EnterSpace

Mental Health Break: "My God, it's full of stars!"

Crazy post-travel day and don't have time to make a proper post, so I'm re-posting something from the indispensable Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait.

Beautious!

Behold the brain-busting beauty of Barnard 59!

[Click to ennicotianatabacumenate - and seriously, do it! - or stick the gargantuan 16,000 x 15,000 pixel version (!!) into your pipe and smoke it.]

This incredible picture was taken by the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The chunk of sky shown in this image is pretty big for a deep sky photo – about 6 arcminutes on a side. For comparison, the Moon is about 30 arcminutes across, so we’re still talking just a teeny region. But look at all those stars!

Of course, it’s not the stars that draw your attention: it’s the not stars. This region of the sky, in the constellation Ophiuchus, is toward the center of the galaxy, and is lousy with gas and dust – the latter of which is actually composed of complex chains of molecules. These form grains astronomers call dust, though they’re not like the bunnies you find under your dresser: these are more like particles of smoke in size. Ethereally thin by earthly standards, they form clouds that are still so large, light years across, that they are effectively opaque. They block the light coming from stars behind them, so in rich star fields like this one the dust clouds are made visible by their silhouettes.

What you’re seeing here is one particular complex of dust in the much larger cloud called the Pipe Nebula. The picture inset here shows the whole thing, and the reason for the name is obvious. Barnard 59, seen in incredible detail above, is the mouthpiece of the pipe.

You really need to take a look at at least the medium resolution image. You can see tendrils, wisps, and many other features. One of the neat things that you might miss at first is how the dark clouds change the colors of stars behind them. Start in the center of the cloud, then look near the edge, where the cloud starts to thin out, and you can see stars once again. See how the stars along the edge are redder than the stars farther out? Dust scatters blue light – a blue photon sent straight at us by a star can hit a dust grain and be sent off in another direction, missing us. There’s enough dust at the edge of the cloud to do that.

But toward the center of the cloud we’re through a lot more of that floating junk, so much that it absorbs the light coming from behind it. This effect is called interstellar extinction, and it’s kind of a pain when you’re trying to look at stuff through a cloud. However, it does make for a very pretty effect in pictures like this.

One more thing. See those fuzzy stars in the center of the cloud? Those are stars being born right before your eyes! These clouds can have very dense, cold clumps of material which can collapse to form stars. Usually invisible to optical telescopes – these ones are on the near side of the dust cloud, which is why we can see them at all – they glow brightly in infrared, and telescopes that can see out past the visible part of the spectrum see these very clearly. And yeah, you really want to click that link. It’s eerie and beautiful and spectacular.

All of this is another reason I love astronomy. One person’s meat is another person’s poison. If you want to study stars, dark nebulae are a pain. But if you want to study how stars form, they’re the first place you want to look!

Image credit: ESO; ESO/Yuri Beletsky

via blogs.discovermagazine.com

China unveils planned space science projects

Latest on China's planned space science projects. HMXT is an x-ray telescope planned for 2012 that will be China's first civilian space telescope. DAMPE (Dark Matter Particle Explorer) is a planned satellite that will look for dark matter and other high energy particles. Another as yet unnamed project will examine the solar magnetic field, and yet another is a joint Sino-French project to study gamma ray bursts. And finally, China announced plans for a second Antarctic Survey Telescope.

These projects were announced at the opening of the International Astronomical Union's 28th General Assembly, which is being held in Beijing.

China unveils ambitious space projects

Xinhua, 08:25, August 22, 2012

BEIJING -- China will launch several space projects, including a hard X-ray telescope for black hole studies, between 2014 and 2016, according to a senior Chinese astronomer.

Su Dingqiang, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and former president of the Chinese Astronomical Society, revealed some details regarding the hard x-ray modulation telescope (HXMT), China's first space telescope, on Tuesday at the opening ceremony of the International Astronomical Union (IAU)'s 28th General Assembly.

The hard X-ray band is a key waveband for high-energy astrophysics studies. Hard X-rays originate mostly from regions close to black holes and have high penetrative power, making them important tools for studying physical processes in extreme conditions, such as high matter density and high energy density.

Su said China will develop another satellite, the dark matter particle explorer (DAMPE), to help detect high-energy electrons and gamma rays, as well as a telescope to study the solar magnetic field and a Sino-French joint mission to study gamma ray bursts. Su said Chinese scientists are also planning to establish an Antarctic astronomical observatory.

Cui Xiangqun, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and president of the Chinese Astronomical Society, said a lot of work has been done to gain experience for the future construction of an observatory in the Antarctic.

An Antarctic Survey Telescope (AST) was installed there at the beginning of the of the year and another AST will be installed in 2013, said Cui. China's first Antarctic telescope was installed in 2009.

"We can only send scientists there once a year and each time they can stay no more than three weeks. These telescopes help us detect problems via remote control," Cui said. "Some of the technological problems we face there are similar to those in space, like low temperatures," Cui said. However, Cui was optimistic about the Antarctic facility. "It has drier air, better visibility and fewer background disturbances. Its turbulent boundary layer is closer to the ground compared to other sites on the ice slope," she said while describing the area near the telescope.

Chinese space exploration has developed rapidly in the past decade. Some large-scale astronomical projects in China, including the Large Sky Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) completed in 2008 and the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) to be completed in 2016, have drawn global attention.

The ongoing conference, the first of its size to be held in China, is itself a historic occasion for the country. "China's technology has advanced markedly, and some of its buildings are really world-class. The fact that we are meeting here is an indication that China has emerged in a short period of time to be competitive on the world stage in the science of astronomy," said Robert Williams, IAU president.

via english.peopledaily.com.cn

Interactive Graphic: The Drake equation - how many alien civilizations exist?

Continuing our summer infographic series, BBC Future commissioned Information is Beautiful to create a fascinating interactive graphic for the Drake Equation. It's completely embedded on the BBC website so click on the image to go directly to the interactive or click here.

The Drake Equation, for those unfamiliar with it, is a mathematical equation devised in 1961 by Prof. Francis Drake from the University of California - Santa Cruz as an attempt to obtain a scientifically informed estimate of the number of intelligent alien civilizations that may exist in our galaxy. This isn't some woo-woo concept - it's the standard model used by astronomy researchers at SETI and elsewhere to grapple with the question of how common life - and in particular, intelligent life - may be in the universe. Carl Sagan was quite fond of discussing the Drake Equation in his books and in the famous TV series, Cosmos.

The equation is based on extrapolations, from reasonably well-understood numbers (at least to an order of magnitude), the estimated percentage of solar systems in our galaxy that have planets; the number of those planets that are in the "Goldilocks Zone" of habitability; the percentage of those habitable planets that happen to develop life; the number of those that develop advanced intelligent life.... and so on.

As a result of new astronomical observations carried out since 1961, we have a much better handle on some of these numbers - and in particular the number of extrasolar planets orbiting other suns. For that, you can thank NASA's Kepler Space Telescope - an amazing piece of astronomical space engineering. Kepler has already detected the presence of thousands of extrasolar planets, and a January 2012 analysis of Kepler data suggests that "planets are at least as numerous as the stars in the Milky Way", and that each star of the 100 billion or so in our Milky Way galaxy is estimated to contain "on average ... at least 1.6 planets." 

Ultimately, the Drake Equation is informed speculation - a guesstimate. Obviously no one should take the numbers too seriously. But it's an interesting exercise, and one I believe is important in order to have some scientifically sound method of calculating - at least to ballpark numbers - such an important question.

Embedded in the equation, as you will note from the interactive graphic, is a number that estimates the number of years an advanced civilization may be able to persist before it becomes extinct. This reflects an understanding of the Fermi Paradox - the evident contradiction between estimates of the apparent number of probable extraterrestrial civilizations and the fact that we have an utter lack of evidence for their existence. Put another way, assuming there are other advanced civilizations and also assuming, reasonably, that our civilization is somewhere in the middle of the bell curve of technological progress, that leaves a lot of more advanced civilizations out there in our galaxy. And if that's so, why haven't they contacted us to say "hey, we're here!"?

That's the Fermi Paradox. The estimates you use to plug in numbers to the Drake Equation heavily determine the results you get. And that, perhaps as tellingly as anything, reflects how optimistic or pessimistic you are about the ability of a civilization to be sophisticated and moral enough to avoid the pitfalls of social and technological evolution. The more pessimistic you are, the more easily the Fermi Paradox is to understand.

And yet you would be forgiven for hoping that there's something screwy in one or other equation somewhere, such that whatever extraterrestrial civilizations out there that may exist are just keeping their radio silence because they're shy and not because they killed themselves.

That wouldn't bode too well for us.

Image: BBC Future and Information is Beautiful

Mental Health Break: Amid Myriads of Stars, by AtomicZen

Found this photo on Facebook and thought it worth sharing. It's a composite Photoshop job, but still lovely.

Amid Myriads of Stars
Copyright : AtomicZen 

AtomicZen writes: 

Amid myriads of stars in a new moon night, I felt that we are only a small creature when comparing to the universe.

In that darkest night, the Milky Way could be observed with our naked eyes. I carefully set my camera on the spot while worrying about the incoming tide, even reducing its level from time to time. My brightest wide angel is Carl Zeiss 21/2.8 and it was used in this shot for foreground. I took two shots, one with 20 minutes @ f8.0 and iso 400 to make sure the rock's sharpness. I used hyper focus in the first shot.

Another shot was taken with about 3 minutes @ f4.0 and iso 3200. I lightened the rock, located in the foreground, by light painting it with my small torch.

Unfortunately, even the widest aperture of the lens (i.e., f2.8), I cannot illustrate the beauty of the Milky Way as it was. Hence, Carl Zeiss ZF 35/2.0 was used to capture the sky (i.e., iso 6400, f2.0, and 15 seconds).

In post processing, three shots were manipulated in Adobe photoshop. Nik Software, tonal contrast, was used to boost details of the Milky Way.

Image: Atomic Zen

Infographic: Magnifying the Universe

This is among the best data visualizations of physical scale - ranging from the nano to the entire observable universe - that I've seen. Nice work. 

This interactive infographic from Number Sleuth accurately illustrates the scale of over 100 items within the observable universe ranging from galaxies to insects, nebulae and stars to molecules and atoms. Numerous hot points along the zoom slider allow for direct access to planets, animals, the hydrogen atom and more. Other sites have tried to magnify the universe, but no one else has done so with real photographs and 3D renderings. To fully capture the awe of the vastly different sizes of the Pillars of Creation, Andromeda, the sun, elephants and HIV, you really need to see images, not just illustrations of these items. Our universe really is immensely massive and surprisingly small.

Tip: it helps to view it full screen.

Copyright 2012.

Cool Infographic: How big is our solar system? (BBC Future)

How big is our solar system? 

Big.

This is just a small snippet. The whole thing is about 100 times the length of this graphic. The full version is after the jump.

Trust me, it's worth it. It's just too long to put in a single post.

From: Information Is Beautiful Studio, via BBC Future.

Mars Advocate Robert Zubrin Makes Unfounded Claim Obama Will Gut NASA Planetary Science Budget

The Interwebs are all a-Twitter about Mars Firster Robert Zubrin's op-ed yesterday in which he claims to have obtained "leaked" information that the Obama Administration's Office of Management and Budget plans to "terminate" NASA's planetary exploration program.

But Zubrin's claim is not true. Zubrin seems to have done himself no favors with his essay.

Zubrin wrote:

After 2013, America’s amazing career of planetary exploration, which ran from the Mariner probes in the 1960s through the great Pioneer, Viking, Voyager, Pathfinder, MarsGlobalSurveyor, MarsOdyssey, Spirit, Opportunity, MarsReconnaissanceOrbiter, Galileo and Cassini missions, will simply end.

Furthermore, the plan from the OMB also leaves the space astronomy program adrift and headed for destruction. The now-orbiting Kepler Telescope will be turned off in midmission, stopping it before it can complete its goal of finding other Earths.

The adminstration's decision to derail planetary exploration and space astronomy is shocking and portends the destruction of the entire American space program.

Nancy Atkinson at the Universe Today writes that: 

This would all be horrible if true, but the director of NASA’s Planetary Science division, Jim Green assured members of the NASA Advisory Council’s Planetary Science subcommittee that it is not. “It is not true the planetary program is being killed,” Green told members during a teleconference, according to Space News.

Billion-Ton Comet May Have Missed Earth by a Few Hundred Kilometers in 1883 (MIT Tech Review)

Technology Review's Physics arXiv Blog:

Billion-Ton Comet May Have Missed Earth by a Few Hundred Kilometers in 1883

A reanalysis of historical observations suggest Earth narrowly avoided an extinction event just over a hundred years ago.

KFC 10/17/2011

On 12th and 13th August 1883, an astronomer at a small observatory in Zacatecas in Mexico made an extraordinary observation. José Bonilla counted some 450 objects, each surrounded by a kind of mist, passing across the face of the Sun.

Bonilla published his account of this event in a French journal called L'Astronomie in 1886. Unable to account for the phenomenon, the editor of the journal suggested, rather incredulously, that it must have been caused by birds, insects or dust passing front of the Bonilla's telescope. (Since then, others have adopted Bonilla's observations as the first evidence of UFOs.)

Today, Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and a couple of pals, give a different interpretation. They think that Bonilla must have been seeing fragments of a comet that had recently broken up. This explains the 'misty' appearance of the pieces and why they were so close together.

But there's much more that Manterola and co have deduced. They point out that nobody else on the planet seems to have seen this comet passing in front of the Sun, even though the nearest observatories in those days were just a few hundred kilometers away.

That can be explained using parallax. If the fragments were close to Earth, parallax would have ensured that they would not have been in line with the Sun even for observers nearby. And since Mexico is at the same latitude as the Sahara, northern India and south-east Asia, it's not hard to imagine that nobody else was looking.

Manterola and pals have used this to place limits on how close the fragments must have been: between 600 km and 8000 km of Earth. That's just a hair's breadth.

An ode to exoplanets and NASA's exploration of the stars

Novelist Diane Ackerman, inspired by NASA's Kepler mission that has discovered several exoplanets, has written an ode to space exploration in an op-ed in today's New York Times. It's a reminder not just how space exploration inspires not just science geeks, but ordinary people.

Ackerman is a non-fiction and fiction writer, poet, and naturalist perhaps best known for her book A Natural History of the Senses, and her essay is anything but technical. I recommend the full essay, but some excerpts:

Goldilocks is alive in the constellation Vela. Her real name is HD 85512b, which may not roll off the tongue, but it’s sheer poetry to the ears of sky watchers like me, who long for signs of an Earth-like planet that might harbor life.

This newly discovered planet orbits its sun in what’s called the “Goldilocks,” or habitable zone, at the right distance for liquid water to sparkle on the surface and life to bloom in the shallows. Life as we know it, anyway, with wings and dreams, if the planet has a rocky surface — and isn’t too hot or too cold — as well as a tent of clouds for shade.

That’s a lot of ifs, which is why other candidates have been scarce. This is our best hope, though she’s 36 light-years away, beyond the reach of our spacecrafts or clear view of present telescopes, but well within the imagination. 

Proposed House 2012 NASA Budget would be a disaster

On the eve of the last shuttle flight, Congress is trying to gut the future of the American space program.

Doug Messier has an excellent post on the the new proposed House 2012 budget for NASA. Basically, the the House Committee on Appropriations cuts $1.6 billion from NASA's current budget, which entails cutting funding in half for CCDev (commercial crew development), along with drastic cuts in space technology and exploration R&D, and NASA science programs, and cancels the James Webb Space Telescope (the successor to the aging Hubble Telescope).

I think Messier nails it.