Astronomy
drorzel | April 25, 2007I have two labs on Tuesdays, which is even more exhausting than it sounds, so I went to be early last night. And woke up to find a whole new planet. You guys need to give me some warning about these things...
Anyway, the planet in question orbits a red dwarf star a mere 20 light years from Earth, has a mass of roughly five times that of Earth and an estimated radius half again Earth's (which would mean a bit more than double the surface gravity, for those planning to set SF stories there). It orbits its star in about 84 days, which seems pretty short, but is much slower then the previously…
drorzel | April 20, 2007Via James Nicoll, a post he describes as "someone actively working in a particular field of science talk[ing] about how they went from embracing wingnuttery to more fruitful activities," in this case regarding the "Face on Mars."
Sadly, other than a couple of passing mentions (he name-checks Richard Hoagland and Carl Sagan, and mentions overdosing on Art Bell), there's very little detail about that transition. And, really, I think hearing the story of how the author went from believing in a real face on Mars to taking high-resolution pictures of the Cydonia plateau would be a lot more…
drorzel | April 18, 2007I've got another long lab this afternoon, so I'm stealing an idea for an audience-participation thread from James Nicoll:
Name five things we didn't know in the year that you were born that make the universe a richer place to think about.
This is actually a really interesting exercise for showing how rapidly the world has changed in the last N years. I'm not all that old-- to put it in pop-culture terms, the Beatles broke up before I was born-- but when I try to think about the landscape of science since then, it's astonishing how much the world has changed:
My own field of laser cooling,…
drorzel | March 20, 2007... is astronomy, as the New York Times notes in explaining the equinox:
Archaeological evidence abounds that astronomy is among the oldest of professions, and that people attended with particular zeal to the equinoxes and the solstices. The Great Sphinx of Egypt, for example, built some 4,500 years ago, is positioned to face toward the rising sun on the vernal equinox.
In the 1,500-year-old Mayan city of Chichén Itzá, in Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, the magnificent Kukulcán Pyramid practically slithers to life each spring equinox evening, as the waning sun casts a shadow along its steps…
drorzel | March 11, 2007A good weekend for science in the Sunday New York Times, with a nice magazine article about dark matter and dark energy, and also a piece about the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), inexplicably located in the Book Review section (the article, that is, not the aliens).
It's probably possible to draw some sort of parallel between the two-- after all, the notion of dark matter was viewed as bordeline kookery for decades before gaining wide acceptance, and SETI is still widely viewed as a little bit off. I'm a little discombobulated from yesterday's long trip, though, so I'll…
drorzel | February 22, 2007The only reason I'm not going to hunt and kill James Nicoll for pointing me at the Conservapedia thing is that he also provides a link to the latest results from the Spitzer telescope. Not the one that Kate's former boss uses to keep an eye on the New York State Legislature, but the one that scientists are using to look at the atmospheres of planets around other stars:
The data indicate the two planets are drier and cloudier than predicted. Theorists thought hot Jupiters would have lots of water in their atmospheres, but surprisingly none was found around HD 209458b and HD 189733b. According…
drorzel | January 15, 2007"Thoreau," guest-posting at Unqualified Offerings, has a nice post commenting on a Physics Today article about the use of language in science, by Helen Quinn. The article is pretty standard stuff for anyone following the "culture wars" debates here-- use of the word "belief" to describe scientific conclusions causes confusion, and attempts to put science on the same level as faith. She calls for scientists and science writers to use "Scientific evidence supports the conclusion that" instead of "scientists believe."
Thoreau rightly points out that this issue is somewhat overblown, in that the…
drorzel | January 8, 2007The American Astronomical Society is meeting in Seattle this week, which means a banner week for astronomy news: lots of press releases, and a bunch of live reports. If you're into space stuff, you should have plenty to read and talk about in the next few days.
drorzel | January 5, 2007Via Tobia Buckell, Jeff Bezos is looking for a few good geeks:
Blue Origin; Blue Origin wants you! Actually, Blue Origin needs you and wants to hire you ... assuming you're a hard working, technically gifted, team-oriented, experienced aerospace engineer or engineering leader. If you might be interested in joining us, please keep reading.
We're working, patiently and step-by-step, to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. Accomplishing this mission will take a long time, and we're working on it…
drorzel | January 4, 2007The Times has an article announcing the discovery of methane lakes on Titan:
The discovery, reported yesterday by an international team of researchers, was made by a radar survey of Titan's high northern latitudes by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn and its retinue of satellites since July 2004. One of the mission's major objectives is the investigation of Titan's environment, thought to be a frigid version of conditions on the primordial Earth.
The radar imaging system detected more than 75 dark patches in the landscape near Titan's northern polar region, the scientists…
drorzel | December 30, 2006I've got to be close to the last person on the Internet to link to this, but in the unlikely event that you haven't already seen it, Phil Plait presents the best astronomy pictures of 2006. My personal favorite of his images is probably this one:
We haven't sent all that many probes to Mars, and it's not often that they snap pictures of each other. And the Mars rovers are really a fabulous story-- it's rare to see the kind of Murphy's Law violation that turns a 90-day mission into more than 1000 days of continuous operation.
I just wish she'd update her LiveJournal.
drorzel | December 29, 2006Speaking of James Nicoll and space news, he also notes the launch of the COROT satellite, which is designed to look for extrasolar planets. The detection limit for COROT is supposed to be something like twice the mass of the Earth, so there's some reasonable expectation that it should shed light on planetary systems more like our own than the oddballs that have been detected so far. I also agree with James's prediction in comments:
[T]he first detection by this system of a roughly Earth-massed planet around a sunlike star will involve a "who ordered that?" moment as the new world turns out…
drorzel | December 21, 2006One of the fun things about following science news through the Eurekalert press release aggregator is that work done by big collaborations tends to show up multiple times, in slightly different forms. Take, for example, the gamma-ray-burst results being released in Nature this week, which show up no less than five times: one, two, three, four, five. It's entirely possible that I missed some others, too.
Each of those releases is written by the press office at a different institution, and each tries to make it sound like the people at their university made the most important contribution to…
drorzel | December 15, 2006One of the requirements of the Nobel Prize is that the laureates give a public lecture at some point, and as a result, there is generally a seminar scheduled a little bit before the actual prize ceremony, at which the laureats give lectures about the work for which they're being honored. These frequently involve props and demonstrations, but George Smoot takes it to a new level, using the Cal marching band to demonstrate the Big Bang:
"Professor Smoot came up to the band and asked if later that week, when we practiced at Memorial Stadium, we could do a formation like the universe forming. He…
drorzel | December 15, 2006A flurry of press releases hit EurekAlert yesterday (one, two, three), indicating the release of a bunch of data from NASA's Stardust mission. This is the probe that was sent out to fly through the tail of a comet, and catch tiny dust particles in an aerogel matrix, and return them to Earth for analysis.
The mission appears to have been a pretty impressive success, scientifically speaking, with a bunch of interesting findings relating to the age and composition of cometary material and interstellar dust. The full scientific results are released today in Science Express, and if you've got the…
drorzel | December 13, 2006Here's the day's final repost of an old blog post about space policy. This is yet another post from 2004, with the usual caveats about linkrot and dated numbers and the like.
This one is more or less a direct response to comments made in response to the previous post attempting to argue that using the Moon as a step toward Mars isn't a priori idiotic. Again, I'm not sure how successful this is, but you can judge for yourself:
In the comments to the previous post about the Moon/ Mars proposal, Jake McGuire raises a number of interesting points, which deserve a full response. Having sat on that…
drorzel | December 13, 2006Yet another in today's series of reposts of articles about space policy. This is another old blog post from 2004, back when the Moon-and-Mars plan was first announced. As with the previous posts, any numbers or links in the post may be badly out of date, and there are some good comments at the original post that are worth reading.
This installment contains my attempt at finding reasons why it wouldn't be completely idiotic to try to put a permanent base on the Moon. I'm not sure this was entirely successful, but it's worth a shot:
It's a little foolish to attempt to comment on the merits of…
drorzel | December 13, 2006This is the second in a series of old posts about space exploration in general, and the Bush Moon-and-Mars plan specifically. This is a repost of an old blog post from 2004, so any numbers or links in the post may be out of date. There were also a few comments to the original article, that you may or may not want to read.
In this installment, we have my half-assed explanation of the conceptual problems behind the Space Shuttle program:
There are essentially two arguments for why we ought to support manned space flight, and if you dip into the comments at any of the other fine blogs linked in…
drorzel | December 13, 2006As threatened in passing yesterday, I dug up some old posts on space policy, and will re-post them here. This first one dates from January of 2004, around the time that Bush first floated the idea of the new Moon-and-Mars plan that's re-shaping NASA.
The original post has a ton of links in it, and given that this is lazy-blogging, I haven't checked that they still work. There are also a handful of comments over at the original site, if you'd like to see what people said back then.
Anyway, here's the first installment, on the relative worth of manned and unmanned space missions:
The Mars…
drorzel | December 5, 2006It's more or less traditional for magazines and tv shows to do some sort of year-end wrap-up. As this blog is now hosted by a magazine, I suppose I ought to follow suit. Of course, compiling "Year's Best" lists is a highly subjective business, requiring a lot of information gathering, so I'll throw this open to my readers before compiling my own highly biased list.
So, a call for nominations:
In your opinion, what is the most important, influential, or exciting development in astronomy in 2006?
This could be a new observation, a new type of observation technique, or it could be an exciting…