human thought and belief have provided in improving the lives of the populace. Instead of wanting to believe in something amazing -- do something amazing. Add to the body of human knowledge about the cosmos, or show a child the Andromeda Galaxy. Show them how the light, the fastest thing we know has taken a staggering 2.5 million years to reach our eyes! Inspire them to naturally develop that innate human curiosity about science and the universe in which we live.

Sagan powerfully states in Cosmos that it is the birth rite of every child, of every generation to gain knowledge about their place in the universe, and to critically evaluate such knowledge and facts. To do less would risk being taken in by the first charlatan character, perhaps even on a societal scale – and there are plenty of examples of that in human history. Extraordinary claims do indeed require extraordinary evidence. As Sagan says, there are no authorities in science; it's a totally democratic subject, relying on verified facts, and theories that are readily falsifiable. Yet it's also a very human and creative subject. No one knows from which ranks the next Einstein or Newton will come.

Theatrical movie trailer for Contact (1997) starring Jodie Foster, and based on the book by Carl Sagan.
No article on Carl Sagan would be complete without mentioning Contact. The book, upon which the movie that followed it is largely based, was written by Carl Sagan and published in 1985. Some of Sagan's character traits are evident in the main character, Ellie Arroway, and the novel serves as an enthralling platform in which he encapsulates ideas surrounding many of his life's interests, especially the first contact with extraterrestrials. A film adaptation of Contact, starring Jodie Foster, was released in 1997. Without spoiling the film, for those yet to view it, Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster), after years of searching for "the truth" in radio astronomy, finds conclusive radio astronomical proof of intelligent aliens, who have been receiving our first radio and television broadcasts since the early twentieth century. The aliens send plans of how the human race can construct a machine of immense technology using wormholes (the scientific theory behind this was confirmed as correct by Sagan's fellow scientist and colleague, Kip Thorne). Ellie's role in the movie is juxtaposed with that of Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey). He has spent his life searching for "the truth" through faith in God. This first radio "contact", means that both Ellie and Palmer, and indeed, everyone on Earth, are forced to challenge their own assumptions. In the inevitable first contact, will humankind be able to find a compromise between science and belief? If any movie is worth watching – this is it!
Tragically, Sagan died in December, 1996, after a long fight with myelodysplasia, a rare form of bone cancer at the comparatively young age of 62. A voice of reason and science in a world where superstition and mysticism are once again in the ascendancy, he was one of those talented individuals humanity, at a critical juncture in its history, could least afford to lose. The challenge is for his readers, viewers and students to pick up the gauntlet.

If you ever endeavour to rationalise why you are so avidly interested in astronomy and cosmology, re-visit Carl Sagan's vast astronomical bequest to the public. He succinctly explains why we tingle at the thought of the cosmos and long to leave the Earth -- it's in our genes to return to the stars. More importantly you realise the immense importance of science, and of inspiring your children, or the young generation generally with the subject. Yet you are probably depressed at the degradation and sensationalisation of science documentaries on television. If this is the case, and you get the chance, watch or read Cosmos or read any of Sagan's other publications. Allow this potent master of the Cosmos into your homes and let him inspire your families, friends and importantly youngsters in taking an interest in science.

The proof of Sagan's potent teaching and inspiration lies in many of his students and colleagues who have gained leading roles in space exploration. These include Carolyn Porco, a leading US planetary scientist, Director of the Hayden Planetarium, New York and PBS-Nova presenter Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Steve Squyres, principal investigator of the NASA Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. On a personal level, had it not been for a chance viewing of the PBS Cosmos series a five years ago, you would not be reading this now, and neither would you see myself or my son, thoroughly relishing our visits to our local planetarium, or our nights out under the stars with our trusty old telescope!

Publications by Carl Sagan, Bibliography and Recommended Reading:
Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, (MIT Press, 1973).
Mars and the Mind of Man, (Harper & Row, 1973).
Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science, (Ballantine Books,1974).
Other Worlds, (Bantam Books, 1975).
Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, (Random House, 1977).
The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, (Ballantine Books, 1980).
Ann Druyan, co-author, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are, (Ballantine Books, 1993).
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Random House, (November 1994).
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, (Ballantine Books, 1996).
Ann Druyan co-author, Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium (Ballantine Books, 1997).
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, 1985 (Gifford lectures, Penguin Press, 2006).

Mars The Wonderworld: We’re Just 3.5 Billion Years Too Late!

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 22:06:00 +0000

A vast ocean covered the northern lowlands of Mars some 3.5 billion years ago, suggest planetary scientists.

A view of the boulder-strewn field of red rocks reaches to the horizon nearly two miles from Viking 2 on Mars' Utopian Plain. Image credit: NASA

Bibliography

Sagan, C., Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Random House, (November 1994)

The Pioneer Anomaly

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Fleming) — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 12:36:00 +0000

The Pioneer spacecraft launched in the late 1970s and bound for the stars aren't where they're supposed to be. Are Newton and Einstein's theories not as accurate as we thought they were? Is it time for some new physics? New research is starting to resolve what has become known as the 'Pioneer Anomaly'.

Scientists working with recovered data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions are closing in on a solution to the famous Pioneer Anomaly. Their just-published results show that the mysterious effect on the two spacecraft is not constant over time, probably indicating that no outside force is acting on the Pioneers, but rather, something inside the spacecraft is to blame.

Slava Turyshev and a team of researchers are publishing an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters their analysis of radio transmission data from the spacecraft.

Their work strengthens the case that the source of the anomaly lies in the spacecraft themselves, not in any mysterious outside force acting on them. The most likely cause is heat generated by spacecraft systems, producing a recoil force.

The Pioneer Anomaly was defined as “anomalous acceleration in the direction of the Sun” or, as seen from Earth, the spacecraft appeared to be slowing down. It was first detected in 1980 by John D. Anderson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory through his analysis of the Doppler shift in the radio signal from the Pioneers 10 and 11 on their way out of the solar system, after becoming the first spacecraft to fly by Jupiter and Saturn.

Since its discovery, suggested solutions to the Pioneer Anomaly have ranged from such things as the gravity of as-yet undetected bodies in the solar system, dark matter or dark energy, the cosmic expansion, to some sort of New Physics, such as modifications to the theory of gravity. For over 20 years, scientists around the world have been seeking an explanation.

Full story on the Planetary Society website.