Discover Space

The staring eye of a crescent moon | Bad Astronomy

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:39:56 +0000

Sometimes, the images from the Cassini Saturn probe are so cool it’s tempting just to post them and say, "Look at THAT!"

See what I mean? [Click to gigantesenate.]

But of course, I can’t just leave it at that. This image, taken on January 4, 2012, is a bit different than most. Sure, we see Saturn’s magnificent rings, nearly edge on from this perspective. And we’ve seen this icy moon Enceladus many, many times (see Related Posts below for tons more pictures). Look at the bottom of the moon: see those fuzzy streaks? Those are geysers of water spewing from cracks in the moon’s south pole! Cassini has been studying them intently ever since they were discovered; they are proof that liquid water exists under the surface of Enceladus, though it’s still being argued over whether it’s in pockets, like lakes, or the whole moon has an ocean of water under the surface.

Despite all that, I keep getting drawn to the crescent shape itself. We can never see that from Earth. Saturn is much farther out from the Sun than we are, and geometry demands that from ...

When the Moon hits your apse in a way-cool time lapse | Bad Astronomy

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:00:10 +0000

Photographer Maik Thomas posted this time lapse video on Google+, and it made me chuckle. The bright object is the Moon, and as it sets it turns red, looking like a missile from space curving right into a church.

I love the star trails effect. It’s just a way of adding the individual frames together to show motion, but it does give the video an oddly other-world feel to it. And in this case it really makes the Moon look like some sort of re-entering rocket!

Related posts:

- Star Light, People Bright
- Alps lapse
- The stars above, the luminescence below
- The lines in the sky are stars

Funhouse galaxy | Bad Astronomy

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:00:10 +0000

Sometimes, I like to think of a photon of light as a car on a road. As the road dips and curves, a car has to follow that path, dipping and curving as well. It might be weird to think of space as curving, but it does. Gravity from massive objects warps space, and a beam of light moving through that curved space curves along with it.

This is the principle behind what’s called gravitational lensing. A beam of light passing by an object — a big galaxy, say, or a cluster of galaxies — bends one way. A beam headed in a slightly different direction bends a slightly different way. This can really mess with what we see… which I can prove! Check this out: a Hubble image of the galaxy RCSGA 032727-13260.

What a mess! All those arcs and blue smudges are images of that one galaxy. The light from that galaxy traveled nearly 10 billion light years to get here! But when it was halfway here, that light passed by the big cluster of galaxies — the red fuzzballs — in the middle ...

Science Getaways: Update | Bad Astronomy

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:36:40 +0000

I love science. OK, duh, but I really do. And when I go on vacation, I can’t help but see science everywhere, and in every case it makes the trip more fun for me. Seeing local geology, biology, how the stars might look different at a different latitude… it adds to the vacations, makes it better.

That’s why my wife and I started a company called Science Getaways. We figured there are lots of other folks out there like us who would really enjoy taking a vacation that has bonus science added in. Our first planned trip is to a gorgeous Colorado dude ranch called C Lazy U. Besides the usual amenities of such a place — horseback riding, great food, spectacular views of the Rocky Mountains — we’re adding SCIENCE! And scientists: we have a geologist, a biologist, and an astronomer — hey, me! — who will be on hand to give talks about the local nature scene, and then we’ll take hikes to put that new-found knowledge to practical use. I’ll be running a stargazing session every evening with my new 8" ...

Exoplanet in a triple star system smack dab in the habitable zone | Bad Astronomy

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:00:54 +0000

In the race to find the weirdest planet orbiting another star, we may have a front runner: GJ 667Cc, a super-Earth orbiting one star in a triple system that’s actually relatively closeby. And oh yeah: it just so happens to be in just the right spot to be potentially inhabitable!

Of course, I have some caveats, so don’t get too excited. But this is a weird and pretty cool one!

GJ 667 is a triple star system that’s right in our back yard as these things go: it’s only about 22 light years away, making it one of the closest star systems in the sky. It’s composed of two stars a bit smaller and cooler than the Sun which orbit each other closely, and a third, smaller star orbiting the pair about 35 billion km (20 billion miles) out. Stars in multiple systems get capital letters to distinguish them, so the two in the binary are GJ 667 A and B, and the third one is GJ 667C.

That third star is the interesting one. It’s a cool, red M dwarf with about a third the diameter of the ...

Holy aurora | Bad Astronomy

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 02:58:26 +0000

I really don’t think I need to add anything to this. Set it to HD, make it full screen, and turn the sound up.

Tip o’ the magnetometer to Tom Lowe, aka Timescapes.

Related posts:

- Two lovely aurora time lapse videos
- Real time footage of aurora shows them dancing and shimmering
- Time lapse: The Aurora
- Awesome timelapse video: Rapture

Hey, I can see my snow-covered house from here! | Bad Astronomy

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:51:20 +0000

In case you were wondering what the snow was like here in Colorado the other day…

[Click to ensnowflakenate.]

That’s an image taken by NASA’s Aqua satellite on February 5, 2012. I live in Boulder, to the northwest of Denver (which is labeled), right on the edge of the Rockies. We got well over 30 cm here locally, and it was deeper in other places. Typical of the area, though, the Sun was out the next day, and now our yard looks like a fairyland of sparkles.

It’s unusual to get a heavy snowfall like this in February (we do get big ones, but later in the year) and from what I’ve heard this was a record for a February. And not to overextend the post to climate change, but a) weather is not climate… unless you add time, and 2) contrary to any soundbite you might hear, snowstorms will actually become more common as the Earth warms. Warmer weather means more evaporation, so more moisture in the air. It’s still cold higher up in the atmosphere, and it’s still cold in the winter over land, so a ...

OK, a couple of more things about a Moon base | Bad Astronomy

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:00:13 +0000

I love the idea of returning to the Moon, and the idea of going back there to stay I love even more. Having said that, I want to stress it must be done the right way. This has been back in the news lately because Newt Gingrich made a speech about it before his doomed Florida Republican presidential primary run.

What bugs me is that we’re talking about it in context of what Gingrich said; I’d rather we were talking about this on its own merits. There are reasons to go to the Moon, and reasons not to do it Newt’s way… all of which I went over in an interview on CBC radio’s Day 6 show with Brent Bambury that aired Saturday. The interview is archived on their site, and you can listen to it there. I was unusually lucid, IMO, and I think the points made were valid.

I was also interviewed on The Alonya Show, a TV news/opinion program on Russia TV:

[UPDATE: I also did an interview with Globo TV in Brazil that's online as well. The show is in Portugese, but I'm in English with subtitles.]

I want to add to ...

An astronomer’s paradise | Bad Astronomy

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:00:39 +0000

Cerro Paranal, in the high, dry, Atacama desert in Chile, is where some of the best astronomy in the world is done. It’s graced with incredibly dark and steady skies, and a view of the southern hemisphere skies that, frankly, makes me jealous.

So it’s hard to argue with the title of this short time lapse video, An Astronomer’s Paradise:

This was taken by photographer Babak Tafreshi, who alerted me that he had put it online. Watch it to 1:30 in if only to watch Orion rise — upside down, to my northern hemisphere bias! — with colors and texture that are simply stunning.

Isn’t that awesome? And then a few seconds later, he shows a still image of the great Carina Nebula with the four domes of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer silhouetted against the sky. You can get a better look at that at The World At Night website, which has amazing shots of the sky.

I hope someday to make a trip to this part of the world. To see this for myself…

Credit: Babak Tafreshi

Space caturday | Bad Astronomy

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:00:54 +0000

This is cute and all, but I was debating whether to run it on the blog or not when I got to the 1:05 mark or so, and decided to go ahead. Why? Watch:

Did you get the joke?

It’s a Chandra X-ray Observatory image in the background if that helps. Note the cat.

Also, the next shot shown of a cat batting at Io was also pretty funny.

They did miss a sure bet, though: Cat’s Eye, and the Cat’s Paw nebula. Neither of which, I’ll note, is in Leo.

Video of the lunar far side from GRAIL/Ebb | Bad Astronomy

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:49:19 +0000

This is so cool: NASA’s twin GRAIL spacecraft (now named Ebb and Flow) have cameras on board to take images of the lunar surface, and an animation has been put together of Ebb’s view of the Moon’s far side!

Pretty neat. I love the wide-angle view; the individual images were taken while Ebb was still over a thousand kilometers from the Moon. The huge circular feature you can see on the right 30 seconds into the video is Orientale Basin, an impact so huge it must’ve lit up the solar system a few billion years ago. That basin is nearly 1000 km (600 miles) across! See the LRO image below for a clearer view, and click it for more info.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what will be done with these cameras. As Principal Investigator Maria Zuber explains in the video, they were installed specifically for educational purposes, and kids all over America will get a chance to examine the data. I love this idea, since it means these children will be invested in the project itself, and remember it for their whole lives. It’s a fantastic idea.

In the dark abyss, a slightly warped mirror on the Milky Way | Bad Astronomy

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:00:31 +0000

There is just something wonderful when Hubble points to nearby spiral galaxies. Sprawling and detailed, we get both great resolution on smaller features as well as a jaw-dropping overview of a grand spiral… like, say, NGC 1073:

Yeah, I know. [Click to galactinate -- I had to shrink it to fit here, and it lost a lot of the coolness when I did -- or grab the 3900 x 3000 pixel version.]

NGC 1073 is a decent-sized spiral galaxy about 60 million light years away. It’s actually part of a small, tight group of galaxies many of which are far more famous (like NGC 1068). But 1073 is important because of a simple property: it looks like us.

While it’s not a perfect match, NGC 1073 does bear an interesting resemblance to our Milky Way galaxy (UGC 12158 looks more like our galaxy, but is far bigger, for example). Both have large, rectangular bars going across their centers. Bars are a bit odd, since you’d expect the arms just to wind all the way down to ...

Q&BA: Pound for pound, are humans hotter than the Sun? | Bad Astronomy

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:19:08 +0000

[Note: Every week I hold a live video chat on Google+ where I answer questions from readers. I call it Q&BA, and when I get a question that stands alone, I'll make it its own video. ]

Every now and again, I hear this urban legend that pound for pound, the human body is actually hotter (or has more energy) than the Sun. I got this question in a recent Q&BA video chat session, so I tackled it. The answer is pretty interesting, and depends on how you ask the question!

I actually wrote about this legend on the blog a while back, and I show all the math. I really like this question, since it has a straightforward answer that makes it seem wrong, but then if you look at it more carefully the answer is a little trickier. And even in the video and that other post, it’s not really a complete answer; if you read the comments on the post you’ll see people arguing over it.

That’s really the best kind of question: the ones that keep on going! There’s ...

An Ambitious Frontier for Flying Drones: Saturn’s Earth-Like Moon, Titan | 80beats

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:27:36 +0000

Artist’s rendering of AVIATR flying on Titan.

Saturn’s moon Titan is a lot like Earth: it has rain, seasons, volcanoes, and maybe even life. Well, it’s not exactly like Earth: the rain is liquid methane, the volcanoes spew ice, and any life would be based on methane. But still, it’s an interesting and relatively Earth-like place, considering the other planets and moons in our solar system. And University of Idaho physicist Jason Barnes says he has a perfect way to explore this moon: with a flying drone.

Why use a flying machine rather than the rovers that worked so well on Mars? With 1/7 the gravity but 4 times the atmospheric density of Earth, flying through Titan is 28 times easier than on our own planet. In fact, it’s the easiest place to fly in our entire solar system. Drones on Titan can be heavier while requiring less fuel. With these facts in hand, University of Idaho physicist Jason Barnes has proposed AVIATR, otherwise known as the Aerial Vehicle for In-situ and Airborne Titan Reconnaissance.

As proposed, AVIATR would fly through Titan for a year on its radioactive power source plutonium-238, previously used on ...

Give Pluto your stamp of approval | Bad Astronomy

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:00:32 +0000

In 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will zip past Pluto, giving us our first close-up view of this tiny world.

The team behind the space probe have a nice idea to help raise awareness of it: make a new US Post Office stamp commemorating it. My friend Dan Durda, both an accomplished astronomer and artist, created this lovely design of the stamp:

[Click to enhadesenate. Note: the word "Forever" means the stamp is always good for first class postage, and is crossed out here to prevent forgery.]

It shows the spacecraft going by Pluto and its (relatively) freakishly large moon Charon. I like how he didn’t go for photorealism, but instead used an oil paint-like feel for it. The stamp is meant as a followup — I might even say send-up — of a US stamp issued in 1990 about Pluto that has the label "Not Yet Explored".

I like this stamp! I’d love to see it made official, too. Alan Stern, the head guy for the mission, created a petition to help that along. It takes more than just a nice stamp design ...

What caused the Little Ice Age? | Bad Astronomy

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:00:31 +0000

Over the course of several hundred years – most notably in the 17th and 18th centuries — winter temperatures in western Europe were much lower than normal. Glaciers came much farther south than they had before, and a famous painting shows people ice skating on the Thames river — which hasn’t been frozen since. The period is known as the Little Ice Age, and its cause has always been something of a mystery.

However, new research by scientists at the University of Colorado-Boulder (yay team!) may have pegged it: the LIA appears to have started abruptly in the late 13th century, between the years 1275 and 1300. Radiocarbon dating of plants from Baffin Island (north of the Hudson Bay in Canada) and sediment samples from a lake in Iceland indicate that there was a rapid onset of severe cooling at that time. It’s been thought that the cooling started around then, but it’s been hard to pin down until now.

More importantly, this narrows down the cause of the LIA: four tropical volcanoes erupted violently in that period. The ash would have darkened the atmosphere, letting slightly ...

Amazing moonset video taken from space! | Bad Astronomy

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:32:31 +0000

Thanks to astronaut Ron Garan on Google+, I was alerted to some amazing footage of the Moon setting as seen by astronauts on board the International Space Station. I uploaded it to YouTube and added some comments to show you something really cool…

[Set it to high-def and make it full screen!]

Astonishing, isn’t it? As the Moon sets, you’re seeing it through thicker and thicker air. The air acts like a lens, bending the light upward. The part of the Moon nearer the Earth’s limb gets bent up more, so the Moon looks like it’s getting flattened. Watch it again; the top of the Moon doesn’t appear to be affected much. It looks more like the bottom slows down and the top pushes into it. You can read about this effect in more detail in an earlier blog post.

Weirdly, as I watched the video, it looked very much like the whole Moon was shrinking as it set, as if it were receding rapidly. When I saw that I knew intuitively that couldn’t be real; the ISS is only moving a few thousand kilometers ...

Does the planet Fomalhaut b exist? | Bad Astronomy

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:00:34 +0000

Well, this is depressing: Fomalhaut b may not exist.

Fomalhaut is one of the brightest stars in the sky, and is only about 25 light years away — that’s close, on a cosmic scale. It’s young, not more than a few hundred million years old, and surrounded by a vast ring of dust, leftover from the formation of the star itself. The ring is about 20 billion km (12 billion miles) in radius, and has a sharp inner edge.

That last bit is important: the easiest way we know to make the inside edge that well-defined is if a planet is orbiting the star just inside the ring. Its gravity would draw in particles, sculpting what would otherwise be a fuzzy boundary into a clean-cut ring. Not only that, but the ring is off-center; again, that’s likely due to the gravitational influence of a planet.

In 2008, astronomers announced they had found that planet: it appeared in two different Hubble Space Telescope images (shown above; click to embiggen) separated by two years. During that time, it had moved a little bit, by just what you’d expect for a planet ...

Strange yet cool VLA time lapse video | Bad Astronomy

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:20:30 +0000

I’m sure what I can say about this, except that it’s oddly engaging.

I’ve been to VLA*, many years ago to do a video for an educational activity, and I don’t recall seeing them behave quite this way. Maybe I should’ve waited until night time.

Tip o’ the side lobe to my pal and science nerd Jeri Ryan on Google+.

* Yes, I know the name was recently changed to the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, but I’ll be honest: I don’t like the new name. If they had just called it the Jansky Array that’d be fine. But if the old name was clunky, it had an easy acronym. Now the name is longer and the acronym harder! So to me, it’ll always be the VLA. And get off my lawn.

Dione and Mimas have a mutual event | Bad Astronomy

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:00:08 +0000

As Cassini weaves its way around the multiple moons of Saturn, it’s not really a coincidence when one gets in the way of another. As a matter of fact, it’s a guarantee. These are called mutual events, and when Cassini dove past Dione, it saw this terrific view of Mimas peeking out from behind it:

Nifty, huh? [Click to encronosenate.]

Dione is nearly 3 times larger than Mimas (1100 versus 400 km wide), but Mimas was also more than 6 times farther away, making Dione loom nearly 20 times larger in this shot. I like how you can’t really see the unlit side of Dione, but Mimas marks it pretty well, sliced in half by the edge of the larger moon.

Funny, too: I was thinking to myself that if Cassini was in position to catch this shot, then it should have also caught Mimas when it was on the other side of Dione, the lit part. Well, seek and ye shall find: I searched the Cassini raw image archive and found it! I put a small ...

Mesmerizing, towering loops of solar magnetism | Bad Astronomy

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:02:58 +0000

I know I’ve been writing about the Sun quite a bit lately, but I have a followup to yesterday’s cool video of the big solar flare… and you’re gonna like it.

I was fooling around with helioviewer.org, watching the flare in different wavelengths of light detected by NASA’s Solar Dynamics observatory, when I switched to 17.1 nanometers — in the far ultraviolet. At that wavelength, the glowing plasma that flows along the Sun’s magnetic field lines is very bright. The images were so beautiful, so incredible, I made a video animation of them, covering the time range of January 26, 2012 at midnight to January 28 at noon (UTC), which includes the huge X2 solar flare that erupted on the 27th. The video shows huge loops of magnetism on the Sun’s surface, glowing plasma flowing along them… and then 48 seconds in the flare changes everything. Watch:

Holy wow! Isn’t that awesome? Make sure you watch in in HD, and make it full screen to get the whole effect.

What you’re seeing is Active Region 1402, a sunspot cluster. This is a tangled collection of magnetic field lines piercing the surface of the Sun. Like ...

Real time footage of aurora shows them dancing and shimmering | Bad Astronomy

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 05:56:25 +0000

Photographer Alistair Chapman traveled to Tromso, Norway — 300 km north of the Arctic Circle — to capture video of the aurorae from the recent spate of solar storms. What he caught on camera is remarkable: shimmering, waving, dancing lights moving in real time!

[Make sure you set it to 720p; Chapman says higher-def footage is coming soon.]

That’s amazing. Aurorae video is generally done with time lapse to show the movement, which is usually slow. I’ve often wondered just how fast the movement really is; I always figured fluctuations in the solar particle density, speed, and magnetic fields would produce real-time changes in the lights, but I’d never seen anything like this! After a search of YouTube I actually found several more.

I know some people will think this is fake, and I had my skeptic hat on while watching it. Note that in most time lapse you can see the stars move; in this they don’t, indicating (unless it’s a complete fake) short periods of time during the filming. Given that, plus the existence of other video like it, I’m thinking this is real.

Mind you, the movement you’re seeing isn’t a physical motion. It’s ...

The Sun’s still blasting out flares… BIG ones | Bad Astronomy

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 13:35:22 +0000

Active Region 1402, the same sunspot cluster that blew out a solar flare and caused all the ruckus last week, is still being feisty: just before rotating to the other side of the Sun, it erupted in an intense, pulsing solar flare that actually was much more powerful than the one that happened last Monday. This was an X2 class flare, making it more than twice as energetic as Monday’s.

Happily, the flares were on the edge of the Sun’s disk, so the bulk of the radiation was aimed away from the Earth, but it still makes for some pretty dramatic footage. Using helioviewer.org I created a video showing about 2.3 hours of the Sun as seen by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. It shows the Sun in the extreme ultraviolet (at a wavelength of 19.3 nanometers if you wanna get geeky), where magnetic activity is seen easily. Watch the upper right corner of our friendly star… and make sure you make it HD and full screen.

Isn’t that awesome? The flare got so bright the automatic software dimmed the rest of the Sun to compensate, giving you an idea of just how powerful ...

The Gingrich Who Stole The News Cycle | Bad Astronomy

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:38:39 +0000

Because I was on the road Wednesday night, I missed the first few hours of reaction to Newt Gingrich’s speech in Florida, when he said he wants to have a permanent station on the Moon "by the end of my second term". It wasn’t until Thursday morning that I opened up my web browser and saw that every blog, every news site, everyone, was talking about it. I must have had dozens of tweets and emails telling me about it and asking my opinion.

So I found a video of the speech and watched it. The only reason I didn’t laugh out loud at the nonsense unfolding from Mr. Gingrich’s mouth was that I already had seen the reaction online.

In Discover Magazine’s Crux blog I wrote a dissection of his speech and why he’s so vastly and profoundly wrong: The Newt-onian Mechanics of Building a Permanent Moon Base. You’ll get all the details there of why I think Gingrich’s plan is the worst possible way to go about trying to go to the Moon: in a hurry, with the wrong source of funding, and maybe ...

Siriusly twinkling | Bad Astronomy

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:19:42 +0000

If you live nearly anywhere on Earth — those of you north of 73° you’re out of luck, but I’m guessing there aren’t many of you! — and look to the southeast shortly after sunset, you’ll see the figure of Orion. Follow the three belt stars to the east, and you’ll see a bright star: Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. If it’s near the horizon, you may see it twinkling madly: flickering, dancing, perhaps even changing color.

This gave astronomer David Lynch an idea: take a time exposure of Sirius with a camera and telephoto, and purposely wiggle the mount. He tried it on January 4, 2012, and the result he got is actually quite lovely:

Isn’t that cool? As the vibrating camera caused the star to trail around, the changing colors got recorded along the track. The changing brightness of Sirius can be seen as well, as parts of the loop-de-loop fade and intensify.

The reason stars twinkle is because of our atmosphere: little blobs of air are constantly in motion. These air parcels act like lenses, and as light ...

Weekly Space Roundup for January 26, 2012 | Bad Astronomy

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:05:59 +0000

Yesterday was the weekly live video Space Roundup, run by Fraser Cain from Universe Today. This week we had Pamela Gay, Alan Boyle, Nicole Gugliucci, and Ian O’Neill. We talked about the solar storm, black holes, arsenic life, Newt Gingrich, Phobos-Grunt, and answered some questions from the listeners. Here’s the video:

We do these every week on Google+ at 18:00 UTC on Thursday. Come join us!

This is a galaxy | Bad Astronomy

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:23:16 +0000

I have nothing to add to this, except to say it’s great, and I saw it because Brian Cox mentioned it on Twitter.

Oh yeah: one more thing; watch it in HD and full screen. Coooool.

The Prophet of Space Trash

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:15:00 +0000

Colliding satellites add to the expanding mass of junk in space.

In 2009, after two telecom satellites smashed into each other, the U.S. National Research Council commissioned a team of experts to examine whether NASA was doing enough to address the growing problem of space junk. When it came time to pick the chair of the panel, the choice was obvious: Don Kessler, a 71-year-old retired NASA scientist who has been warning the world about orbital debris for more than 30 years.

Kessler grew up dreaming of becoming an astronomer but had no money for college, so he joined the Army. After he got out in 1961, he returned home to Houston, where NASA had recently established its manned spaceflight headquarters. Kessler was accepted into the agency’s cooperative education program, which allowed him to earn a degree in physics.

He started out studying meteoroids, but his attention soon shifted to debris from space launches. By 1978 he had published his landmark paper, “Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites,” detailing the science behind what is now unofficially known as the Kessler Syndrome: Space junk collides with other space junk, producing more and more fragments, until the debris eventually renders low Earth orbit (within about 1,000 miles of Earth’s surface) impassable. Junk was sparse in the 1970s, though, and people tended to think of low orbit as part of infinite space. “Nobody believed it initially,” Kessler says...

Rosetta’s stunning Mars | Bad Astronomy

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:52:58 +0000

In 2007, the European Space Agency probe passed by Mars on its way to visit a comet. It used Mars for a gravity assist to help it on its way, and got close enough to take some very detailed pictures (it also passed by the asteroid Lutetia and returned amazing shots; see the gallery at the bottom of this post). That data wasn’t initially released by the mission leader (that’s fairly common in some missions), but they were finally made available late last year. My pal Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society Blog grabbed a bunch of them and put together some simply amazing pictures from them, including this jaw-dropper:

Yeah. You really want to click that to Barsoomenate it. Holy dry ice polar caps!

In fact, you should go over to her blog where she gives all the details and has more incredibly cool pictures of the Red Planet as well. I don’t want to spoil her fun by giving it all away here. Go!

Credit: ESA / MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / RSSD / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA / processed by ...

How to Survive the End of the Universe

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:15:00 +0000

Next year will be a doozy for doomsayers. depending on the prophecy, the world is predestined to expire by means of a solar storm, asteroid strike, rogue-planet collision, plague, falling stars, earthquake, debt crisis, or some combination thereof. Of course, nobody seems to be preparing for any of these impending 2012 apocalypses, with the exception of a porn studio reportedly building a clothing-optional underground bunker.

And why should we? Scientifically speaking, the prophecies are strictly ballyhoo. Physicists can do a lot better. When it comes to end-times scenarios, cosmological data-crunchers have at their disposal far more meaningful prognostication tools that can tell us how it’s really going to end—not just Earth, but the whole universe. Best of all, they can tell us how to survive it.

Science, oddly, is a lot better at predicting things like the death of stars than next week’s weather. The same laws of physics that enable scientists to study the Big Bang that occurred 13.7 billion years ago also allow them to gaze into the future with great precision. And few people have peered farther than University of California, Santa Cruz, astronomer Greg Laughlin, science’s leading soothsayer. As a graduate student in 1992, he was plugging away at a simple computer simulation of star formation when he broke for lunch and accidentally left the simulation running. When he returned an hour later, the simulation had advanced 100 million billion years, much further into the future than most scientists ever think (or dare) to explore.

The program itself didn’t reveal anything terribly startling—the simulated star had long since gone cold and died—but Laughlin was intrigued by the concept of using physical simulations to traverse enormous gulfs of time. “It opened my eyes to the fact that things are going to evolve and are still going to be there in timescales that dwarf the current age of the universe,” he says.

Four years later, still fascinated, Laughlin teamed up with Fred Adams, a physics professor at the University of Michigan, to investigate the future of the universe more rigorously. Working in their spare time, the two researchers coauthored a 57-page paper in the journal Reviews of Modern Physics that detailed a succession of future apocalypses: the death of the sun, the end of the stars, and multiple scenarios for the fate of the universe as a whole.

The full text of this article is available only to DISCOVER subscribers. Click through to the article to subscribe, log in, or buy a digital version of this issue.

Mosaic of home | Bad Astronomy

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:05:35 +0000

Just before Halloween last year, NASA launched into orbit the improbably named National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project, which they thankfully shortened to NPP. In its low 800 km (500 mile) orbit it looks down at the Earth to investigate our environment. It only sees a portion of the Earth at any one time, but if you take observations taken during a single day — say, on January 4, 2012 — and stitch them all together, you get this magnificent shot:

[Click to engaiaenate, or download the Big McLarge Huge 8000 x 8000 pixel version.]

Man, the resolution is so high is like you’re actually there.

Oh wait.

In fact, the biggest version is 8000 pixels across, and the Earth is about 8000 miles wide, so the resolution is about a mile per pixel. We’re not seeing the entire hemisphere here, but the view is roughly 8000 km across (judging from the size of the US compared to the view). The big image is 8000 pixels wide, so the resolution of that mosaic is about 1 km/pixel. The Earth is big.

NPP was recently renamed Suomi NPP ...

Spectacular site for Supernova 2012A | Bad Astronomy

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:00:04 +0000

The first supernova of the year was spotted a couple of weeks ago: Supernova 2012A, in the galaxy NGC 3239 in the constellation of Leo. Adam Block of the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter took a phenomenal image of it:

[Click to corecollapsenate.]

Funny, the supernova isn’t what you’d expect; it’s not that really bright star (which is probably a star in our own galaxy that happens to be superposed on the galaxy) but instead the fainter one indicated. Images taken years ago show no sign of the new star.

The galaxy is called NGC 3239 (or Arp 263), and is a weird galaxy technically classified as irregular. Its distance isn’t well known, but it’s something like 25 million light years away or so. I imagine we’ll get a better distance determination very soon, since that’s important in understanding how much energy a supernova puts out.

The shape of the galaxy is probably the result of the collision of two separate galaxies which are still in the process of merging. The odd shape is a consequence of that. The pinkish glow is from gas clouds ...

Interview on KPCC about the flare and aurorae | Bad Astronomy

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 02:59:02 +0000

I was interviewed by Patt Morrison on NPR’s KPCC radio in Los Angeles today about the solar storm. It’s online for your listening pleasure, or you can grab the MP3 directly.

We talked about the event itself, how it was not nearly as strong as it was thought it would be (though still producing some aurorae and a bit of ground current in Sweden), what impacts it might have had, and what we can learn from things like this to protect ourselves in the future.

I really enjoyed this interview; Patt is knowledgeable and easy to talk to, and I hope I can be on the show in the future to talk about more astronomical events!

The Sun aims a storm right at Earth: expect aurorae tonight! | Bad Astronomy

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:00:26 +0000

Around 04:00 UTC on Monday morning, January 23, 2012, the Sun let loose a pretty big flare and coronal mass ejection. Although there have been bigger events in recent months, this one happened to line up in such a way that the blast of subatomic particles unleashed headed straight for Earth. It’s causing what may be the biggest space weather event in the past several years for Earth: people at high latitudes can expect lots of bright and beautiful aurorae.

I’ll explain what all that is in a second, but first here’s a video of what this looked like from NASA’s SOHO satellite.

Wow! Make sure you set it to high def.

So what happened here? The sunspot cluster called Active Region 11402 happened.

Sunspots are regions where the magnetic field lines of the Sun get tangled up. A vast amount of energy is stored in these lines, and if they get squeezed too much, they can release that energy all at once. When this happens, we call it a solar flare, and it can be mind-numbing: yesterday’s flare exploded with the energy of hundreds of millions of nuclear bombs!

Independent researchers find no evidence for arsenic life in Mono Lake | Bad Astronomy

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:04:32 +0000

Late in 2010, scientists participating in a NASA news conference dropped a bombshell: they had found evidence that bacteria in California’s Mono Lake were metabolizing arsenic and using it in their life processes.

This was huge news, since arsenic is toxic for carbon based life. If some forms of life evolved a way to process it, this would open up a whole new field of biochemistry!

However, almost immediately, the work came under attack. Biochemists accused the original team of not performing the research carefully (to put it delicately). Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, was particularly critical. She decided, in fact, to try to verify the original work, and set out to do so openly, writing up her progress on her blog.

And now, according to an article on Scientific American, she can confidently provide a "clear refutation" of the arsenic uptake in the organisms:

Their most striking claim was that arsenic had been incorporated into the backbone of DNA, and what we can say is that there is no arsenic in the DNA at all.

That’s a pretty clear statement! The ...

Q&BA full video chat session online | Bad Astronomy

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:43:55 +0000

On Sunday, I did a live video chat on Google+ where I took astronomy and space questions from folks and answered them as best I could. It was a lot of fun, with several hundred people showing up! I did some minimal editing of the session and put it on YouTube for your enjoyment:

The video resolution is not that great, I know, and I’m working on solutions for that. I’m looking into recording the feed locally on my PC so that I can upload a better version. If you have suggestions, I’m listening (but anyone starting a PC vs Apple war will be eviscerated; be ye fairly warned, says I).

I’m also always happy to get suggestions from people too. I have plans to do this on a weekly basis, and would love to improve it. Whaddaya got?

[P.S. In the "Related posts" below I have some links to the old Q&BA v.1.0 videos. Those got to be so time-consuming I had to stop doing them, but things have gotten much better since then! I'm looking forward to doing this more often now.]

2011: The 9th hottest year on record | Bad Astronomy

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:34:50 +0000

If anyone tells you the Earth isn’t warming up…

… tell them they’re full of it.

2011 was the ninth hottest year on record, and those records go back 130 years.

And then they might say, well, sure, but that could be coincidence. Then you look them straight in the eye, and you say:

Nine of the ten hottest years on record have been since 2000.

Weekly Space Roundup for January 19, 2012 | Bad Astronomy

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:45:21 +0000

Every week, my friend Fraser Cain of Universe Today gathers together a few scientists and science journalists to review the past week’s space and astronomy news. This week we talked about boiling planets, the demise of Phobos-Grunt, dark matter galaxies, and an Earth-sized telescope to zoom in on a supermassive black hole.

Participating were Fraser, Pamela Gay, Alan Boyle, Emily Lakdawalla, Jon Voisey, Nicole Gugliucci, Nancy Atkinson, and me. We do these on Google+, which has a feature called Hangouts On Air, which allows for live video broadcasts like this, and also the ability to save them on YouTube. We do these roundups every Thursday at 18:00 UTC (13:00 Eastern Standard Time). You don’t have to be signed up for G+ to watch them, but if you are (and it’s free and easy) we ask also that you +1 them, so we get an idea of how many folks are tuning in. Thanks!

What happened to Phobos-Grunt? | Bad Astronomy

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:05:13 +0000

On Sunday, January 15th, 2012, the Russian spacecraft Phobos-Grunt fell to Earth after a failed attempt to get it to Mars. It burned up in our atmosphere some time around 18:00 UTC, though the exact time isn’t clear.

During its final orbit, I did a live video chat on Google+ with my friend, science journalist Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society, and we talked about the probe. The entire discussion is now on YouTube:

It’s an hour and a half long, as we were following the news and rumors of the probe in real time. The big question the whole time was: where and when did the probe fall?

It’s a good question. Moving at 8 km/sec (5 miles/sec) as it came in, it covered a lot of territory — as you can see in the map above showing the final track of the spacecraft. And since the final moments apparently happened over the Pacific ocean and southern South America — places where there aren’t many observers — it’s not at all clear just where, or even when, the spacecraft came ...

Time lapse: Chinese rocket caught on video | Bad Astronomy

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:00:42 +0000

Not that any time lapse video of the Very Large Telescope complex at Paranal in Chile would be normal, but this one by Farid Char caught something pretty unusual: what appears to be a Chinese rocket boosting a satellite to orbit!

Did you catch it? From 14 – 18 seconds in, you can see it as a bright object moving against the setting stars to the west. If you pause the video, you can see what look like two plumes of gas coming from the object (though I wonder; a cone-shaped plume might look like this too seen from the side due to limb-brightening). Given the time, it was most likely the Chinese satellite FengYun 2-F moving into its transfer orbit (or possibly just venting some fuel), and it will slowly boost itself to a final geosynchronous orbit over the next few weeks.

These time lapse videos are always pretty cool, but they’re even better when they get a surprise like this!

Tip o’ the lens cap to eundas on Twitter.

Related posts:

- Time lapse: The Aurora
- ...

Phobos-Grunt to come down today | Bad Astronomy

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:45:27 +0000

[Update 2 (18:40 UTC): According to the US Strategic Command, Phobos-Grunt re-entered over the Pacific ocean, not far west of Chile. This is unconfirmed, but STRATCOM is usually quite reliable. As I write this, I'm pretty sure the spacecraft is down, and hopefully we'll know more about where it came down in the next few hours.]

[Update 1 (15:50 UTC): The predicted re-entry time is now around 17:20 UTC or so, but still not exact (Eastern US time is UTC - 5 hours, so 12:20 in the afternoon). The Russian space agency Roscomos has created a map of the predicted final orbit:

That's over more land than I would've expected, but still lots of water. And remember, even if it falls over land the odds of it hitting anyone are incredibly low. Follow PhG_Reentry and me on Twitter for constant updates.]

I’ve been referring to Phobos-Grunt as "the doomed Russian space probe". Today, that name gets verified: it’s due to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere today, sometime around 18:30 UTC (plus/minus 3 hours), though the exact time is still unsure.

Emily Lakdawalla at The Planetary Society ...

Stunning view of a bloom from space | Bad Astronomy

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 14:00:48 +0000

Almost exactly one year ago, I posted a beautiful picture of a phytoplankton bloom as seen from space. And here’s another one, and it’s way, way more spectacular!

Holy wow! [Click to enalgaenate.]

This shot of a bloom in the southern Atlantic Ocean was taken by the ESA’s Envirosat, which — duh — is designed to observe our environment. In this case, scientists keep a keen eye on phytoplankton blooms: while this bloom is breathtaking and gorgeous, many can be hazardous. Besides producing toxins that can harm sea life, they can also consume more oxygen in the water than usual, which is obviously tough on any life in the area. The color of the bloom can be found quickly using satellite imagery like this, and the algae species determined. Also, phytoplankton are sensitive to some climate changes, so observing them can act as a "canary in the coal mine" for climate change.

Sometimes, the best view of the Earth around us is from above. And sometimes that view is amazing, but a reminder that our ecosystem is a dynamic balance… and it’s best ...

In the Milky Way, There Are As Many Planets As Stars | 80beats

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:49:48 +0000

There are at least as many planets in the galaxy as there are stars. And even that is probably a vast underestimate.

That’s the latest bombshell from astronomers looking for planets beyond our solar system. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy will have a post on this soon, but for now, here’s a little quote salad for you:

“Planets are like bunnies; you don’t just get one, you get a bunch,” said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute who was not involved in this research. “So really, the number of planets in the Milky Way is probably like five or 10 times the number of stars. That’s something like a trillion planets.” (via PopSci)

“We think about one-sixth of stars should have a Jupiter-like planet, half have a Neptune-sized planet, and two-thirds should have an Earth,” said Kailash Sahu, an author of the Nature paper in which this observation was published. (via Wired)

“Kepler [a space telescope devoted to the search for planets] has already been finding that small planets are actually quite ubiquitous around stars,” says Scott Gaudi of Ohio State University, who did not contribute to the new research. “That bodes ...

Preserving the Moon Landings for Posterity | 80beats

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:13:11 +0000

Archaeologists, historians, and governments take great care to preserve human history across the globe, protecting monuments of our civilizations and traces of our origins. Even what may seem, at first, like the detritus of existence—footprints left millions of years ago, the contents of well-preserved wastebins—can serve as tangible, informative links to the past.

Now, scientists and officials are working preserve some of humanity’s best-known footprints, left by a giant leap for mankind, by extending those same sorts of historical protections to the Apollo missions’ lunar landing sites. The tricky part is, many such protections require that a site be on the territory of a state or nation—and the US government can’t claim sovereignty over any part of the moon, and doesn’t want to appear as though it’s trying to. But NASA and the New Mexico and California state governments have gotten onboard with the effort to safeguard the sites, spearheaded by New Mexico State University anthropologist Beth O’Leary. A NASA panel recently issued recommendations for protecting the sites that suggest future explorers give a wide berth to the astronautical artifacts left behind, Kenneth Chang reports at the ...

As from above, so from below | Bad Astronomy

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:00:30 +0000

NASA’s Earth Observatory site just put up this amazing picture. I have to say, this is one of the cooler pictures from the International Space Station that I’ve seen. Not for it’s beauty or anything like that — though it is starkly lovely — but because of what it shows:

[Click to dicraternate.]

Obviously, that’s a volcano on the right: Emi Koussi, in northern Africa. But look to the left, almost at the edge of the picture. See that faded ring? That’s Aorounga — an impact crater, some 10 – 15 km wide, formed when a chunk of cosmic debris hit the Earth about 300 million years ago! So these are two craters, one formed from processes happening deep below the Earth, and one from events from far above. Yet both can be seen at the same time, from one vantage point: orbiting our planet somewhere above the surface but beneath the rest of the Universe.

Image credit: NASA

How Stephen Hawking Has Survived to Age 70 | 80beats

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:04:36 +0000

Party hats out, everyone! Stephen Hawking turned 70 years old yesterday, 49 years after being told he had fewer than four left to live.

The Cambridge professor suffers from a motor neuron disease related to Lou Gehrig’s disease that has gradually taken from him his ability to move, feed himself, and speak, except through a synthesizer that he operates using a cheek muscle (unfortunately, his control of that muscle is also fading). But despite these handicaps, he has survived to an incredible ripe old age—the average for an Englishman is currently 77.2—and has continued his work as a cosmologist and physicist throughout. How has he managed to live so much longer than expected? Katherine Harmon at Scientific American asked neurologist Leo McClusky, who specializes in such diseases:

One thing that is highlighted by this man’s course is that this is an incredibly variable disorder in many ways. On average people live two to three years after diagnosis. But that means that half the people live longer, and there are people who live for a long, long time.

Life expectancy turns on two things: the motor neurons running the diaphragm—the breathing muscles. So the common ...

Google+ astronomy weekly roundup video now online | Bad Astronomy

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:00:24 +0000

Yesterday, I was in a live video chat session with several other scientists and science journalists. I wrote up the details of it yesterday, and it went pretty well! We had a lot of fun talking about the new GRAIL Moon mission, the fiery future return of Phobos-Grunt, 2012, and of course President Obama’s purported teleportation trip to Mars many years ago.

Wait, what?

Well, if you wanna know more, now you can: the video’s online.

The plan is to do these every week on Thursdays, and have a rotating cast of characters over time. I hope you like it. And I strongly suggest people join up over at Google+. I really like it there, and post quite a few things you won’t see here or on Twitter.

Live weekly astronomy roundup on Google+! | Bad Astronomy

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:10:55 +0000

Fraser Cain (from Universe Today) and I are trying something new… and by new, I mean new. We’re going to be holding a live video weekly astronomy and space roundup on Google+! We’ll have a roundtable group of scientists and science journalists discussing the latest cosmic news, explaining it, and letting you know what it all means. We have a pretty good group of folks lined up for this, and the first one will be held today, Thursday, January 5 at 18:00 UTC (1:00 p.m. Eastern US time).

[UPDATE: We're live now!]

These will be held on Google+ using Hangouts on Air – a live video stream that can be watched by an unlimited number of people. You have to be on Google+, and then circle Fraser Cain — that’s G+’s version of adding friends. He’ll have the link to the video feed in his stream once it’s set up (and I’ll update this very blog post as well). And once you’re in, you can ask questions for us in the comments section on the post! You can read more about this on Universe Today.

I’m very excited about these live video news session. For one thing, ...

Doomed Russian Mars probe seen from the ground | Bad Astronomy

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:21:38 +0000

In November 2011, the Russian space agency launched the much-anticipated Mars probe called Phobos-Grunt (which means "Phobos dirt" or "ground"), which would go to the Red Planet, soft-land a probe on the tiny moon Phobos, and return a sample of the surface to Earth. Unfortunately, the booster that would take it from Earth orbit into a Mars-intercept trajectory failed to fire, stranding the spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. Atmospheric drag has doomed the mission; it will most likely burn up sometime in the next two weeks.

Phobos-Grunt is visible to the naked eye as a bright star if it happens to pass overhead. Astronomer Thierry Legault, an expert in nabbing incredible images of objects in orbit (and no stranger to this blog!), traveled to Nice, France to observe it, and (as usual) got great video of it:

You can actually see detail in the probe; he provided a helpful picture to make it more clear:

The solar panels and other parts are pretty obvious.

Like UARS and ROSAT last year, Phobos-Grunt is making an uncontrolled re-entry, and it’s not entirely clear where it will fall. Odds ...

Bacteria Survive in Cold, Dry, Mars-like Conditions By Living Off Iron | 80beats

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 19:09:06 +0000

An image of the Martian surface from NASA’s Viking 2

To eke out even the barest subsistence on Mars, a living thing would have to adapt to a formidable set of environmental challenges: an arid, often extremely cold landscape with miniscule amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere and no organic matter to eat. During a recent foray into a similarly inhospitable part of our own planet, scientists have discovered several species of bacteria that hint at what life on Mars, if it exists, might look like. These microbes survive on minerals in the surrounding rocks—minerals also found in the Martian surface.

The bacteria were living beneath a thin layer of ice coating a lava tube, a subterranean tunnel lava once flowed through, high in the Cascade Mountains. These frigid, dry conditions—an environment similar to Mars, albeit less extreme—are devoid of typical food sources, and the layer of ice blocks out much of the oxygen from the atmosphere. Rather than breaking down sugars and other nutrients, the bacteria have evolved to get by on what’s available: lots and lots of rock. They glean energy from a simple chemical reaction with the iron ...