Feed aggregator

How often do you go outside and look up? I mean really, just look up at the sky and stars?

With more and more people living in cities, and light pollution still a major problem, it seems that a smaller percentage of people actually get to see the stars. That’s why the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) started the GLOBE at night program, an effort to get folks outside and get them to appreciate the night sky.

The program is actually pretty simple: all you have to do is go outside and look at Orion, and compare the stars in the constellation you can see with maps showing progressively fainter stars. This tells you your "magnitude limit" which in turn s tells you how bad light pollution is in your area. You can then submit your findings on the GLOBE at Night website, where they are compiled and mapped.

It doesn’t matter if you live in the middle of the Sahara or in downtown NYC. In fact, the more people who submit their results the better, so that the GaN folks can get really good coverage of the planet. Not only does this help you get a feel for the sky and for light pollution, but it helps astronomers keep track of wasted light as well.

Light pollution destroys our view of the sky, but it also represents a lot of energy totally wasted. Cities, towns, everyone can save a lot of money by installing more efficient lighting — you can find out more at the Dark Sky Rangers site. Projects like GLOBE at Night will help a lot of people realize that, too.

The project goes from now until March 16, and the website has everything you need to get started, including resources for teachers, parents, and students. Give it a shot!

Last year, I attended the NASA-sponsored Launch Pad Workshop, a week-long camp in Laramie, Wyoming, to help science fiction authors learn astronomy. That way, they can get ideas and write more accurate stories! It was a lot of fun, and I had a fantastic time.

Registration is open again for Launch Pad 2010, with guest speaker Kevin Grazier, who is a planetary scientist and science advisor for TV shows, including Battlestar Galactica.

Launch Pad will be from July 11 – 18, 2010, and if you’re a science fiction author you can apply to attend from now until March 31. And if you are an author, I urge you to go. It’s more than just getting the science right; it’s about inspiration, and there’s plenty to be had in astronomy. Launch Pad is a great way to meet it head on.

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, only launched a couple of months ago, and has already done spectacular work. Gulping down huge tracts of sky every day, it has already discovered over 2000 asteroids — not seen, but actually discovered — including several that pass near the Earth (none on track to hit us, happily). It’s discovered four comets, too, and by the end of the mission in a few months will see far more.

But since it’s a survey instrument, and it sees in the far infrared, the views it gets are nothing short of spectacular! Like this one:

[Click to embiggen, or grab this ginormous 11,000x4000 TIF].

There is a lot to see here! First, the colors: all of this is far infrared, with blue being the IR wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns combined (5 and 6.5 times the wavelength the human eye sees), green is 12 microns, and red 22. Green is dominated by warm dust and big organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

The glowing gassy stuff is part of the Heart Nebula, which I’ve posted about before (guess what date). But take a look a bit to the left of all that gas, and look much, much farther in distance…

Those are two galaxies, called Maffei 1 and 2. Both are actually quite close to the Milky Way, only about 10 million light years away. They’re big galaxies, and really should be among the brightest galaxies in the sky. Yet chances are you’ve never heard of them! That’s because his area of the sky is loaded with dust in our galaxy, which absorbs visible light. Another incredibly beautiful galaxy, IC 342, is also part of that group, but is hard to see in visible light as well.

Maffei 1 is right and below center, and Maffei 2 is the barred spiral one above it. For comparison, this image here is about twice the diameter of the Moon on the sky. WISE has a huge field of view, so it doesn’t get high-res images of galaxies, but it more than makes up for it in breadth and depth. Observations like this will help astronomers map the dusty content of nearby galaxies, and even get a handle on how much dust is in much more distant galaxies, though the maps won’t be quite as detailed. Still, more information is always good, and getting to study galaxies — and nebulae, and planets, and comets, and asteroids, and and and — in the far infrared will help our understanding of all these objects far better.

As an aside, I learned of this image on my pal Amy Mainzer’s WISE blog. She’s a bigwig with WISE, and when she has time away from doing nonstop firehose science she writes up fun stuff about this new and extremely cool spacecraft. That’s definitely one you want to drop into your RSS feed reader!

This mosaic of images from the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explore, or WISE, in the constellation of Cassiopeia contains a large star-forming nebula within the Milky Way Galaxy, called IC 1805 or the Heart Nebula, a portion of which is seen at the right of the image. IC 1805 is more than 6,000 light-years from Earth. Also visible in this image are two nearby galaxies, Maffei 1 and Maffei 2. In visible light these galaxies are hidden by dust in IC 1805 and were unknown until 1968 when Paolo Maffei found them using infrared observations. Both galaxies contain billions of stars and are located some 10 million light-years away. Maffei 1 is a lenticular galaxy, which has a disk-like structure and a central bulge but no spiral structure or appreciable dust content. Maffei 2 is a spiral galaxy that also has a disk shape, but with a bar-like central bulge and two prominent dusty spiral arms. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

NASA has exercised a $60 million, one-year extension option for a contract with Science Applications International Corporation of Houston to provide support to safety and mission assurance activities at the agency's Johnson Space Center.

NASA today unveiled an interactive computer simulation that allows virtual explorers of all ages to dock the space shuttle at the International Space Station, experience a virtual trip to Mars or a lunar impact, and explore images of star formations taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Am I a Geek Dad? Well, I’m a geek, and a dad.

But in this case, I’m talking about the cool website Geek Dad. To celebrate their third anniversary they’re opening up voting for their Geek Dad Awards, with categories like Best Actor/Actress, Best Gadget, and so on.

Of particular interest to me are the categories of Best Social Media Star and Best Geek Celebrity (overall). That’s because, for some reason, they put me on those lists.

Now, I love Geek Dad, don’t get me wrong! But I’m up against folks like My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™ and My Not Quite As Close But Still A Friend Felicia Day, so my odds of winning are smaller than the gap between the time a tribble is born and when it gets pregnant.

See what I did there? Yeah, I deserve to win a geek award, but I’m guessing it won’t be this one given the competition. And worse, Fwhil Fwheaton is in both categories, and I can’t in good conscience ask you to vote for me thousands of times at the expense of my mancrush. No-names like Neil Gaimon and J. J. Abrams, sure. But Wil?

So if you care to, go to Geek Dad and vote your own conscience. And I won’t ask the couple of folks I know at GD to send me the lists of IP addresses of the voters so that I can exact my revenge as necessary. Seriously. I won’t. At all.

But hurry! Voting ends at 8:00 p.m. EST on March 14th. If I win, I’ll give everyone who voted for me a unicorn*.

*But not really.

Do cannibals have friends? I imagine some must… unless they have them over for dinner.

Just like the giant elliptical galaxy ESO 306-17, which you can see in this gorgeous Hubble picture:

[Click to embiggen, or grab the monster 3800 x 3800 pixel version. They have wallpapers, too.]

ESO 306-17 sits about a billion light years from Earth. In this picture it looks like it’s surrounded by other galaxies, but that’s an illusion: all the other galaxies you see here are either much closer to us or much farther away. ESO 306-17 is actually a loner, sitting all by itself in space.[Update: Or almost all alone; Michael West, who led the team that took these images, tells me the little elliptical at the bottom left of ESO 306-17 may be interacting with it. It's difficult to tell; but what is certain is that there are very few galaxies near the big one, far fewer than you'd expect.]

How can a galaxy get this big and yet be sitting in a giant void? Easy. It ate all the neighbors. We know this is how galaxies grow in size, and is even why the Milky Way is a giant among galaxies. Like our galaxy, ESO 306-17 has a lot of globular clusters around it, just as you’d expect if it ate a bunch of other galaxies.

When I downloaded the bigger image, I noticed this weird galaxy on the left:

Wow. I’m guessing that long stretched-out junk is a small galaxy that got shredded, maybe after a close pass to that spiral. I thought for a moment the spiral might be active — that is, the black hole in its core was actively eating matter and ejecting long jets of gas and light — but the core itself is not bright, as you’d expect. Plus, the material is lumpy and irregular, more indicative of a cosmic collision in progress. It’s unrelated to the elliptical, but still very cool.

I really urge you to download the big image and take a nice, long look at it. There’s a lot to see, and it’s all really beautiful.

Image credit: NASA, ESA and Michael West (ESO)

In 2005 the robotic Huygens probe landed on Titan, Saturn's enigmatic moon, and sent back the first ever images from beneath Titan's thick cloud layers. This artist's impression is based on those images. In the foreground, sits the car-sized lander that sent back images for more than 90 minutes before running out of battery power. The parachute that slowed Huygen's re-entry is seen in the background, still attached to the lander. Smooth stones, possibly containing water-ice, are strewn about the landscape. Analyses of Huygen's images and data show that Titan's surface today has intriguing similarities to the surface of the early Earth. Image Credit: ESA

NASA today announced its founding partnership of Launch, an initiative to identify, showcase and support innovative approaches to sustainability challenges through a series of forums.

Starting tonight on the BBC, a new series premiers called "Wonders of the Solar System". The host is some guy named Brian Cox. He’s a particle physicist! I don’t see the BBC hiring me to do a show on the Large Hadron Collider, so this doesn’t seem fair. And I’m a little concerned about how much Brian knows about the LHC, anyway.

Still, it looks cool. Here’s the trailer:

Seriously, this will be awesome. I can’t wait to see it!

Thanks in no small part to my beloved BABloggees and Tweeps, Rachael Dunlop won a Shorty Award in the Health category!

Yay!

It’s nice that she gets some recognition for her debunking of quackery, hoaxery, and quite a bit of alt-meddery, but the real schadenfreudeliciousness comes from knowing that she’s helping Mike Adams’ and Joe Mercola’s heads that much more explodey. Go read her link for all the sordid, but oh-so-satisfying details.

For those of you who helped out, my sincere thanks. Ya done good.

Cosmic grains in NASA collector could reveal atoms that went into making the stars and planets

NASA's aptly-named Stardust spacecraft may have returned the first-ever samples of interstellar dust to Earth. Scientists hope to confirm their possible discovery of two dust grains, based upon the sharp eye of a citizen scientist, BBC reports.

Scientists don't kid when they say everything comes from stardust. The interstellar dust contains heavy atoms that formed within the fiery stellar furnaces. Those atoms later went on to make other stars, and eventually planets such as Earth.

The Stardust spacecraft deployed a dust collector with cells made of aerogel -- a porous material -- so that it could capture dust during a flyby of Comet Wild/2. But some of dust grains may represent interstellar grains, rather than pieces from the dirty snowball of a comet.

Stardust dropped off its sample capsule to Earth in January 2006, but has continued on a new four-and-a-half year journey to reach the comet Tempel 1.

NASA then enlisted the help of the public to try and find interstellar grains in the dust collectors. The Stardust@home website allows netizens to use a virtual microscope and scope out more than 700,000 individual images, which is how Bruce Hudson of Ontario, Canada first spotted the speck known as particle 30.

Scientists followed up on Hudson's find and discovered another likely interstellar grain candidate. Hudson has since named the two grains Orion and Sirius -- both appear to contain magnesium, aluminum, iron, chromium, manganese, nickel, copper and gallium.

The Stardust team can't confirm the find just yet, and admits that it could be a false alarm. But Andy Westphal, a Stardust scientist from the University of California, Berkeley told the BBC that they were "cautiously excited."

So c'mon, netizens! You should get cracking on those Martian craters via NASA's crowd-sourced online game -- you never know what might turn up.

[via BBC]

I am pleased to write that the creationist and generally anti-reality Don McLeroy has lost his bid for re-election to the Texas State Board of Education!

Yay!

The man who ousted him is Thomas Ratliff, who is — gasp! — an actual educator who has vowed to try to remove the politicization of the board and also to actually – gasp again! — listen to educators when it comes to, y’know, educational topics. You may remember McLeroy is the goofball who infamously said, "Someone has to stand up to the experts!"

However, mitigating the good news somewhat are some things to consider:

1) McLeroy is still on the BoE for the next seven months before his term runs out. He can do a vast amount of damage to Texas schoolchildren’s education in that time.

2) Ratliff only won by a very narrow margin, meaning a whole lot of Texas citizens either didn’t know about McLeroy’s maniacal attempts at derailing the Lone Star State’s educational system, didn’t care, or actually supported him.

3) McLeroy and his crew of revisionist creationists have already done so much damage that it cannot be easily repaired. There is a cycle to the way standards and such are reviewed and updated in Texas, so it could be years before things are straightened out, if at all.

Still, this is good news, and so I won’t use the "Texas: Doomed" graphic. Instead, I’ll remind you not to rest:

Tip o’ the ten gallon hat to Robert Estes and the many other BABloggees who emailed me about this.

Zach Weiner is a shrewd, shrewd man. He does stuff like this just because he knows I’ll link to it.

Click through to see why (NSFW-ish). But he should know better. I got my revenge years ago by failing all those jocks in my astronomy class*.

Also: Zach is 28 today, that whippersnapper. Get off my lawn**!

*Actually, that’s not true. They all got the grades they worked for and deserved. In reality I got my revenge by hacking into their accounts and changing their sports stats.

**I mean, get off my astroturf!

Need a little bit of jaw-droppiness today? Mwuahahaha. Let me show you something:
a hole in the Moon.

[Don't tell anyone, but that's where they faked the Moon landings!]

This is an image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, one of my favorite spacecraft in existence. It’s been mapping the Moon at an incredible 50 cm/pixel resolution — that’s 19 inches, my pretties — for a while now, and revealing one astonishing thing after another.

What you’re seeing here is indeed a hole in the Moon: what is almost certainly a skylight, a hole punctured in the roof of a lava tube, an underground tunnel carved by flowing molten material on the Moon. The hole is about 65 meters across — roughly 2/3rd the length of a football field. This region of the Moon is called Marius Hills, and is known to be volcanic in nature. The clincher is that the hole sits in a rille, a sinuous, snaking gully in the lunar surface.

The picture on the left provides a little context. The hole is the very dark feature near the top, and sunlight is coming from the left. The rille is pretty obvious here, snaking more or less top to bottom, and the hole is smack dab in the middle of it. The place is littered with craters, most of which are soft looking, with no rims and very smooth features, which are possible indicators of very great age (erosion from solar wind, newer impacts, and thermal stress from the large day/night temperature swings wear down sharp features over time), or perhaps the regolith (the ground up rocks making a loose soil-like composite) is just very thick here, softening the sides of craters.

Let me show you another view, a bit closer in:

This section is about 1 km (3000 feet) across; in other words, it might take you about 10 minutes to walk across it (here on Earth, that is; in a spacesuit YMMV). The arrow at the bottom shows you the direction of sunlight; the Sun is coming from the left. That’s important, because our eyes get fooled easily if sunlight is coming from below; it makes craters look like domes and vice-versa. A lot of softer craters look like domes to my eye in this shot, so I marked a nice sharp crater with a 2 (the hole itself is labeled 1). See how the right side of the crater is bright? That makes sense if the Sun is on the left.

I marked the top of the rille with a 3, and the base of the sloping side with a 4. Think of it as the top and bottom of a riverbank. The other side of the rille is off the picture to the right.

OK, still with me? Now look at the hole again. The bright crescent around the hole on the right and the dark part on the left must be due to a slope leading into the hole, as if the whole thing is not just a hole punched into the surface, but more like a funnel pushed into it. The hole probably started out somewhat smaller, and the sides collapsed down a bit. Think of digging a hole in dry sand and you’ll get the picture.

This means there’s a lava tube under the rille, probably carved out by an older lava flow. Observations by the Japanese probe SELENE indicate the hole is about 90 meters deep, and the roof — the top part of the tube — is about 25 meters thick. That explains why it hasn’t collapsed under the eons of meteoric bombardment forming all the craters in it. The hole may be a collapsed section, or it may have been punched by a larger meteorite. Given the size of the hole, the impactor couldn’t have been bigger than a few meters across itself. Had it been much bigger, I’d think more of the roof would’ve collapsed.

Incredible! And useful, too: radiation from the solar wind may be a problem for future lunar colonists. A good solar flare could sicken or kill them, so they’ll need protection. Building underground is one way to do that, and here we have a pre-fab cave! It’s unfurnished, a bit of a fixer-upper, but ready for occupants, and priced to move.

You may think a colony on the Moon is fantasy, but I disagree. It’s a matter of realty. And of course, location location location.

This is a composite image of NGC 1068, one of the nearest and brightest galaxies containing a rapidly growing supermassive black hole. The X-ray images and spectra obtained using Chandra's High Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer show that a strong wind is being driven away from the center of NGC 1068 at a rate of about a million miles per hour. This wind is likely generated as surrounding gas is accelerated and heated as it swirls toward the black hole. A portion of the gas is pulled into the black hole, but some of it is blown away. High energy X-rays produced by the gas near the black hole heat the ouflowing gas, causing it to glow at lower X-ray energies. X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory are shown in red, optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope in green and radio data from the Very Large Array in blue. The spiral structure of NGC 1068 is shown by the X-ray and optical data, and a jet powered by the central supermassive black hole is shown by the radio data. This Chandra study is much deeper than previous X-ray observations. Using this data, researchers believe that each year several times the mass of our sun is being deposited out to large distances, about 3,000 light years from the black hole. The wind likely carries enough energy to heat the surrounding gas and suppress extra star formation. These results help explain how a supermassive black hole can alter the evolution of its host galaxy. It has long been suspected that material blown away from a black hole can affect its environment, but a key question has been whether such "black hole blowback" typically delivers enough power to have a significant impact. NGC 1068 is located about 50 million light years from Earth and contains a supermassive black hole about twice as massive as the one in the middle of the Milky Way Galaxy. Image Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/ MIT/C.Canizares, D.Evans et al), Optical (NASA/STScI), Radio (NSF/ NRAO/VLA)

NASA will highlight the educational activities planned on the next space shuttle mission during a news briefing at 12 p.m. CDT, Tuesday, March 9.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: when I was a kid, Mars was a dead planet. Dry, frozen, with hardly any atmosphere, I always figured it wasn’t very interesting.

Heh.

Mars may or may not be alive in the biological sense, but it’s certainly active geologically! And images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera verify it. It’s spotted migrating ripples across Martian sand dunes:

These before and after images (part of a trio of them) show the motion. The image on the left was taken June 30, 2007, and the one on the right in October of that year. During that time, just a few months, the ripples can clearly be seen to have moved by a few meters (the inset diagram shows the ridges on the dunes schematically). This means that the wind blowing in this part of the planet is not only actively pushing around the sand, but also doing it on a timescale we can measure.

And on a spatial scale, too. Note the scalebar in the images: it’s 20 meters long, about the size of a house! This strongly suggests that these dunes are loose piles of sand, and not heavily crusted over or cemented (the grains stuck together). That, plus the time and size of the migration, yields yet more clues about the way the surface of Mars is put together.

Amazingly, this comes at the same time as other news showing that dunes in another region of Mars haven’t moved for at least 100,000 years, and possibly as long as three times that age! So while some regions of Mars are dynamic, active, and changing on a timescale of weeks, other regions are static, unchanging, and rigid for hundreds of millennia.

I used to think Mars was uninteresting. I was dead wrong. Mars is weird, and in astronomy and space exploration, weird is always interesting.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/International Research School of Planetary Sciences

In an attempt to shorten the gap between the end of the Space Shuttle and the deployment of its replacement, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) has introduced a bill that would extend the life of the Shuttle by two years. The bill directly contradicts the White House's space policy, which favors a rapid decommissioning of the Shuttle, followed by an emphasis on the private sector to maintain support of the International Space Station (ISS).

The bill, called the Human Space Flight Capability Assurance and Enhancement Act, costs $1.3 billion more than Obama's $19 million plan, and also calls for any replacement vehicle to have the same cargo and crew capacity as the Shuttle.

Unfortunately, some feel that both proposals fail to understand some of the key realities in the US space program.

According to Scott Pace, Director of the Space Policy Institute, Hutchison's plan is actually impossible, as the industrial infrastructure for supporting the Shuttle beyond another year no longer exists. Additionally, requesting Shuttle-sized cargo and crew capacity for the replacement vehicle, as the bill does, actually hampers the return of human space flight, since no agency or company is interested in producing another spacecraft so large.

However, Pace also believes that the White House plan misses the mark, and that its emphasis on the private sector and technology development as a replacement for Shuttle service to the ISS bets the future of manned space flight on high risk ventures.

Said Pace, "I think people of good will are trying to find a way forward, but there aren't a lot of good options."

[The Orlando Sentinel]