Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Every time a psychic gets surprised by something, the world gets a little smarter. I hope.

If that’s true, then our collective IQ went up a solid 8 points when the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a suit against "America’s Prophet" Sean David Morton on claims he’s a big ol’ phony.

If only he had spelled it "profit" instead, then he wouldn’t have been falsely advertising. And given that he made a cool $6 million off of gullible dupes, that moniker would certainly fit better.

Now, of course this doesn’t mean all psychics are knowing frauds any more than a scientist who perpetrates knowing fraud indicts all other scientists.

However, science has given us spaceflight, agriculture, computers, medicine, telescopes, and a deeper and quantitative understanding of the Universe from the quantum level out to its observable edge.

Psychics have given us, well… y’know… um… oh! They make it easier for non-critical people to carry their now much-lighter wallets around.

Right. Well, to paraphrase Philip J. Fry: psychics 0, regular science a billion.

Tip o’ the crystal ball to Dale Martin.

The website called Today I Found Out has an interesting post on Sun factoids, including its color as designated in hex code: #FFF5F2. That code is actually taken from the site vendian.org, put together by Mitchell Charity. He has other star colors listed as well. I found the codes for different stellar types interesting.

The star type is listed, along with the RGB and hex values. The stars go from hottest at the top to coolest at the bottom, and the Sun is roughly a G2V.

The colors are relatively good, in that they are blue at the top and reddish at the bottom. But I was surprised at the lack of color saturation, and that the cooler stars aren’t as red as I would think.

I have spent a lot of time at the eyepiece. Vega, an A0 dwarf star, is distinctly and brilliantly blue, almost a sapphire to the eye. Betelgeuse, an M1 supergiant, is a ruddy orange. I’ve seen a handful of cooler red giants, and to the eye they are very red, not the pastel orangey thing seen here.

Why is this? There are lots of reasons that come to my mind. One is that the way stars shine is inherently different than the way colors are represented on your screen. Stars are hot balls of luminous plasma, glowing like a blackbody. Unless you heat your monitor to that same temperature, you can only approximate the way a star shines, and the colors will be off.

Our eye perceives color oddly, too. Seeing a star against a black sky will give you a different sense of its color than if you see it on your monitor. Even putting a differently colored star in the same field wrecks your color sense. I’ll note that Charity’s star color page has a hex code for the color of planetary nebulae, and that’s a whole nuther can o’ worms.

In my opinion, doing this is an interesting exercise, and a wonderful "teaching moment" on how stars emit light and how we perceive color. But as an exercise in actually trying to mimic star colors, it’s a whole lot tougher than you might think. I’m not saying Charity’s colors are wrong, but I am saying that trying to get hex codes for star colors is like writing down the notes to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on paper. It’s a code, and has the right information in it, but it’s not the same as hearing the orchestra.

I’ll also note that the whole point of the first site’s article is that the Sun is white. This is actually an extremely difficult topic to understand — it’s not just scattered blue light that makes the Sun look yellow to us, and I’m still not convinced the Sun does look yellow to us. Charity links to a page about the Sun’s color written by my friend the astronomer Andrew Hamilton, which has some more info on it.

I think the real lesson here is that something we think of as simple — color — is not at all simple! The way colors are emitted by an object, the way our eyes detect color, and most importantly the way our brains interpret that signal, are actually extraordinarily complex processes. I think that’s a very important concept to keep in mind when pondering pretty much any issue: what we take for granted as simple is almost never any such thing.

Tip o’ the artist’s beret to Philippe Hamel.

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!

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^*.

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)