Blogs / Bad Astronomy

What??? You haven’t gone to the CICLOPS website yet and perused the fantastic closeup images of Saturn and its amazing moons? What’s wrong with you? They have Enceladus in 3D! Rings! Moons! Less exclamation points than I am using!

It’s way cool stuff. Go there now.

On Wednesday, March 30, a scientist and friend of mine, David Morrison, will “debate” one James McCanney, who is neither a scientist nor a friend of mine. The topic will be the claims of Immanuel Velikovsky, and the “debate” will air on the Coast to Coast AM radio show.

Morrison is an expert in astrobiology and many other fields of astronomy, and is well-known and respected in the scientific community. McCanney, on the other hand, believes in so many impossible things he could give the Queen of Hearts a run for her money.

I talk all about this guy on my web page debunking his claims. Comets are hot, comets are as big as planets, the Sun has nuclear fusion on its surface and not in its core, and lots of other silliness.

McCanney is a believer in a modified version of Velikovsky’s claims, which are already so silly that modifying them won’t help (in much the same way as taking 500 mg of Vitamin C won’t cure a decapitation). I wrote a chapter in my book about V’s theories, and could easily have written a whole book on just his terrible astronomy claims. I can’t remember a single thing V said in his book “Worlds in Collision” that was astronomically correct. It’s an astonishing collection of rampant wrongness. For more info, see here, or here, or here.

McCanney is similar, in that his claims not only don’t make sense, but are trivially shown to be wrong by using math and physics you should learn in high school. Go ahead and read my link about him and you’ll get the picture.

I’m not sure I can hear the whole “debate” (in quotations because it’s nearly impossible to debate anti-scientists like McCanney) because it’s on late at night, but I’m hoping to listen later when I get a chance. This will be both amusing and irritating, I have no doubt.

I have learned that whenever I am away from my internet connection for more than, say, an hour, that’s when lots of cool astro-news hits the street. This week was no exception. I was at a meeting for high-energy astronomy (basically, super-duper violent stuff like exploding stars and black holes), and since my life is nothing without irony, some of the news dealt with the same stuff I was listening to and talking about at the meeting. Some of this news was way cool, so here’s a quick-and-dirty list, with links.

• Astronomers have found a black hole in another galaxy that’s a mesomorph. For a long time we knew of two kinds of black holes: ones that mass a few times what the Sun does, which are formed when big stars blow up, and huge ones in the centers of galaxies which can mass millions or billions of times the Sun. Recently, intermediate mass black holes have been detected, with a few hundred or few thousand times the Sun’s mass. These are not well-understood, and not many are known, so every time a new one is found it helps astronomers a lot. This new one was detected by the Chandra X-Ray observatory.




• 
  In 1995, planets were first detected indirectly around other stars like the Sun. As they orbit their star, the planets tug on the stars, and this can be detected. Then, a few years back, one was found that actually passed directly in front of its star, eclipsing it a little bit, and that drop in light was detected. Now, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have for the first time seen the light from the planet itself. Basically, the planet is hot because it’s close to the star, and that means it glows in infrared. Happily, stars are weaker in IR, so it’s easier to see the planet that way (stars way overpower planets in optical light). We don’t have actual images yet, because the planets are too close to their parent stars, but it’s still pretty neat that we can detect their light at all.




• You’d think we’d know about a cluster of stars in our own Galaxy that masses 100,000 times that of the Sun, and has stars so bright they’re literally a million times the Sun’s brightness. However, sometimes nature is sneaky. There is so much floating crud in our Galaxy (astronomers politely call it the “interstellar medium”) that it can hide even tremendously bright objects. Such is Westerlund 1, a cluster of super-giant stars located just 10,000 light years away (a hop and a jump in galactic terms). Its light is dimmed by a factor of 100,00 due to the dust between us and it, so it’s hard to see at all. Astronomers have recently been able to investigate it, and find that it is chock full of monster stars, some so bright that if we were inside that cluster, they’d outshine the full Moon!




• 
  This one’s more gee-whiz than anything else. A gamma ray is basically normal light on steroids; a very high-energy beefed up form of light. It takes a lot of energy to make a gamma ray, and that energy comes from seriously violent stuff like exploding stars, black holes, matter-antimatter collisions (yes, seriously) and stuff like that. The Earth is bombarded by gamma rays all the time, but usually there aren’t enough to do any damage to us. Astronomers have observatories orbiting the Earth to look for gamma rays (none built by Bruce Banner, don’t fret). One of these, the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, orbited the Earth for many years peering into the cosmos. But it also looked down, and over the years it was able to see quite a few gamma rays coming from the Earth. An astronomer collected that data and created an image of the Earth in gamma rays. He says it will help us understand the Earth’s environment in space and all that, which is probably true, but I just think it’s kinda neat and worth looking at.

Phew! That’s more of a blog than I intended, but what the heck, it makes up for a few days of silence from me. I still have plenty to say about other things, including some rants about stuff that has me good and ticked off. Stay Tuned.

I’ve been away at a meeting for the past few days, and way too busy to write anything here. I have some stuff to talk about for tomorrow, but for now I’ll leave you with this picture I took of a van I saw while I was in New Mexico at the meeting. Clearly, an indication of where the devil keeps up on the latest work he’s doing up here.

The other day I was walking across the campus here in California, and I saw a nice halo around the Sun. Well, really only the top half of the halo; the bottom half was cut off because of clouds. Halos are really pretty– ethereal circles of diffuse light around the Sun caused by sunlight bending around inside of ice crystals in the air. It’s getting late in the season for halos, because soon enough it’ll be too warm for ice crystals. So it was a nice surprise to see one.

The best one I ever saw was a couple of years ago. I had just dropped my daughter off at school, and glanced up in the sky. The halo was vivid, as if it were etched into a crystal hemisphere. It was flanked by two teardrop-shaped flares of light called parhelia, or more often called sundogs. The sundogs stretched out to either side, focusing into lines of light that shot straight out, parallel to the horizon, nearly halfway around the sky. I had never seen the like.

I was stunned, mesmerized by what I saw. It was beautiful. See for yourself: I took the picture above of the event (click on it for a bigger version). You can see the sundogs and everything. It was a real stunner. To be honest, this image is actually a mosaic of several smaller shots, combined by an artist with whom I work.

Anyway, I ran back inside the school to grab the kids and show them the halo. They all “oohed” and “ahhhhed”, and I explained how the ice crystals bent the light and all that. After a while they went back in, and I started home. On the way back, I saw a woman I knew vaguely (I see her a lot on the way to dropping off my daughter). I showed her the halo too. Her reaction was not what I expected.

She gasped, looked at it for a moment, and then asked me, “What does it mean?”

I gawked at her for a second. “What do you mean, ‘what does it mean’?” I asked.

She looked right back at me. Her tone was more plaintive. “What does it mean?” she repeated.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I replied. “It just is.”

She watched me for a moment, then turned back to the sky. I waited for her to say something more, but when she didn’t, I began walking back home again, leaving her to try to extract some sort of purpose from a random event.

Humans are pattern-seeking animals, and we constantly look for meaning in our lives. I don’t think that halo really meant anything. It wasn’t a sign, an omen, a harbinger, or a portent of anything.

What it was, was pretty. And interesting, in a scientific way, but really, it was just very pretty. Can’t that be enough?

A few years back, there was a minor flurry of worry about how scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York were doing experiments that might destroy the Earth. The lab has a particle accelerator, a device designed to (duh) accelerate particles. They smash the subatomic critters together, and watch what happens. A lot of insight into nature comes out of such things, and labs such as Brookhaven have greatly increased our knowledge.

Well, some folks were concerned that the Mad Scientists at Brookhaven might accidentally create a black hole, which would then fall into the Earth, and eat it up atom by atom. Eventually the entire planet would get munched by the black hole, and we’d all die.

At the time, I thought this was silly. No scientist would ever do such a thing! They’d never get another grant.

Closeup of a black hole

Well, this has turned up again. A scientist at Brookhaven has speculated that a recent experiment might just have created a black hole. Now, my knowledge of the particular experiment in question is limited to that article I just linked, so don’t go asking me about quantum tunneling phase dispersive chronosynclastic infundibula. The stuff I study tends to be quite a bit bigger than your average neutron.

But I suspect that there are plenty of otherwise mundane explanations to the puzzling results of the Brookhaven experiment outlined in that news article. Not that I know what they are. But I’d just love to be near a water cooler at Brookhaven right now. I can imagine what they’re chatting about.

Was a black hole created? I don’t know. But if there was, I am not terribly concerned. For one thing, higher-energy particles than what they do at Brookhaven hit the Earth relatively often. If these created black holes, and they were dangerous, the Earth would have been toast a few billion years ago. The fact that we are still here attests to this being benign. How many people do you know who have been killed by a quantum black hole?

Also, black holes this tiny evaporate before they can do any damage. Evaporate, you say? I thought they only got bigger! Well, read this, or read this, if you dig equations and higher-level stuff. Or just Google "Hawking radiation".

Still and all, I also expect two things: 1) lots of email about this, and 2) the anti-science websites will go nuts. "We’re alllll gonna diiiiieeee!" So I’ll ask it again: How many people do you know who have been killed by a quantum black hole?

I don’t know of any, and I know lots of people who study black holes. So don’t panic. If and when scientists can create a real black hole in the lab, you wont hear about it on silly anti-science websites. You’ll hear about it on some silly scientist’s blog.

So for about the past ten years, I’ve been saying that the vast majority of things reported as UFOs are more mundane objects, like birds, airplanes, satellites, Venus, what-have-you.

I have seen for myself countless times that people simply are not familiar with the sky, and so they routinely misinterpret what they see. Most people, for example, don’t know that you can even see man-made satellites in the sky (not only can you see them, you can even predict when and where you’ll see them).

So this article from Dubbo, Australia comes as no surprise to me. A woman reported a UFO to the police:

Suzanne Fuller had called police on Sunday night to report seeing the object “about 50 miles away” in sky’s [sic] south-east.

Shaky video footage of the object was later viewed by police who made an official report to Air Services Australia (ASA), and sent them a copy of the tape.

“It looked like a bird, but much larger… with a flat top and a deeper shape at the bottom,” was how Mrs Fuller described what she had seen in the sky “for five hours”.

So what was it?

Last Sunday night, for five hours, [Paul Cremin] was flying a ‘delta coyne’ [sic; that should be Delta-Conyne] kite 140 metres in the air - directly in the part of the sky that Suzanne Fuller and her family reported seeing a UFO.

The UFO in question. Beware of probing.

I’ve seen mylar balloons and kites that really do move around in the sky exactly the same way people describe a lot of “UFOs”. I was myself once (almost) fooled by a flock of ducks…

Anyway, when you hear someone describe an object that danced and weaved, or glowed brightly, or hovered then suddenly moved off, don’t jump to conclusions. There might be a string attached.

By the way, I’ve been to Dubbo. I was there in November 2004, during a whirlwind tour of Australia. We stopped in Dubbo, where I ate a meat pie, had a pretty good fruit smoothie, and drove through an epic locust invasion. Those were definitely identified flying objects, but it was still pretty weird. Even for Australia.