I knew it!

Way back in June 2005 I wrote a blog entry about Light Emitting Diodes, or LEDs, and how they will soon become household products. They can emit white light with really low electricity consumption, can take a beating, and last a long, long time.

Well, I told you so.

Now all I need to do is predict my own immense wealth that will befall me in a week, and all will be good.

Last week, I was in Palm Springs California for a meeting of the California Science Teachers Association. I don’t teach, but in my day job I develop educational activities for students, and so we go to these meetings to distribute our materials and to learn what others are doing.

Palm Springs is located at the foot of a pretty extensive mountain range east of LA. As we were walking to breakfast one morning, I looked over to the mountains and was pretty surprised to see what looked like a lenticular cloud. These are round, lens-shaped clouds that can form from winds blowing over mountains. For some stupid reason, I didn’t take a picture right away, but a few minutes later I did pull out the camera and took these shots:

By this time it was starting to lose coherence, but you can still see the weird shape. Not surprisingly, these get reported as UFOs. They’re rare, so even people who are used to watching the skies don’t see them very often! This particular cloud was smoother and showed the more usual lenticular shape when I first saw it. Lesson learned: if you have a camera with you, take the shot right away!

It’s funny– just a few days before that I saw another weird cloud, this time outside my office in northern California:

It really looks like the horizontal contrail is pushing against and slicing in half the more vertical one. The effect was even stronger when viewed in real life. I wonder if that was what was really happening– I have no other simple explanation for it, so maybe that is precisely what was going on.

Looking up is fun. You miss so much otherwise!

A footnote has been added to this entry.

Sometimes, I see an image, and it literally raises the hair on the back of my neck.

Take a look at this picture (click it for a higher-res version):

Doesn’t look like much, does it? Ah, but like so much in astronomy, appearances can be very deceiving.

The picture is from the Spitzer Space Telescope, an orbiting observatory sensitive to infrared light. Astronomers pointed this formidable instrument into a region of the sky in the constellation Draco, where there is a minimum of stars, galaxies, and dust to obscure any distant objects. The fact that you see so many objects in the image is a testament to how sensitive Spitzer is.

The top part of the image shows the results of a ten-hour exposure. The image is 6×12 arcminutes across, roughly a fifth by a third the size of the full Moon on the sky. Almost all the objects you see in it are stars and galaxies; the stars are in our own Milky Way Galaxy, and are relatively close, maybe a few thousand light years away. The Galaxies (which look pretty much like stars) are much farther, millions or billions of light years away.

But what you don’t see in that top image is what’s important.

In any deep image of the sky, the bright objects are of course the easiest to notice. Usually, the astronomers display the contrast in an image such that the bright things are easy to see, and anything faint is set to black. But in this case, the astronomers wanted to see the extremely faint objects. To do this, they masked out the bright objects and then upped the contrast… way up.

What pops out of the image is displayed in the bottom part of the image. The masked foreground objects are obvious enough. But what’s that fuzzy, glowing material weaving its way in the background?

According to the astronomers who took the image, most if not all of that diffuse glow comes from the very first stars ever born in the Universe.

According to current theories, after the Big bang, the material in the expanding Universe was too hot to form stars for quite some time. Finally, after about 200 million years, the gas had cooled enough that gravity’s ghostly grip could start to form clumps of matter. Before there were galaxies, before there were “normal” stars, before there were planets, before there was anything except hydrogen, helium, and just a taste of lithium, the first stars coalesced from this miasma. They were monsters, these first-generation stars, with as much as 100 times the mass of the Sun. They were short-lived, too: consuming their fuel at prodigious rates, their life span was a fraction of the Sun’s. In a few million years, maybe less, they were doomed to explode as titanic supernovae, forming black holes in their cores. Eventually, galaxies may have coalesced around those black holes, leading to normal stars, planets, and eventually us.

But during their short lives, the light those first stars emitted was blinding. That light sleeted out into the still-young Universe, traveling through space as the space itself expanded, like someone running up the down-escalator. Finally, after billions of years– billions of years after the stars themselves had blown up– the light reached Earth, falling into the waiting eye of Spitzer.

The fuzzy web of light in that bottom half of the image may be the first real ghost photo– the image of light from stars long-since dead, the very first stars ever to appear in our Universe.

That’s why I got a chill, why the hair on the nape of my neck stirred. Look at that picture again, and wonder that the light recorded in it had traveled for 13.5 billion years, 98.5% of the age of the Universe itself, across that vast and terrible gulf of space. I got a chill when I first saw the picture, but then a spread of warmth: I’m proud to be human, to be able to see this, to know that we can understand it. We all should be proud. We are the way for the Universe to know itself.

Note added morning of Nov3: As I state in this entry, the results here are not confirmed; the light might be from the first stars, or it might not be. Astronomer Ned Wright has his (strong) doubts, for example, which are stated in a CNN article. Hopefully followup data will shed more light (haha) on this.

So last night I took my telescope out for the trick-or-treating kids to see Mars, and it was fun, kinda. Mars is too low in the sky, and the thick air was making it fuzzy. Plus, my ‘scope isn’t designed to look at planets, so it was a bit too small to be really impressive. Still, a lot of kids thought it was pretty cool. I therefore consider that I accomplished my mission.

However, the ‘scope is big, and I think I wrenched my neck taking it out, and it’s hard to type because looking down makes my neck ache. So instead of a long essay today, I’ll just say, changing the subject, that I had no idea that Wikipedia had a Moon hoax entry. It’s not bad, and is worth a read. They link to my site, which is cool, but I don’t remember ever calling myself a “battle-axe of Science”. I guess it’s better than a mace, or a codpiece.