Blogs / Bad Astronomy

My book, Death from the Skies!, comes out in less than two weeks.

Woohoo!

Death from the Skies!, coming very soon.

I’ve added a countdown clock in the sidebar of the blog (go ahead, take a peek), as well as links to order it, and a couple of blurbs (one’s from my Close Personal Friend ™ Adam Savage). The clock assumes it goes on sale midnight October 20, but that’s close enough. Assume a bin size of one day.

I have some things I’m doing to promote the book. I’ll be writing some blog posts geared toward it over the next two weeks; so expect a wee bit more doom-and-gloom (but in a fun way!): more gamma-ray bursts, meteorites, solar events, and exponentially expanding collapses of the false quantum vacuum.

Also, I’m doing some press events. Here’s the list so far:

1. October 21: I’m doing a live interview at Denver’s KUSA (Channel 9) at 12:20 or so p.m.
2. October 21: I drive back home, and then I’ll be at the Boulder Bookstore that night at 7:30 to give a short presentation with a dramatic reading from the book. I’ll have a meteorite to show people, too.
3. October 21: I drive home again, and then I’ll be on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory that evening from 2-5 a.m. Eastern time — check your listing. Lots of radio stations broadcast the show (it has 10 million listeners) and many stream it live as well.
4. December 11: I’ll be giving a talk at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, time TBD.

I’m sure there will be more as time goes on. I’ll update this list as it changes, and report it here on the blog.

I’m hoping to be able to quote some of the reviews coming in; they’ve been very positive, and so I’m getting pretty excited! So tell a friend… it’ll make for appropriate Halloween reading.

Planets circle the stars that dot the heavens.

Before 1995, we couldn’t have said that with any certainty. Now we know of more than 300 planets orbiting distant stars, and we have a fleet of telescopes looking for them. The ultimate goal is to find another Earth orbiting a star like the Sun, but the quest on the way to that Holy Grail has yielded some strange benchmarks.

COROT-exo-3b compared to Jupiter

Meet the planet COROT-exo-3b. It orbits a star slightly larger, hotter, and brighter than the Sun. The star is not an unusual one in any way, but the planet is definitely weird: it orbits the star in just over 4 days, which is pretty close in, though not a record breaker in and of itself. What’s bizarre is that it has about the same diameter of Jupiter, but has 21.6 times Jupiter’s mass. That makes it denser than lead.

If I could stand on the surface of this planet, I’d weigh 4200 kilograms. That’s over 9000 pounds!

Oof.

This is by far the most massive planet found so close to its parent star. There is another extrasolar planet found with about that mass, but it orbits its star much farther out. The ones we’ve found that orbit their stars so close tend to have masses much smaller than this. For comparison, Jupiter takes 12 years to circle the Sun once. Mercury takes 88 days. So we’re talking big planets, really close to their stars.

This planet is challenging to models. How did it form? It most likely formed farther out from the star — gravitational influences make it hard for a large planet to form close to a star — and then gradually moved in. This can happen due to friction, of all things: when the star and planet are young, there is a disk of material leftover from the planetary formation. As the planet sweeps through this material it slows its orbit. It spirals in due to drag gravitational interaction with the disk, and eventually settles down when the disk material thins out a few million kilometers from the surface of the star itself.

The mass of this newly discovered planet is pretty freaky. Normally, anything with a mass more than about 15 or so times the mass of Jupiter would be considered a brown dwarf, a "failed star", as some people call them (I don’t). But at the lower end of the brown dwarf mass range, it gets a bit hard to tell the difference between a planet and a BD. Some people say planets and BDs form in different way (planets grow in size from smaller bodies building up over time through collisions, while BDs and stars form from the collapse of material in a nebula); but I don’t like this definition. You could have two objects that look precisely the same, yet one could be a planet and the other a BD, just because they formed in different ways. That strikes me as silly.

Either way, COROT-exo-3b is weird.

It was discovered by COROT, an orbiting European Space Agency mission designed to look for stars that dip in brightness as an orbiting planet passes in front of them. That gives the size of the planet (the amount the light dims is proportional to the size of the planet). The mass was found using ground-based telescopes, by measuring the amount the planet tugs on the star as it orbits. That’s how the incredible density of this object was found.

As we search the sky for Earth analogue planets, we’re bound to find things at the limits of our understanding. This ultra-dense ball of compressed matter certainly falls into that category. And we’re still new at this! What else lies out there at the fringe of our knowledge?

The NASA probe MESSENGER will pass by Mercury for the second time at 08:40 UT Monday (which is the middle of the night for the US). I’ll get up first thing and write about what it saw, but it’ll probably be a few hours before we get the really cool stuff.

The last flyby was in January, and the pictures were incredible. As it happens, we’ll be seeing the other side of Mercury in this second flyby, so it’ll be all new territory (well, new to MESSENGER). Stay tuned! And check out Emily’s blog for the in-depth info.

Just a quick reminder: the Hubble documentary I’m in will be on the national Geographic Channel tonight! It’s at 10:00 p.m. Eastern time (8:00 Mountain time), but you should check your local listings, of course. If you miss it, it repeats later (two hours after the first showing ends). It’s also on their HD channel. Kewl.

Cool: An astronomer has just been named as Australia’s new Chief Scientist. Penny Sackett, who ran the rebuilding of the Mt. Stromlo observatory after devastating fires in 2003.

Also cool: she said that global warming is the biggest issue we face today.

Again also cool: She’s a woman. I wonder what she wanted to be when she was 13? Well, now she’s the chief scientific advisor to the Australian government.

Cool all around.

So I’m doing my thing, surfing and reading and writing, and I go to click on my Gmail tab in Firefox. When I look at the tab, I notice something weird: little, single-pixel-high black rectangles beneath the tab.

What the…?

Sometimes if you display an image and then close it, little leftover pixels will hang out on the screen. Usually manipulating the pixels^* will fix that. Hmmmm. I iconify FF and then reopen it… boxes still there. I open a window on top of FF, then move it off. Nope. Still cootified.

Here’s what they look like:

See them there? Underneath the tabs? Here’s a closeup:

I marked them with red lines. Look! Some of the cooties are blue!

What. The. Heck?

I have never seen anything like this, and the obvious conclusion is that the government has decided to bug my browser. Or aliens have control of my Mac.

Anyone seen anything like this before? I’m running FF 2.0.0.17 on a MacBook Pro with OSX 10.4.11. I know, I’ll upgrade to 10.5. Eventually. I’m in no hurry.

Edited to add: And now, of course, as I’m about to post this, they’re gone. Back to the mothership? NSA bored with my blog? Maybe the Doctor Who music I was playing scared them off…. and now I miss my cooties. Sigh.

^*Note: not a euphemism.

If you ask 1000 young girls ages 13 - 18 what profession they want to be, how many do you think would want to be scientists?

According to a poll done in the UK and reported by The Guardian, the answer is 14%.

How many want to be models?

31%

Ouch.

While again this poll was done in the UK, I suspect it would be pretty closely reflected in the US as well.

There are two interesting things about these numbers. The obvious one is that many more girls want to be models than scientists. That’s disturbing. And it’s obvious why; every TV show dealing with models depicts the life as glamorous; even the ones where we see contests with models dropping out in tears can be interpreted as glamorous because the winner is showered with accolades and, well, glamor. We tend to forget the misses and remember the hits, so I would think a young girl watching that would also tend to see the winner and forget the losers.

I don’t think we need to go deeply into the psychology here; it’s been analyzed everywhere. Certainly in the US we are not showing good images to our girls; it’s aggravating and seriously hurting our culture (Jezebel has one potential solution, but I don’t think it would help since it still would glamorize behavior instead of simply praising it).

But something struck me as I was thinking this over. 14% of the girls polled want to be scientists. By itself — that is, not compared with models or any other category — what does that number mean? Well, how many scientists are there in the US (again, the poll was done in the UK, but let’s assume their numbers reflect ours)? A brief search yielded several numbers (like, say, here), but a rough average would be about 3 million. There are 300 million people in the US, so that means 1% are scientists.

Hey, wait a sec! This means that the poll indicates that proportionally, there are far more girls wanting to be scientists than there really are scientists.

That’s actually a good thing. Lots of girls want to be scientists!

So interpreting the poll — assuming it’s accurate — is interesting. I absolutely agree with the analysis that way too many girls, both proportionally and in real numbers, want to be models, and I also agree that the media (which remember, reflects to some degree the population) is a big part of the problem.

But I also think those numbers aren’t totally depressing. If that many girls want to be scientists, then we’re doing something right. Maybe we need to give the media their due. I see more women scientists on TV shows, more women in positions of authority, more women who are smart and hard working and shown as complex people, and not just eyecandy.

Having said all this, I want to stress that a) the actual questions and choices for answers weren’t listed in the article, b) I am extrapolating from a UK poll to the US, and c) I’m not a social scientist. So my conclusions come with a series of caveats.

And there’s more to consider. First, how many boys of the same age want to be scientists? I wonder what that percentage would be. Higher? Lower? I’m not sure.

Second, we need to think past the immediate numbers. Roughly 1% of the people in this country are scientists. What if we had asked them when they were 13 - 18 what they wanted to be? Would the numbers still be the same? If 14% of them wanted to be scientists, what happened along the way to them becoming scientists? You expect a natural attrition; some people lose interest in school, or don’t have the aptitude, or there weren’t enough jobs… you can think of more, I’m sure. Knowing why we lose so many students of either sex along the way is a topic all by itself, and one I honestly don’t know much about, so I’d rather not speculate.

And finally, are there special pressures on girls who want to be scientists? You betcha! So just looking at the overall attrition rate isn’t enough; it has to be broken down by sex, by social status, by economic status, by location, by family type. This is a complicated situation, and difficult to boil down to a simple solution.

But one thing I’m taking away from this: a lot of girls want to be scientists, far more than is represented in the general adult population. That’s a good thing, and even if we can’t support that many scientists, we can sure support that scientific attitude. I’d love to see everyone thinking more like scientists, and that’s something we need to nurture.

Tip o’ the lab coat to SkepChick.