Blogs / Bad Astronomy

This.

Is.

AWESOME!!!

That is a model of the USS Enterprise-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation, created using an ion beam that guides vaporized chemicals and deposits them into a given shape. The amazing thing is that this model of the Big Little-E is only 8.8 microns (millionths of a meter) long! For comparison, a human hair is about 50-100 microns across. This image is magnified 5000 times.

I wonder if it comes with a tiny Wil Wheaton, too?

Tip o’ the VISOR to Digg.

As I promised a little while back, the European Space Agency has released new extremely high-res pictures of Phobos, one of the moons of Mars! Check this out:

Yegads. Click to embiggen, and see this in all its glory. This image, taken by the Mars Express spacecraft, has a resolution of 4.4 meters per pixel, meaning objects about the size of a two-car garage can be seen on the surface of Phobos. For comparison, this lumpy, battered moon (named for the Greek word for fear, a companion to Mars) is 27×22x19 kilometers (16×13x11 miles), so even though it’s on the tiny side, this is still a fantastic map of the surface.

And an important one as well: next year, Russia will be launching a probe called Phobos-Grunt (Phobos soil) that will attempt to land on the moon, collect a sample of its surface, and send it back to Earth! These images of Phobos will help the Russians figure out the best place to land.

On the ESA page linked above, you’ll also find a cool 3D anaglyph of Phobos, and if you want to stay up to date on all this, check out the Mars Express blog, too.

Image credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

A wave of reports is coming in from the town of Euclid, Ohio, from folks there who are seeing a mysterious light hovering over Lake Erie and Cleveland. The light, they say, is very bright, lasts for a couple of hours, stays near the horizon, changes colors, and keeps coming back to the same spot night after night.

Here’s an MSNBC report about it:

Could it be an alien visitor from another world?

No, I don’t think so. In fact, I think it is another world. Venus, to be specific.

A Fort Wayne, Indiana website has an interview with one of the witnesses on video, and includes some still shots. Everything in his description, including the photographs, makes me think he and the others are seeing Venus.

Right now, Venus can be seen in the west — the direction to Lake Erie and Cleveland as seen in Euclid — shining brightly just after sunset. It is so bright it can be seen while the sky is still light (I’ve seen Venus in the middle of the day). It appears to hover. Changing atmospheric conditions can affect its color, especially when it’s low to the horizon. It can be seen night after night, in the same spot in the sky.

Sound familiar?

I’m not saying what these people are seeing is in fact Venus, but it sure fits everything I’ve heard in the news reports (sometimes the witnesses describe multiple lights, but when looking to the horizon, especially over a big city, it’s not too unlikely to see planes flying around). In the MSNBC report they talked to the FAA, the military, and others (including a UFO guy from England), but never talked to an astronomer. Hmmph. And note that in these news articles, Venus is never mentioned! That’s mighty peculiar, given how spectacular it is in the west after sunset. It’s really hard to miss. A likely explanation is that it’s not mentioned because it is, in fact, the culprit here.

I’m getting a kick out of just how positive so many people are that this is a flying saucer of some kind. I wonder how many of these folks actually are familiar with the night sky, and would recognize Venus when they see it? That’s why I think very few astronomers (pro or amateur) report UFOs: astronomers tend to know what they’re looking at in the sky.

The next time you hear a report like this, don’t jump to the conclusion that some interplanetary object is making a close encounter… because it may very well be interplanetary, but the encounter may not be terribly close.

Tip o’ the probe to Patrick Kent.

A special court set up as part of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program
has ruled that there is no evidence that thimerosal — a preservative used in vaccines, but removed from virtually all of them years ago — causes autism.

Yay!

Last year, this same court ruled that evidence presented by families claiming their children were harmed by vaccines was insufficient to show that vaccines cause autism. In fact, one judge said that the families were misled by antivax physicians.

This new ruling is a good one. Medically and scientifically, it’s been known for some time that thimerosal does not cause autism. This graph makes it pretty clear:

Since the removal of thimerosal from most vaccines, autism rates have increased. The antivax movement has frothed and railed about this, but as usual reality is firmly against them. I suggest you read Australian skeptic Maggie’s take on this topic as well.

As a parent myself, I have sympathy for parents of autistic children, I really do: no parent could deny the strong urge to defend and protect their child against all threats. But because we are so strongly emotional in cases like this, we have to be ever-more vigilant about using logic, evidence, and rationality, lest we react to a problem that doesn’t exist. The parents who brought their cases to this court are, I suspect, well-meaning and desperate for answers. But the respite they seek will not be found in an imagined link between vaccinations and autism.

This movement is doing serious damage in two ways. One, it’s scaring parents unreasonably into not vaccinating their kids, putting these children and others at risk for contracting preventable diseases. But second, this whole debacle is distracting researchers against looking for the real causes behind autism. In other words, these people are fighting against their own cause.

We need real answers about autism, and the antivax movement is wasting tremendous resources that could be far, far better spent looking at the reality of the situation. Instead, they rail against phantoms, and the real victims are children, theirs and everybody’s.

Spring is approaching us here in the northern hemisphere on Earth once again, and we are experiencing the annual thaw of the winter ice.

Spring is approaching the northern hemisphere of Mars as well, and with it comes the thaw of carbon dioxide ice. Some of that dry ice sits at the tops of cliffs, and when it thaws it dislodges the material there. The rock and debris on Mars then does the same thing it would do on Earth: it falls. Fast.

And when it does, you get this slice of Martian awesomeness:

Holy scarp!

That’s another avalanche on Mars caught in the act by the HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. I say another, because a few others have been seen, including this spectacular one two years ago, and lots of older ones that left their marks on the Red Planet’s surface.

This one is amazing! You can see the debris falling down the cliff’s edge (the top of the cliff is to the bottom left of the image, and we’re looking almost straight down the cliff’s face) and then creating a plume of dust at the bottom, hundreds of meters below. When HiRISE took this image, the slide couldn’t have been more than a minute old. If you look at the higher-res image (click the image above to embiggen) you can see that there have been a lot of avalanches here in the past, too. The bottom of the cliff has lots of material clearly deposited by fast-moving falling debris.

To be honest, it’s not completely sure that the sublimation (the change from solid directly to gas) of carbon dioxide is causing these avalanches, but it does seem the most likely explanation. Whether it’s dry ice or not, what this shows us directly is that Mars is still an active place. Certainly the surface is undergoing continual (if small scale) modification, with avalanches, meteor strikes, and other processes still occurring even, literally, today.

Mars is a very, very cool place.

If you want to learn more, check out the HiRISE blog, which always has great stuff, including explanations of these extraterrestrial rockslides.

And when you read about Mars and our exploration of it, remember this: it is an entire world, worthy of our attempts to understand it. And that is one of the grandest things we humans ever do.

[This is an update to my previous post, Texas conservatives screw history, so you should read that first to get your blood to a rapid boil before reading this.]

The Texas State Board of Education member Don McLeroy — creationist, antireality promoter, and stander-upper to experts — was interviewed on ABC TV’s Nightline program. Give this a listen, just in case you were thinking of cutting him a break… for whatever reasons I cannot fathom.

Yes, how magnanimous of the rich white men to allow women the vote, or to give the blacks equal rights!

[If the video doesn't load for you, go to the Nightline web page and click on Thursday's listing of Texas Textbook controversy, which should be up for a few more days.]

I have been active on Twitter today mocking the new textbook standards, and a handful of people have taken me to task thinking I was mocking all Texans. That’s ridiculous; I am clearly ridiculing the ten people on the Board who rammed this revisionist nonsense through… though you may feel free to expand that to the people who support them.

And to the commenters on my original post and elsewhere defending McCarthy because there were in fact communists in America: shame on you. Seriously, shame on you. What McCarthy did — and yes, it was a witch hunt — was directly opposed to all the ideals of this nation: free speech, liberty, presumed innocence until proven guilty, and many more. He was only able to ferret out a handful of so-called communists, but even if he had been 100% successful in his efforts what he did was an abomination for anyone in this country, let alone a seated Senator in the United States Congress. He engendered fear and suspicion, a paranoia and chilling climate from which it took years to recover. He betrayed precisely what he claimed to be trying to protect, and will stand as an object lesson for future generations on what happens when our system fails so utterly.

That is, he’ll stand as that lesson for those who will listen. Clearly, some people didn’t. It’s a crying shame that this includes a majority of the Texas State Board of Education, because now it’s entirely likely the lesson will be missed by a decade’s worth of schoolchildren, too.

Tip o’ the ten gallon hat to Robert Luhn of the wonderful National Center for Science Education for the link to the ABC interview.

I recently posted that Don McLeroy, a Texas conservative creationist buffoon on the State School Board of Education, lost his re-election bid. That was good news, but I also warned that in his last months on the BoE, lots of damage could still be done.

Sometimes I hate being right.

In a 10-5 party line vote last week, the BoE rammed through a vast number of changes to the Texas state history standards, all of which conform to the über-far-right’s twisted view of reality. In these new standards, Hispanics are ignored, Black Panthers are added to provide balance to the kids learning about Martin Luther King, Jr., and get this, Thomas Jefferson was removed^*.

It’s insanity, pure and simple. The absolute and utter denial of reality generally is.

In typical McLeroy nutball fashion, he said:

"We are adding balance," said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. "History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left."

"Balance". Feh. As Colbert once said, reality has a well-known liberal bias.

The problem here isn’t one of balance, it’s of revisionism. As one of the more reality-based members of the BoE said, "They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world." As another example, the new history standards downplays and questions the separation of Church and State. And this was no accident by the religious zealots on the Board; when a more moderate Democrat tried to insert language about why the Establishment Clause was put in the Constitution, it was voted down by the Republicans.

There’s tons more. And there’s one that totally blows me away. I hope you’re ready for this — they added apologetics for the McCarthy hearings.

Yes, you read that right. They added to the standards that America was being infiltrated by Communists, and therefore McCarthy was right.

Holy crap.

So, is Texas doomed? Well, I can hope that teachers across the state will see through this sort of revisionist garbage, but I also know that bucking the standards is very difficult for educators, especially when those standards guide how tests are made, both in the schools and in statewide standardized testing.

And even worse, Texas has such a huge school system that textbook publishers will base their books in large part on the Texas standards, and these books will then be sold in other states. So these handful of ultra-conservative rabid far-right lunatics will actually be affecting the way children are taught all over the country. That means my kid. Your kids. All of them.

Congratulations, Texas State Board of Education. And thanks for dragging the rest of us down with your insanity.

My thank to everyone who sent me links about this.

[^* Update: It was Jefferson's contribution to the Enlightenment that was removed, not Jefferson himself. Sorry for any confusion there.]