‘Update (March 23, 2006): Space-X is taking another day to review data. Launch is now scheduled for Friday at 13:00 Pacific time.

The private rocket company Space-X will try once again to launch their first rocket, Falcon 1, Thursday at 13:00 Pacific time. They’ve tried several times before, but have had various engineering issues to deal with. Yesterday they tested the engine in what’s called a "static firing", where they ignite the engine but don’t launch the rocket. Everything went fine, so they are go to launch. I’ll be watching if I can find a live feed.’

‘If you live in the northern hemisphere and go outside in the late summer, you’ll see a bright blue jewel of a star high in the sky. Named Vega, it’s one of the brightest stars (if it sounds familiar, it was the star Ellie Arroway, Jodie Foster’s character in Contact, detected alien signals from).

Vega is critically important to astronomers. Being bright and high overhead for many observers, it’s become a "standard star", a target you can use to calibrate your instruments. It was used in such a manner for years by astronomers around the world. I don’t think it’s used directly any more, but many astronomical brightness measurements are in some way based on Vega.

It therefore surprised astronomers years ago when it was discovered that Vega had way too much infrared light coming from it. It was quickly realized that the star was surrounded by a disk of dust. Heated by the star, the disk was warm, and emitted infrared light (just like you, a warm human, emit IR, which can be detected using heat-sensitive cameras).

But there have been some problems. Compared to similar stars, Vega appears to be too bright. Worse, high-resolution spectra seem to show anomalous features, what you might expect from a rapidly rotating star. But Vega shows no signs of rapid rotation.

Now a new paper puts all that into a tail spin. Literally.

Using interferometry, an amazing technique that allows incredibly high-resolution data to be taken, astronomers have discovered that Vega indeed spins quickly– very quickly. They took advantage of the fact that a star spinning really quickly will flatten out near the equator due to centripetal force; the same force that keeps water in a bucket as you swing it around. In a sense, this force acts against gravity, so if you were to stand on the equator of a spinning object, you’d feel like you’d weigh less (this is true on the Earth, too– you weigh about 0.3% less on the Equator due to the Earth’s spin).

In a star, this balance of forces makes the star cooler at its equator than at its poles, so in optical light its not as bright at the equator. Normally, stars are way too far away to detect this difference, but interferometry can make extremely high-resolution observations, and the astronomers were actually able to see this difference in Vega.

They determined we see Vega nearly pole-on– like we’re looking right down over its north (or is it south?) pole. The polar region is hot, while the equator is cooler. You can see that in this graphic:

The orange "plus" marks Vega’s pole the &subsolar point"^* , the center of Vega’s disk as seen from Earth (incidentally, it’s known that the debris disk around Vega is circular in appearance, which matches the idea that we are "looking down" on an actual circle-shaped disk; if we saw it at an angle it would appear elliptical, like the rim of a glass as seen form an angle) , and hotter regions are in blue while cooler are in red. They also determined that to give this degree of uneven heating, Vega must be spinning really fast: about 275 kilometers/second at its equator– 620,000 miles per hour! If the Earth spun that fast, our days would be 90146 seconds long!^* Incredible. In fact, if Vega spun much faster, the centripetal force would be stronger than gravity, and the gas on the equator would fly off. Vega would tear itself apart.

This affects a lot of calculations astronomers use, and it will be interesting to see how this new data will be assimilated into the body of knowledge. After reading the paper, my first thought, oddly enough, was not so much the impact on astronomy, but on the movie "Contact"– for a brief moment, we see Vega as Ellie Arroway stops there on her way to meet the aliens. We see Vega as a beautiful spherical blue star… but if it’s spinning as fast as the observations indicate, it would not be spherical at all: it will be highly flattened, like a basketball someone is sitting on. It will be 25% wider through the equator than through the poles.

It figures: a new observation comes along that affects almost all of observational astronomy, and I wonder how it’ll affect how I watch a movie.

Tip o’ the dew shield to Larry Klaes for the heads-up on this one.

^* I made a couple of unrelated errors in this entry for some reason, which is annoying. The period error was because I didn’t convert from miles to kilometers! The thing with the orange plus was just misreading the plot. Duh.‘

So I’m cruising the blogosphere, and I see a lot of blogs have chicklets, those little rectangles at the bottom of their sidebars that link to other bloggy things. I have a few; they go to Technorati, or Blog Hot or Not, or Feedburner.

A lot of blogs link to award sites; “best of”, “top blogs”, things like that. So I go there to see how well some of my favorite blogs are rated. There are lots of categories: sex (duh), humor, politics. But only very rarely is there a science category. Most have a “technology” category instead, which just ain’t the same thing (BlogTopSites, for example).

A little while back, the Weblog Awards 2005 got a lot of attention, and — you guessed it– no science category. I emailed the proprietor, but never received an answer. I’ll note that The Bloggies didn’t have a science category either.

I read quite a few blogs, including those dealing with politics, tech, humor. But my favorites are the science blogs. I have several blogrolled in my sidebar. Give them a look. If you like them, add them to your feedreader, or bookmark them. Visit them! Scientists are quite capable of excellent writing, and you just might learn something (hmmm, come to think of it, blogroll me too if you have a blog!).

And if you see some blog award site without a science category, let ‘em know how you feel. Now more than ever in our history, we need to be aware of science and what scientists are thinking. Blogs are a great way to find out.

‘

Given that the vast majority of my readers are in the US, I waited until the last minute to post about the eclipse tonight, seeing as how it’s happening over Africa and Asia. Also, I’m lazy.

The eclipse starts around 08:30 Universal Time and runs through about noon UT (in 03:30 – 07:00 Eastern US time). Granted that’s a wee bit late at night for us here in the States (stupid Earth, turning its back on the eclipse!), but you can still watch it live on the web.

First, if you’re not sure about what an eclipse is and how they work, then head over to Sky and Telescope webpage which has loads of info.

If you want to watch it over the web, there are lots of resources. Here are a few good ones:

• NASA (yes, NASA)
• The Exploratorium, a great kids science exploration place in San Francisco. For the uber-geeks, the Exploratorium also has a feed that will go into Second Life. Wow.
• The Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California
• Lots more webcams are listed on the Sky and Tel website.

By the way, there is a lot of misinformation about eclipses. For example, there has never been a single reported case, ever, or total, permanent blindness from looking at the Sun. You can be partially blinded, but you’d have to work pretty hard to go totally blond. Still, looking at the Sun without correct protection is not too bright (hahahaha) because you can do some damage. Again, Sky and Tel has a list of ways to view an eclipse safely.

Also, if you’re pregnant, it’s still OK to watch, despite some really weird rumors (bottom of that page).’

‘I have to admit, this is brilliant. It’s clearly designed as a web meme. I have seen no commercials on TV for it, nothing on the radio; just ads on various high-profile websites. I never poke around flash-driven websites, yet I found myself enthralled. The commercial vignettes are damn funny, too. There’s a "Galaxy Quest" feel to them, and that’s not a bad idea at all.

Not that I believe aliens are abducting cows: like I’ve been saying for years, why keep repeatedly traveling thousands of light years to excoriate a few cow anuses at a time, when you can do it just once and clone all the cow anuses you need at home?’

I heard today that North Carolina Congressman Brad Miller is looking into the claims of widespread scientific suppression by the White House. I wrote about all the details earlier today on the Huffington Post.

Basically, he is looking for other scientists (like James Hansen) who have had their views politically suppressed. I know a lot of scientists read my blog, and I know of a few who have talked to me privately on this issue. So this is a call to all of you: if you are a government-supported scientist, and you know of anything like this, contact Rep. Miller’s legislative assistant Heather Parsons at heather.parsons "at" mail.house.gov, or Dan Pearson of the Democratic staff of the Science Committee at dan.pearson "at" mail.house.gov.

At 18:26 Universal (Greenwich) time today, March 20, the center of the Sun will be at Right Ascension 0^h0^m0^s and a declination of 0^o0^m0^s, which means it will pass directly over the Earth’s equator as it moves north in its annual path around the ecliptic.

You and I call that the vernal equinox. OK, I call it that. You’d probably call it the first day of Spring. I wouldn’t call it that, but hey, semantics.

Around the United States today, kids in their classrooms will be standing eggs on end, or at least newsrooms will be talking about it. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then read this, and then this, and if you’re really enjoying yourself, this.

And if you are really a glutton for punishment, see when the equinoxes, solstices, perihelia, and aphelia will be for the next 14 years.

You know, I have a whole book about stuff like this, too.