You can download the slides here and what follows are links to various sites that I mentioned during the talk. The talk as a whole was inspired by the .Astronomy conferences, the second of which is taking place in Leiden from November 30th to December 4th this year. You can read more about that on the conference website www.dotastronomy.com and the twitter feed @dotastronomy.

As well as these links, you may want to click around this site itself, as it contains many more examples of online astronomy.

http://www.twitter.com/overcardiff
http://www.twitter.com/lookupastro
http://www.galaxyzoo.org
http://www.slooh.com
http://www.faulkes-telescope.com
http://www.photosynth.net
http://earth.google.com
http://www.newburyas.org.uk
http://www.astrometry.net
http://www.flickr.com/groups/astrometry/

Nemesis!

Roughly every 30 million years something very bad seems to happen – life on Earth seems to die in vast quantities and a large percentage of all Earth’s species go extinct. Why do these mass-extinction events occur? Not sure – but it does seem to have happened with a reasonably regular interval for over 250 million years.

One hypothesis for this is that there is something ominous circling around us, at the edge of the Solar System. Some think it could be a large planet, other suggest a dead star – it has been given names like Planet X and Nemesis. Whatever it is, the theory goes that it is orbiting our Sun in a highly elliptical fashion. Once every orbit it plunges very close to the Sun, just scraping the edge of the Solar System: the Oort Cloud.

The Oort cloud is home to countless rocky bodies – it is the home of many comets – and such a massive gravitational nudge would send potentially thousands of these objects hurtling into the inner Solar System – one of which might hit us and cause a catastrophic global disaster. This might what killed the dinosaurs, and it’s possibly what will kill us.

Magnetic Switch

Since the mid-nineteenth century humans have been monitoring the Earth’s magnetic field. The same magnetic field that guides migratory birds and makes a compass work also protects us from harmful radiation from the Sun and gives us the beautiful Northern Lights. But here’s the thing – it is gradually weakening. According to some researchers, this could mean that something is about to change.

We also know – and this where it gets disturbing – that the Earth’s magnetic field has historically flipped over from time to time. In fact this usually happens every 250,000 years. It has been almost 800,000 years since the last flip so perhaps we’re overdue. Of course no one was around to witness the last one and so we don’t know what effect it would have. Things could get very ugly though.

If the magnetic field that protects the Earth did flip it would mean that somewhere along the way we wouldn’t be protected from space for a while! We might be bombarded with harmful radiation or cosmic rays. The lovely aurora would perhaps be slightly more menacing if they gave you cancer. If the flip is sudden then it would wreak havoc on the world’s electric systems – potentially frying them.

The Singularity

We are now able to make ever-smarter machines. What happens when we make a machine that is smarter than us? The answer surely is that it will be able to built an even better, smarter machine and that in turn will build an even better one too. Within a few cycles we will be faced with a machine so clever that we seem puny and irrelevant by comparison. The world could quickly be controlled and organised by such a machine and we will have ended our reign here.

We are also extending the human lifespan faster all the time (in the West) – what happens when we extend it by more than a year each year? We will then live indefinitely. Technological progress advances exponentially. This means that world-changing advancements come along at shorter and shorter intervals – eventually you reach a mathematical singularity, at which point things can no longer be thought of the way they used to.

The theory goes that some singularity is coming in the next century and although it may not be quite as we imagine it, it will possibly end the world as we know it. It may bring an end to our lives as we know them – in the machine case for example – why not download ourselves into super-intelligent machines and go onto bigger and better things? At our current rate of progress we will make more progress in the next century than in the past 10,000 years. The world as we understand it will surely cease to be.

Irradiated

Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) are distant but gargantuan explosions that take just a few seconds and release more energy than the Sun will in its entire lifetime! Some are 100s of times more powerful than that. Needless to say, you don’t need to be very close to one of these things to be more than a little singed. It could be almost anywhere in our galaxy and still devastate the planet.

There are other ways to be irradiated: the Sun could go nova, releasing massive quantities of dangerous material and radiation; a stray pulsar could accidentally spin around and fry us like an massive, errant laser pointer.

However it might happen, it remains remotely possible that in a brief instant the Earth could find itself totally irradiated on one side. Every living thing, every molecule of anything would be vapourised and instantly! Half the population – more or less – would be gone in a microsecond. And they’re the lucky ones. If you’re unfortunate enough to live on the other side of the Earth during this high-energy blast then you have the pleasure of gradually rotating around into the radiation – if it is still there. Worse still you could experience the awful, apocalyptic nightmare that is a shockwave of plasma – made up of every living thing from one half of the planet – sweeping across the world, incinerating everything as it goes.

Andromeda

We’ve  all heard the old wives tale about the Sun dying and swallowing up the Earth as it becomes a red giant, right? Well let me tell you you don’t need to worry about it. That will take 6 billion years to happen – that’s ages! Especially whn there’s something much worse heading for us much faster.

The Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way’s friendly galactic neighbour and virtual twin sister is heading right for us. Pulled in by gravity, Andromeda and the Milky Way are on a collision course and  in 2 or 3 billion years Andromeda will rip our galaxy apart like cotton wool. Shockwaves will ripple through the two galaxies, triggering supernovae and star formation at an incredible rate.

The Solar System will be lucky to survive such an event. Gravitational forces could tear us apart, radiation could fry us to a crisp or if we’re really unfortunate we could be gobbled up by one of two very big black holes as they coalesce and merge.

Snowball Earth

Periodically, many times over the course of the Earth’s history ice has covered the world and then gone again. I’m not talking about ice ages – no this is something even more dramatic. 600 million years ago the Earth was a giant snowball – entirely covered by ice. It also happened 100 million years before that and over two billion years ago. This ‘Snowball Earth‘ is the result of a runaway cooling effect where the ice covering the surface of the planet increases the reflectivity (or albedo) such that a lot of the incident radiation from the Sun bounces back into space, thus cooling the planet further.

As man-made climate change warms up the Earth, key processes may shut down due to changes in the freshwater/salt water balance – the gulf stream, the ocean currents. If this happens and the poles are cut off from sources of warm air or water, then they may refreeze rapidly and the runaway ‘Snowball’ process can begin.

Evolving Out of Style

With all this talk of things that might happen in millions and billion of years it is probably prudent to mention that we almost certainly won’t be around anyway. If by the end of the world, you mean the end of civilization or the end of the human race, then even looking a million years ahead is foolish.

Even the most well-adapted and long-lived species seem to only last a few million years or so before evolving out of style. The ones that do are not exactly like us – crocodiles, sharks, cockroaches. The human race, like any other, is subject to the environment around it and will evolve and adapt with it. It only takes one big volcanic eruption or viral outbreak to change our circumstances dramatically.

In a million years we could have become plankton-eating aquamen or tree-loving, hairy cannibals. We may not even live on Earth anymore…

Big Crunch/Rip/Freeze

Our universe has been around for 13.7 billion years – Earth has been around for just over 4 billion. We’ve been here for a few hundred thousand – depending on what we you call ‘we’. If we do manage to secure our existence indefinitely – perhaps by uploading ourselves into machines or spreading ourselves far and wide enough into the cosmos – then can we really be here forever? Time it seems could be eternal but also it could not.

Following the Big Bang – the beginning of the universe – we can either live in an ever-expanding universe that eventually rips itself apart (the Big Rip), an ever expanding universe that gradually slows down (Big Freeze) or a universe that reaches some extremely large size and then begins to fall back in on itself (Big Crunch). It all depends on how the Universe is made up and how much dark energy there is.

If we’re heading for a Big Rip then eventually there will be no Universe left as we understand it – so we die. If it’s a Big Crunch then everything ultimately smashes back together and time end – so we die. If the Big Freeze happens then sooner or later all the energy in the universe gradually becomes so diluted and spread out that nothing energetically useful can ever happen – everything freezes out – (thoughts, movement, calculations) – so we die.

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

Nothing is impossible – just highly improbable. As fans of the Hitchhiker’s Guide are aware. That is what Heisenberg ended up stating about the Universe thanks to quantum mechanics. It is possible, though not very likely that a giant cat will appear one day and give the Earth a lovely hug and magic up some tea and cake. It is also equally unlikely that one day a giant death ray will appear and destroy our whole planet.

Given enough time – say an infinitely long time – eventually each of these things will happen. The problem is that since we already exist, it doesn’t matter if something good pops into existence alongside us. If something bad randomly blurts out of the vacuum – even for a brief moment – and destroys us then that does matter. The longer we hang around, the more chance there is for something like that to happen.

It isn’t likely, but is worth thinking about.

The Belt (called Gould’s Belt in North America, and named for Benjamin Gould, who identified it in 1879.) is actually a fragmented ring of of star-forming clouds, young stars and nebulae that comes in at around 3000 light years in diameter. Containing lots of bright, young O- and B-type stars, in sits neatly inside the local spiral arm of our own galaxy the Milky Way. The Sun appears to be situated roughly in the middle of it – but it is not know where it came from or what it really is. To study the star-forming regions does not necessitate any understanding of the belt itself, but it is curious to wonder how it came to be.

The image below (from galaxymap.org) shows approximately where in our Milky Way galaxy the Gould Belt lies. You have to image the entire Solar System as an invisible speck near the middle of the white ring, denoting the Gould Belt.

One common theory is that there was some ancient supernova that exploded and sent radiation and material outward. Like a ripple from a stone dropped in a pond, this caused an ever-growing ring of activity in the surrounding interstellar medium. This model works fairly well, since the local bubble – a region of low density in which the Sun and a few other stars sit – fits reasonably well inside the Gould Belt. Perhaps both of these structural features could have resulted from an ancient explosion.

It is also possible that some much larger scale interaction has taken place. A recent paper on arXiv suggests that the belt originated 30 million years ago when a giant dark matter clump collided with a giant molecular cloud in the Milky Way’s spiral arm.

Maybe there is no Gould Belt! It could be that we only think we can see a ring-shaped pattern in the layout of our local region. After all when it comes to detailed structure in the galaxy, we cannot see much further out than our own spiral arm. Maybe these kinds of shapes are merely coincidental from our viewpoint.

The image at the top of this post was created by my office-mate Jason Kirk and it shows the star-forming clouds within the Gould Belt. The belt itself is marked as a blue ring and the local bubble is shown as a shaded area. The size of the star-forming regions is proportional to their mass, assuming a uniform density. This image was created for the Spitzer Gould Belt Survey and I have always found it handy when thinking about the Gould Belt.

Next Big Future is thinking about better superconducting magnets that are making tests of gravitational field propulsion possible. If that theory is correct, it would enable advanced hyperdrive propulsion to be realized with large powerful superconducting magnets.

Cosmic Ray is talking about the ‘unprovoked attack on the moon’ by NASA’s LCROSS mission. There are many people out there who misunderstood LCROSS.

Centauri Dreams describes the surprising early results from the IBEX mission, which is mapping the area where the heliosphere meets the nearby interstellar medium.

Cheap Astronomy presents a podcast on its experiences with one of the world’s great cheap telescopes: the Galileoscope.

The Chandra Blog is meeting an astronomer. Carles Badens is doing some really interesting work on supernovas and their remnants.

Weirdwarp reports on Kepler, discovering exoplanets and how you can adopt a star and see your name on Google Sky.

AARTScope Blog writes about variable stars and how they are discovered, both historically and personally.

Crowlspace relays some cool papers on starships and then speculates about photons bashing into mirrors.

At Universe Today, a post that has a fun way to celebrate the IYA:  Jane Houston Jones works at JPL, but she’s also an amateur astronomer.  For IYA, she is attempting to recreate all of Galileo’s astronomical drawings by sketching her observations through a telescope similar in size to Galileo’s.

Over on Bad Astronomy, Phil has some imagery from Mars that you need to embiggen fully to enjoy. Martian landscape artwork for all to enjoy.

Artsnova has a post that is close to m heart: social networking and robotic space exploration. Lots of linkage a some wallpaper goodies too.

Commercial Space is talking about the conference season and specifically the Canadian Science Policy Conference and Space Summit.

Telescoper, Peter Coles, has a wonderful 17th Century poem about the achievements of humanity, Greatness in Little by Richard Leigh.

Simostronomy has more variable star news in an update on R Coronae Borealis – or R Cor Bor.

The Great KSSSM has a report on how amateur astronomers from all over Cumbria created a scale model of the solar system at a historic, ancient castle in Kendal, the birthplace of the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington.

A Babe in the Universe tells all about a rocket so big you could project movies on the third stage! A showing of movie APOLLO 13 at Johnson Space Center gives us pause to remember the biggest rocket of all.

Kentucky Space has a video about how they and Nanoracks are working to make affordable and repeatable microgravity research on the International Space Station available to many more organizations.

Finally, from this very site, a picture that paints a billion words:  trying to grasp to meaning of one billion thanks to Information is Beautiful.

[Check out the full index of the Carnival of Space at Universe Today. The image in the header of this post comes from the 2009 Wellcome Image Awards for excellence in scientific imagery and art, that were announced this week.]

When you begin to consider such figures in relation to each other then your whole world changes! For example the Iraq War ($3000 billion), worldwide spend on advertising ($320 billion) and the Internet porn industry ($97 billion) are seen in stark contrast to the defense budget of Russia ($11 billion) and the global gift card market ($29 billion).

NASA’s annual budget was just about $17 billion for 2009 and the entire annual UK STFC budget is about $1 billion.

This image comes from Information is Beautiful, which if you’re not reading you should be. It is a fabulous blog collecting together (and creating) some amazing and insightful data-art.

[Information is Beautiful's Billion Dollar Gram]

UPDATE: Max Alexander’s Explorers of the Universe exhibition is now on display at Royal Albert Hall until 2nd November http://bit.ly/UZbOg

[Max Alexander's astronomer's portraits collection]

As the time of impact approached on Friday, the web began buzzing with tales of how NASA was going to ‘bomb the moon’ – I even ended up arguing on Twitter about it with a random user. It seems that LCROSS’ end-of-days finale was too much for some to take – with much criticism of ‘littering’ and ‘polluting’ the Moon going on. This all despite the fact that, as Stuart Lowe and Chris North point out, this sort of thing happens to the Moon all the time – albeit with rock and not space probes.

As it happens, the spectacular plume was not visible from Earth as was hoped – disappointingly nor was it terribly visible from the NASA live feed. This led some to say the mission has failed but again this is another case of science being misunderstood. A small plume was seen, even if it wasn’t as big and bright as hoped – and NASa got lots of data. No doubt they will reveal before too long what they have – or have not – uncovered.

They have quick post up showing that a plume was at least ‘just’ visible – the optical image is shown above – and I await further results from the LCROSS team in the coming weeks.

More importantly though – if they do find evidence of water hidden under the Moon’s South Pole – why is this important? Well if we want to send people back to the Moon and then beyond into the Solar System we need to start thinking about actually going and living on the Moon. We need bases in space – and the Moon is a good place – or space travel will just be too expensive. Water is heavy and carting it about with us around the Solar System will be difficult. If we have a supply of it on the Moon that we can mine then we need to know where it is and thus where to start thinking about putting our first base.

If there is water to be found on the Moon then it becomes even more interesting and relevant to mankind’s space travel agenda and to its science agenda in the coming decades. Well done to the LCROSS team for a successful smash-down!

16 Psyche was the first asteroid to be given a number upon its discovery. Until then asteroids were given symbols like the planets. Psyche is thought to be 253km in diameter and is of iron-nickel composition. It may be the remnant core of a larger body that was at some point blasted apart during the early days of the Solar System.

Psyche is obviously moving through the sky but when I saw it (and at the time of writing) it resided in Capricorn, ideally placed for my location in the late evening. At around magnitude 9.5 it isn’t visible to the naked eye.

The trick the finding asteroids is to look in the same place more than once. Finding the starfield where you expect the asteroid to be, you take a photo or sketch what you see. Then you go back a fews hours later, or the next night and look again at the same spot. If you’re in the right place, you’ll see that one of the stars has moved – that is most-likely your asteroid.

I observed Psyche two nights in a row and indeed could see, even without referring to my sketch of the area around it, that it had moved in the field of view. I thought this was pretty cool but was frustrated by my lack of photography facilities – I have no CCD or other telescope imaging device. Ah! I thought, I know what to do – I’ll go online and use SLOOH, the pay-as-you-go robotic telescope network.

The result is two images from the next two nights showing two more successive motions of Psyche. These are the images seen here.

I’m very pleased with my first asteroid find. I also then went on to spot asteroids 88 Thisbe and 7 Iris, although no pictures I’m afraid. I didn’t manage to find the Comet 22P/Kopff, which was a shame. The weather, and limited nights in the garden, got the better of me in the end.

LookUP works by asking the right databases the right questions. If you ask for a planet, the LookUP will query one astronomy web service. If you ask for a comet, it may ask another. You can read more about this on the LookUP about page.

Before long, an iPhone app was been developed and then several other ways of interfacing with the new service. Now I have thrown my own contribution into the mix:  a Twitter bot that connects you to LookUP in those situations when only Twitter will do.

Tweet ‘@lookupastro Orion Nebula’ and you will get a reply with the data on where to find M42 in the sky.

@lookupastro is a simple Twitter bot that when tweeted with the name of an astronomical object, will reply with its RA and declination and a link to the LookUP page. This is achieved by querying the Twitter stream for @lookupastro mentions and dealing with them in a way that can be parsed through the LookUP JSON outputs. Stuart’s data service is robust enough to reply sensibly to most things thrown at it and so the Twitter bot has been running fairly smoothly.

You don’t need to follow @lookupastro to use it, just tweet it. For example tweet “@lookupastro Orion Nebula” and you will get a reply with the data on where to find M42 in the sky and a ‘more information’ link. It’ll even suggest spelling corrections! Give it a go.

Last time I was here I attempted to observe all the planets and Pluto – in one day. In the end only Mercury evaded me and so I still have that target in mind for another trip. This time, though I have my sights set on the asteroids. Observing asteroids is something I’ve never thought to try really. It occurred to me the other night though that with these excellent dark skies and the trusty Meade ETX-90 Autostar, I could probably bag a few of them.

A quick check with Starry Night shows me that there are a few visible and prominent in the late evening, notably Iris, Psyche and Thisbe (you’ll need to add in your lat/long on those Heaven’s Above links BTW). I think it will be best to try to photograph them at different times and then see if one can spot the motion of the asteroid compared to the background stars in he shot. I’ve not tried it before but I’ll give it a go and let you know – if you have tried and have any advice, let me know. Maybe I’ll try and follow up my observations using an online telescope, such as SLOOH.

Another target for this trip is the comet 22P Kopff, which peaked back in June but is still visible and is very well placed for my location, being not too far from Jupiter and given that today is a new Moon. The above image of Kopff 22P is from July 20th this year and is by Michael Jager. I doubt I’ll see anything like this but what a shot!

I shall report back on my efforts, and I’d be interested to hear from anyone looking at the same things recently.

[Header image from David Darling]

2) Realise this isn’t the summary. Repeat step 1.

3) Nearly there, try again. It’s at the back.

4) Find the session you’re interested in. For the time of that session, find the list of concurrently running Joint Discussions, Special Sessions, Symposia and random titles with roman numerals next to them. (Note: the sessions indicated by roman numerals have no descriptions in the book at all so you just have to guess that they are about).

5) If you are interested in a Joint Discussion, Symposium or Special Session then you now have to go backward through the book and find where it is listed. This may take some time as the pages have no header text to help you.

6) When you locate the Joint Discussion, Symposium or Special Session that you’re interested in you will finally feel that you have found something sensible: a list of the talks with dates and times. Speakers are listed by surname, no indication of institution is given.

7) If you want to know more about a talk – you only have the often cryptic title so far – then pick up the telephone directory abstract book: the tree they sacrificed and gave to you upon registration; and look up the Joint Discussion, Symposia or Special Session you are interested in. Locate the abstract for this talk.

8 ) Hope that it does look interesting or you have to do this all again.

9) Give up and just go to the session with the coolest talk title discarding the massive abstract tome so you don’t hv to carry it around. Realise that if you ever speak at the IAU General Assembly yourself then your title should be “Observations and simulations of dark matter, in supernova, exoplanets and AGN taken in Antartica with the E-ELT using primary school children from developing countries. Free money”.

10) When in disappointing talk, be glad you have an iPhone and that, for once, the WiFi is working.

The talks at this event really are fascinating and I have learned a lot about many topics, but specifically the life of Sun-like stars and the activities of the IYA2009.

I have finally met several fellow astronomy bloggers and twitterers, including my .Astronomy pals Sarah Kendrew and Carolina Ödman; 365 Days of Astronomy colleague and general shining light Pamela Gay; and self-confessed Pluto killer Mike Brown.

Conferences are all about networking. You make acquantainces, forge friendships and generally drink with collaborators and colleagues. In this regard I see why Rio was a good choice.

I will more formally review all this another time. Right now bed beckons and a decent sleep/shower. Also I finally have decent WiFi so it’s time to catch up on some emails.

They are showing images of dwarf planets on the central screen.

The lights are dimming. I wonder if I can liveblog from the iPhone?

1416: Yes it seems I can.

1422: Whenever you’re ready guys, no hurry. The lights have undimmed! “The governor did not arrive yet but now he is arriving” we are told. I hope it’s really Arnie.

1435: President arrives to much fuss and bother.

1447: “All men and women are born astronomers” – Catherine Cesarsky, IAU President

1449: “IYA has already surpassed all expectations” – Catherine Cesarsky, IAU President

1450: “Never before have so many professionals, amateurs, journalists and educators come together in such a way” – Catherine Cesarsky, IAU President

1453: Portuguese for Pluto is Plutão, Portuguese for Makemake is Makemake

Brazil is a country that wants to be invited to major economic summits, that wants to be on the UN security council. Rio is hoping to host the 2016 Olympics and is clearly taking the IAU General Assembly very seriously with various astronomy events going all over the city. However I have to admit that I was shocked driving through Rio last night.

The airport is located North of the city and to get to your hotel you must drive past the Favelas – shanty towns. Whole communities built from wood and breeze blocks without proper sanitation or other amenities. These are the places all tourists are told to avoid, but it is hard to miss them as you fly past on the main road, watching block after block of dark, teetering edifices go by.

Rio has a crime problem and statistically several of the nearly 3,000 astronomers will be mugged this week – apparently some have been already. The trick is not to be one of them. I have no laptop, will carry only my money for the day, and won’t travel alone.

Today we will take the metro to the conference centre and spend the morning in talks. This afternoon is the grand opening ceremony. Rumour has it that the President of Brazil will be speaking. I’m looking forward to getting into the talks now and chatting to all the other astronomers at coffee etc.

As for Rio itself, I plan on taking a better look at the weekend. There is a lot to see and if one has to do it all in daylight then it will mainly have to wait for Saturday and Sunday. Until then: on with the astronomy!

If you’re blogging or tweeting the event why not add your name in the comments and we’ll create a list.

Obviously I will be there as will my Twitter account http://twitter.com/orbitingfrog

Also if you are tweeting it, follow me for news of the tweetup when it happens. There is also a Flickr group at http://flickr.com/groups/iau2009/ join it to add your photos!

The Southern Cross is a circumpolar constellation that is used to mark the position of the South Celestial pole. It is only visible from the Southern Hemisphere.

I have been below the equator before but didn’t get much star gazing in, die to cloud cover. So the IAU General Assembly may be my best chance to see a whole raft of stars that I’ve never seen before.

[Flickr user joka2000]

The General Assemblies began in 1922, in Rome, and have moved around the globe ever since. It was at the 2006 GA in Prague that Pluto was re-classified as a dwarf planet. In 1973, due to political problems, two assemblies were held: one regular assembly in Sydney and another ‘extraordinary’ assembly in Poland to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the birth of Copernicus.

Part of each GA involves sessions where new ‘resolutions’ are debated and voted upon – such as the planetary definition resolution in 2006. Another example is that in 2003, in Sydney, the IAU made a resolution to ensure that after a reasonable period of time, all astronomical data from major telescopes go into the public domain, and be free of intellectual rights.

The IAU also decides on the standard symbols for various astronomical constants, and on the accepted frequencies for various spectral lines. All of this may sound trivial and bureaucratic, but by keeping the community cohesive and tidy, astronomy runs more smoothly.

This year’s event in Rio de Janeiro will be my first and I’m looking forward to it. I will be blogging the experience, although I’m not taking my laptop with me – also a first! I will instead rely solely (and perhaps foolishly) on my iPhone. This means my posts will be shorter and possibly misspelled. Flickr, and Twitter will be my friend, and Skype on the iPhone will be thoroughly tested! I may have to buy a solar charger…

There will mostly likely be a Tweetup and a mini .Astronomy meeting whilst I am there as well as many many talks! If you are going to be there follow me on Twitter and head for the Tweetup when it happens. I have also created a Flickr group for the IAU (http://www.flickr.com/groups/iau2009/) so if you’re going and are on Flickr then join it and add some snaps.

[Post image from Flickr user Rodrigo_Soldon]

So far the results are interesting and as we have now passed the 500 tweets mark, I thought it would be nice to report on some facts and figures.

Overview

The site is generally working well and I am pleased with it. We current have 516 tweets (and this number has changed several times during my writing of this blog post!) which averages at about 8 tweets a day since it started. This number fluctuates quite a bit though, as the daily tweets graph below indicates.

The site will need to run for several months more before any really hard numbers can be drawn from the data. At the moment the odd popular paper can completely skew all the statistics. However in general, astronomy and general physics papers do best. Those papers which are accessible to a non-expert reader seem to do well, which makes perfects sense.

Usage

The website receives about 200 visitors each day with a lull at the weekends and a peak on Fridays. Conversely, the tweets themselves are predominantly collected on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, inline with statistics recently released about Twitter use in general ^[1].

These two graphs plot the tweets over time. The first shows the cumulative number of tweets over time. The second shows the tweets each day since April 16th. The best fit to the cumulative graph is actually a slow, exponential growth, which is in keeping with the number of tweets being produced in general by Twitter. The daily graph indicates the same, although it is interesting to see the weekend lulls clearly marked out. In the future this chart can have other information overlaid such as news stories – you can see the Iran elections spike at the far right.

Categories

The most-tweeted broad subject areas are Computer Science (29%), Astrophysics (28%) and Physics (14%). This probably to be expected given the way that arXiv is used with different academic fields ^[2].

The two most tweeted sub-topics are ‘Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics’ and ‘Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics’. Together they account for about 35% of the tweets and they each contribute roughly half of that total. After that ‘Physics and Society’ is very popular with 13% of the total tweets. ‘Cryptography and Security’ and ‘Applications’ (of Statistics) make up 11% and 13% respectively but it should be noted that most of those tweets are for only one, very popular, paper in each case.

Word Cloud

A curious sideline I set up is a word cloud of the words found in tweeted paper titles. I would like to know what words hook people in and get them to read a paper.So far this has shown limited effect but should grow more useful with time. A similar same cloud can be created for the abstracts of the papers and for the tweets themselves.

Interesting Papers

A couple of papers have really rocketed through the ranks. Recently a paper described a statistical result suggesting that there was vote rigging in the Iranian elections. ‘Benford’s Law anomalies in the 2009 Iranian presidential election‘ rose from nowhere to become the most tweeted arXiv paper since April in just two days, with 35 tweets at time of writing this post.

‘Hiding Information in Retransmissions‘ is a Computer Science paper that has shown a slower, but steadier climb through the popularity ranks. It has now dropped out of the weekly top-ten but remains in the monthly and all-time charts.

Mavens and Connectors

The twitter users producing the most tweets have stayed roughly constant in the past 2 months. In order, the users contributing more than 10 arXiv tweets since April are currently @CharmQGP (48), @sarahkendrew (25), @heptwit (20), @orbitingfrog (15; me), @astroclif (14), @astrodicticum (11) and @cmetzner (11).

Interestingly of these, @heptwit and @astroclif have only 7 and 2 followers each on Twitter. This leads me to think that I should begin measuring the ‘reach’ of tweets as well as the number of tweets. For example, a paper tweeted by @CharmQGP will be seen by potentially 401 people. If it were then retweeted by @sarahkendrew it could reach up to 653! This would be compared to a paper tweeted by @heptwit, @astroclif that can only be seen by 8 people. The reach of a tweet is a new metric that I can easily begin adding into the site.

In a similar vein, it is curious to measure the retweeting potential of users. We can reorder the top contributors listed above in order of their retweeting power – that is to say that we can place them in order of how many times people retweet the papers that they mention. Now the list looks different: @sarahkendrew (16), @orbitingfrog (13), @CharmQGP (3), @cmetzner (2), @heptwit (1), @astroclif (0) and @astrodicticum (0). This can only be taken as a tentative result since we are only 2 months into this data set and retweeting is far less common than simply tweeting in general. However it points out another metric that may be worth measuring.

@tweprints

As suggested many times by many people there is now a @tweprints twitter feed that announces popular papers as they reach a threshold number of mentions. This threshold is changeable but currently sits at 5 tweets.  I am open to suggestions for the kinds of things this twitter feed should announce. At the moment it is a very sparse feed.

Future Plans

The new metrics I mentioned above will find their way onto the site soon, as will an expanded statistics page. XML feeds for data and hopefully an RSS feed of the current top-ten papers. All of this is of course only going to get done in between real work on my thesis. Sheesh.

There is a large and valuable database building up behind this project and if anyone has any novel uses for it, I would be interested to hear from you. I will update again in the future when there is something worthy of noting. In the meantime: keep tweeting your arXiv papers!

[1 - Sysomos Twitter Report] [2 - SarahAskew] [Link to Tweprints]

Neilsen describes the current situation, in which scientists must publish refereed papers in selective journals in order to progress science. In fact publishing has become a part of the scientific process, and has been for almost 300 years. The history of this situation is explored in the article, so I will not go into it here.

The Internet represents an opportunity to change this system, one which has created a 300-year-old, collective long-term memory, into something new and more efficient, perhaps adding in a current, collective short-term working memory at the same time. With new online tools, scientists could begin to share techniques, data and ideas online to the benefit of all parties, and the public at large.

Online tools for commenting, sharing and distributing information are now established but many scientists remain reticent to put their ideas – their hard work – into this free-for-all. Fear of wasted time, intellectual property theft and reprisals from the community have made scientists stay behind their desk, filling up their hard drives and filing cabinets, rather than share en-masse.

I probably don’t need to explain to someone reading a blog that online tools are changing many other aspects of society. During my astrolunch talk I presented a slide showing some of the online tools I have used in the past year to benefit my own work. (I realised when writing the talk that there were too many to fit on one slide!)

In the end, Neilsen’s article concludes that for scientists to engage and share ideas online, and thus become more efficient in their work, they would need to do so in a very different online infrastructure to that which we usually see in so-called Web 2.0. Scientists would need a way to track any one person’s activity within this infrastructure so that proper credit and attribution could be given to the origin of ideas. This, along with some metric of contribution would be vital for scientists to consider putting time and effort into any online activity regarding their work.

At present only your refereed publications count toward anything in your future as a scientist. Without publication, you likely won’t won’t progress in research and likely won’t advance in your career. If you spend time online; writing, sharing and contributing, then it will not help you in your academic life. This is a situation that has to change, and that almost inevitably will change in the coming years.

Neilsen thinks that the system will be transformed in the next couple of decades, far more than it has been in 300 years! This will involve a huge shift in the culture of scientists. However with the proper tools and the right amount of ‘evangelizing’ by techy science types, it could all happen more easily.

The talk generated a lot of discussion, and in fact still is via email. People seemed to think I was advocating the abolishment of the current system or suggesting everyone put every idea they’ve ever had onto Facebook. I am not. What I do know is that there are a huge number of small tips, tools, scripts, techniques, spreadsheets, templates and other bits and bobs lying on every academic’s hard drive in every university in the world! If those little pieces of knowledge were searchable, filterable and accessible to everyone else in the field then it might be easier for people to progress in their work and find the right people to collaborate with on the right jobs.

Michael Neilsen is an invited speaker for the .Astronomy 2009 conference in Leiden this winter. For more information on that conference visit the new website www.dotastronomy.com. You can also find Neilsen’s blog at michaelnielsen.org/blog/.

[Link to original article] [PDF of my Slides] [Header image taken from original article, Credit: Photolibrary]

How did I get into astronomy? I was born in 1981 so my formative years were the late 80s and early 90s. I am an astronomer forged from Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Hubble Space Telescope and of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. I would say that those were the things that got me into astronomy? What got you into astronomy? I’d be interested to know. In the spirit of sharing, here’s my story.

I always liked space, most kids do. I had a litle Osborne book called ‘Space Facts’ (or something) which was filled with child-sized facts perfect for memorising. It was probably given to me to shut me up, as I was a ‘why?’ child. I can still picture some of the illustrations that helped me learn all about space. Saturn sitting in a giant bucket is one I can vividly recall.

I got a telescope when I was 11. It was a small, wobbly refractor that I used to look at Jupiter’s moons and the Orion Nebula. Around the same time we had our loft converted  at home. Thus the first bedroom that I didn’t have to share with my brother was south-facing and had a large, retractable skylight that was just right for looking out at the Moon and planets. Suddenly I was obsessed.

A couple of years later, with the recent repair of Hubble firmly in my mind, I got my first real telescope. It was a 114mm Newtonian refractor and it was heavy! It was bulky and obtrusive in my sloped-roofed bedroom but it worked like a charm. I had to teach myself about Right-Ascension and Declination, the rotation of the Earth under a ‘celestial sphere’. I taught myself about the life-cycle of stars, with Orion and Patrick Moore’s ‘Atlas of the Universe’ as my guide.

I was hooked on the TV coverage of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 as it impacted Jupiter and it propelled me into learning about comets, asteroids and the origins of the Solar System.

In the late 90s we got an Internet connection and that changed everything! I began programming and coding little Visual Basic programs that would rotate little solar systems on the screen. I could grab images and information via our CompuServe browser and use Mosaic to see the latest images from NASA. It was very exciting.

University soon loomed over the horizon and I was amazed to see that Astrophysics was an option – the rest is probably self-evident. I’m now trying to wrap up my PhD and create a thesis from the papers I’ve written. I have now been to a professional telescope and taken real, original data.

I have just seen astronauts repair Hubble for the final time, almost 20 years after it was first launched. Yesterday the first British astronaut was selected by ESA. A whole group of European astronauts was revealed after a lengthy selection process. I assume (or perhaps hope) that there are legions of 10 year old children around Europe watching this and thinking ‘I want to do that’. Because for what seems to me like the first time: they really could!

I hope that you have heard of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, which I play a small part in organising. As part of this I am creating an episode about how people get into astronomy. If you would like to share your story then please leave a comment explaining how you got into astronomy.

Make sure you use your correct email so I can contact you (emails not published here). I’ll be blogging about this upcoming podcast episode again, but since I was sharing I thought you might like to as well.

[Image from Flickr user turbojoe used under CC]

This post features some interactive charts that show the altitude, velocity and acceleration of the Ariane rocket as it progress through the air into space. You can click and drag to zoom in on a section of these charts. Move your mouse around inside them to get more information.

7 seconds after ignition of the main stage cryogenic engine, two solid-propellant boosters are ignited, and we have liftoff. The launch begins with a 6 second vertical climb. The onboard computers optimize the motion of the rocket in real time, in order to minimise fuel consumption. The main stage engine takes the launcher into an intermediate orbit before the end stage takes the payload into the final orbit. You can clearly see the change between the two stages on the velocity and acceleration graphs at about 9 minutes.

The main stage of the launcher will apparently fall back, just off the coast of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean. The launcher will remain at an altitude of about 852 kilometers travelling at about 10,000 meters/second! The fairing protecting the Herschel, Planck spacecraft is jettisoned shortly after the boosters.

By the end of the process, Herschel and Planck will be on their way to a placed called ‘L2′, a point in space where objects sit ‘behind’ the Earth with respect to the Sun (see diagram below). L2 is a good spot for space-based observatories because they are effectively ‘towed’ around in orbit with the Earth but remain roughly stationary with respect to it.

Herschel and Planck will not be alone at L2. The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe is already there and the Gaia mission and James Webb Space Telescope will also be placed at L2.

The Herschel space telescope has two main objectives: observation of the “cold” Universe, in particular the formation of stars and galaxies; and studying the chemical composition of celestial bodies and the molecular chemistry of the Universe. Herschel’s mirror, at 3.5 meters in diameter, will be the largest ever deployed in space. It will wiegh over 3,400 kg at launch. For more info visit the ESA Herschel page.

Planck is designed to analyze the remnants of the radiation that filled the Universe immediately after the Big Bang, which we observe today as the cosmic microwave background. Planck will provide vital information concerning the creation of the Universe and the origins of the cosmic structure. It will weigh 1,920 kg at launch. For more info visit the ESA Planck page.

[More info in Ariancespace press release. Launch image: ESA-CNES-ARIANESPACE, L2 diagram: ESA/NASA]

It explores the many facets of the telescope — the historical development, the scientific importance, the technological breakthroughs, and also the people behind this ground-breaking invention, their triumphs and failures.

Dr. Joe Liske, an astronomer from the European Southern Observatory hosts the 60 minute movie. He can also be seen on the Hubblecast video podcast. The DVD contains subtitles in several languages. If you would like to get hold of a copy for your local astronomical group, school, museum or other public event then visit the website or simply email ESO and ask.

The Eyes on the Skies book is available in English, German, Finnish and Korean.

[Eyes of the Skies Trailer]

I think it is technically now possible and so I am putting out a personal plea for translators! Help! I have so far obtained a first draft version of my tweets in French and Dutch, as I will outline below.

The phrases that needs translation are as follows:

SATELLITE will pass over CITY at mag XX at HH:MM on DD/MM. Moves from XX° elevation COMPASS to XX° elevation COMPASS over X min

Mag XX Iridium flare over CITY at HH:MM on DD/MM. Will appear at XX° elevation, bearing XX° from North

Here is a list of the current feeds that need translating. If you would like to volunteer to help me out when please reply to me @orbitingfrog. The only requirement I have is that you have a Twitter account so that you can stay subscribed to the feed as we get the translation right.

So here’s the list as it stands. Feel free to comment or tweet and I’ll update the list as we go along.

French (Aix, Paris) (with thanks to @sarahkendrew)

• L’SATELLITE passera au-dessus de CITY avec mag XX à HH:MM le DD/MM. Trajectoire de XX° d’élévation COMPASS à XX° d’élévation COMPASS en XX min
• Flash Iridium mag XX au-dessus de CITY à HH:MM le DD/MM. Apparaîtra à XX° d’élévation, XX° d’azimuth

Dutch (Amsterdam) (with thanks to @sarahkendrew)

• SATELLITE vliegt over CITY met helderheid XX om HH:MM op DD/MM. De hoogte gaat van XX° COMPASS naar XX° COMPASS, gedurende XX min
• Iridiumflits met helderheid XX over CITY om HH:MM u op DD/MM. Verschijnt op hoogte van XX° N, XX° azimut

Greek (Athens)

Norwegian (Bergen)

German (Berlin, Munchen, Wien) (with thanks to @drmirror)

• SATELLITE überquert CITY mit Helligkeit XX um HH:MM am DD/MM. Zieht von XX° Höhe COMPASS nach XX° Höhe COMPASS in X min.
• Iridium Flare der Helligkeit XX über CITY um HH:MM am DD/MM. Erscheint in XX° Höhe, Richtung XX° von Nord.

Spanish (Madrid)

Russian (Moscow)

Czech (Prague)

Italian (Rome)

Korean (Seoul)

Swedish (Stockholm)

Arabic (Tehran)

Japanese (Tokyo)

Hebrew (Tel Aviv)

Other languages for possible future feeds:

Poruguese

Between 2007 and 2009, a group of amateur meteor enthusiasts in Japan got together to create a national network of over 100 connected video cameras. They used a piece of motion-detection software called UFOCapture (by a company called SonotaCo) which allows video recording from a few seconds before the trigger. This unprecedented network recorded not only 240,000 optically bright meteors over two years, but almost 40,000 meteors seen by more than one station.

The multiple-station events are particularly interesting because they enabled observers to trace the motion of the meteors back into the Solar System and say where they came from. Using this data they created the above radiant map. The map labels several known, seasonal meteor showers. This itself is kind of cool but the really interesting part is that they’re map revealed eleven further seasonal meteor shows that had not been known about before!

The eleven new showers were identified by new radiants on the sky from which meteors appear to flow. Research like this could potentially indicate some comets or asteroids that was hitherto unknown, but that as APOD says: ’that might one day pass close to the Earth’.

These kinds of data excessive projects really spark my imagination. they can only be achieved in this modern age of modest home-technological excess. By networking together their video cameras, these guys created something that was more than the sum of its parts.

The southern half of the sky is obviously still somewhat sparsely plotted. If there is an amateur group out there in South America, Australia, New Zealand or some such other antipodean location – then get on the case. You could be making discoveries of an entirely digital kind in the near future.

[Ongoing Meteor Work PDF from The Journal of the IMO, APOD on Twitter]

Servicing mission 4 (SM4) will launch on Monday from Cape Canaveral (2pm EST) this coming Monday (May 11th). The shuttle Atlantis is performing the mission. There will be another shuttle on standby, acting as a lifeboat because the astronauts have no other means of escape.

The team will be giving Hubble quite an overhaul. They will be replacing a unit the controls Hubble’s communications with the onboard science instruments. Several spacewalks will replace all six gyroscopes and install new batteries. This life-extending repair mission also involves new guidance sensors, thermal insulation and a new de-orbit mechanism for when Hubble is moved at the end of its life. It is hoped that the whole exercise will give Hubble another 5-10 years delivering science.

The astronauts will also try to repair Hubble’s out-of-commission instruments, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). STIS stopped working in 2004 and ACS failed in 2007. Brand new intsruments Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) will be installed. WFC3, is a visible, infrared and ultraviolet light camera. It should improved the sensitivity of Hubble some 10-30 times.

It is perhaps most interesting to note that if the mission is a total success then Hubble will literally be better than it has ever been! It would have six functioning scientific instruments as well as brand new stabilisation and operational components. Not bad for an observatory that is now older than the undergraduates coming into our astrophysics degree programme.

Fingers crossed for Monday!

[Hubblesite SM4 page, NASA SM4 page]

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory  has the largest single mirror ever built for a space telescope. Herschel’s mission is to collect long-wavelength radiation from some of the coldest and most distant objects in the Universe. In addition, Herschel will be the only space observatory to cover a spectral range from the far infrared to sub-millimetre – an ideal regime for my own area of study: star formation.

Herschel will be launched along with Planck, ESA’s microwave observatory which will study the Cosmic Microwave Background. Planck is designed to image the anisotropies of the Cosmic Background Radiation Field over the whole sky, with unprecedented sensitivity and angular resolution.

Cardiff University is heavily involved and will be holding launch events on the day, including a live video feed (with nibbles). Both Herschel and Planck can be found on Twitter. I will attempt to liveblog from Cardiff on the day, and I’m sure that many others will do the same around Europe.

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting the BBC in Birmingham to help edit The Sky at Night as an astronomy researcher. The episode was about near-Earth objects, specifically 2008TC3, which crash landed in the Sudan last year, after being tracked from space. You can currently catch the episode on the BBC iPlayer.

The BBC was very nice and friendly and the whole thing was really interesting to someone who knows nothing about it. In fact the experience of sitting, editing in a darkened room in close-quarters with two other people and twenty computer monitors is not unlike operating a large telescope. Happily, no altitude sickness though.

This is just one step away from fulfilling my childhood dream of meeting Sir Patrick! Maybe one day. In honour of this event, I found the old B3ta video ‘Patrick Moore plays the xylophone’ – an homage to the man himself.

I find that reading papers outside of my own academic field is quite compelling and often sparks the imagination. The problem of course is knowing which papers one should read if you’re not inside the system. After a few weeks this website should begin to show the emerging favourites in any field.

It’s also interesting to simply see what gets talked about. As the data piles up, it will be possible to filter the papers into different topics or types. It might, for example, be useful to see what astrophysics papers are most discussed in a given month, or which biology paper has risen fastest through the ranks this week.

The engine behind the site periodically looks for tweets that contain both the word ‘arxiv’ and an arXiv.org paper identifier (such as 0102.3456). You can see a list of recently detected tweets on the site itself. In this way it will pick up anyone mentioning an arXiv URL or someone who tags their tweets #arxiv and includes the paper id – two things that I often see. It also therefore keeps the idea global – you don’t have to tweet in English.

The statistics and top-tens are worked out democratically:

• If a paper is tweeted 4 times then it is ranked 4x higher than a paper that is mentioned only once.
• I place no restrictions on multiple mentions by the same user at present.
• One can mention more than one paper in a single tweet. This will give each paper a single vote.
• Mentioning the same id code more than once in a tweet does nothing.

If it continues to look interesting, I have every intention of adding more detailed trends to the site as time goes by. For now, I just need data – and by that I mean tweets! Start tweeting about your favourite papers now! If you have any thoughts on the kind of data you’d like to se displayed, then let me know in the comments.

I’m a bit confused about what to call this new site. ‘twarxiv’ came to mind, but is entirely inaccessible to outsiders! Anyone have ideas? If you can think of a good name, or have any other suggestions about arXiv on Twitter then please leave a comment here or contact me @orbitingfrog.

The primary research goal of PAMeLA (Payload for Anti-Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) is to study the antimatter component of cosmic ray radiation. Antiparticles account for a small fraction of cosmic rays. Where the bulk of them originated is not known. It could be that they are produced in interactions between cosmic rays and atoms in the interstellar medium, (this is called a secondary source). They could also be produced in some sort of astrophysical phenomena like in pulsars, microquasars or through dark matter annihilation, which would all be primary sources.

This report outlines a measurement of the positron fraction in the energy range 1.5–100 GeV. In this range they find numbers of positrons that are inconsistent with secondary sources. So could it be that positrons are really being created in an astrophysical object (.e.g  a pulsar or microquasar) or by dark matter annihilation?

Download the PDF of this talk. Read original article on Nature.