Blogs / Bad Astronomy

This is a reminder that the very cool conference SpaceFest 2007 is August 17-19. I just looked over the website, and the list of guests has lengthened, with more astronauts, and — this is very cool — Joe Kittinger. Who?, you may ask. Hee hee. Read all about him, and be amazed.

I’ll be there, fawning over the astronauts and giving my Moon Hoax talk. It’ll be great fun!

Here’s my original post about SpaceFest.

Also, Fraser Cain of Universe Today has put up the latest Carnival of Space. Lots of good reading there. So go read them!

Whether you think stem cell research is immoral or not, this little trope needs to be dealt with.

President Bush vetoed a bill last night to fund stem cell research. He then made a statement which is, to be blunt, a lie:

If this legislation became law, it would compel American taxpayers for the first time in our history to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos.

This is 100% absolutely untrue, and there is no way to interpret the bill to mean this. The bill would provide funding for additional research to use embryos which were going to be discarded anyway.

If the President were really trying to prevent what he thinks of as murder of humans, then he should block any attempts at in-vitro fertilization, which is what creates so many zygotes in the first place. Instead, he goes this route, which satisfies his far-right fundamentalist base without having to deal with actual, y’know, reality, in any way.

His statement is a lie. It is partisan pandering. It is putting ideology before science. It is distorting science.

With evidently no sense of irony, the President also said:

We want to encourage science.

If you can survive reading this statement without your head exploding, then you are either a better person than me, or you haven’t been paying attention. This White House Administration has been the most openly hostile toward science that I can remember. Period.

Media Matters has quite a lot more information on the disinformation on this topic going around.

And I expect the comments to this blog entry will be heated. I understand that. But let me point out that this blog is about science and skepticism, and this topic, while not astronomy, fits that theme perfectly. Science is not a snapshot, it’s a tapestry, and when one thread is attacked the whole pattern can be in danger.

1) The Shuttle was supposed to land today, but bad weather in Florida has postponed it. The next chance is Friday at 2:18 Eastern time.

2) At 11:06 Mountain time (18:06 UT) the center of the Sun’s disk was at the intersection on the sky of the celestial equator and the ecliptic. the northernmost apex of its annual path along the ecliptic. In other words, it was the summer solstice! Some people call this the first day of summer, but I don’t. Update: AAAARRRRGGGG! That’s what I get for writing quickly with no coffee in me. I originally described the equinox, not the solstice. Criminy. Happily, commenter Joe pointed this out.

3) I sat in the Colorado DMV for two hours today waiting to get my license. The people were very pleasant, but I am only now getting my morning coffee at 12:30, so I’m tired. If there are any more odds or any more ends, they’ll have to wait.

Just some odd -n- ends…

1) I’ll be interviewed live on the EZHelp radio show at 11:30 a.m. Eastern time this Sunday, June 24. We’ll be talking about the Moon Hoax, why the sky is blue, and how nuts I am to quit a paying job to be a writer.

You can listen live by going to their chat room.

2) In Darwin’s Wake

I heard that the Galapagos Cruise is half sold out, and all the deluxe cabins are gone. If you wanna be trapped on a boat with me and a bunch of skeptics, better hurry! And if you book a cabin because you read about it here, please let me know. I just wanna know.

3) Mars bars Mars Bars?

Due to my move and massive amounts of email transfer getting lost, I just found out that the way hot Inky Chicks wrote an article about how to feed astronauts on the way to Mars. If you don’t read Inky Circus every day, why not? Ya should. They’re funny.

4) Where there’s a Wil

Wil Wheaton is a good man Note: SFW article, not so SFW ads.

So when is the supermassive star Eta Carinae going to blow? No one knows. But at 100 – 150 times the Sun’s mass, it doesn’t have much time left. And the presence of lots of nitrogen in the gas surrounding it is a bad sign: that means that the star was making heavy elements in its core, then belching them up into space. By the time a star like Eta Car is making nitrogen, it doesn’t have long left to go. And when it goes, it’ll go.

The image above is from NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory. The blue part is an optical image from Hubble, and shows the bipolar lobes of gas ejected when Eta Car had a coughing fit back in the 1840s. That’s 20 octillion tons of gas (20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) it ejected at about a million miles per hour, in case you’re not getting enough awesome in your diet.

The yellowish ring is gas the star ejected long ago getting slammed by more recently blown out matter. The gas gets heated to a few million degrees by the impact, and gives off X-rays. By examining the energies of the X-rays, astronomers have found the ring is rich in nitrogen, and that’s the bad thing. Stars like the Sun fuse hydrogen into helium in their cores. If the star is really massive, then it can fuse helium into carbon once the hydrogen in the core is used up. Then it can fuse carbon into neon, and up the periodic table until it hits iron. Stars can’t fuse iron in their cores, which takes away the source of support for the zillions of tons of gas in the star. It collapses, and then complicated stuff happens (forgive me, I just wrote a long chapter for my next book about this, and I don’t wanna repeat myself right now… but I wrote a description of how this works on my Bitesize pages), and then the outer part of the star explodes. The inner part collapses down into a neutron star or a black hole.

Usually, a star like Eta Car can go through its hydrogen in a few million years. But each element fuses more quickly than the last, and by the time neon or oxygen is fusing, the star has literally centuries left at most. The presence of nitrogen in the gas means there was time to make that much of it, get it to the surface, expel it, and let it expand for a while.

So Eta Car is ticking bomb. It could go off tonight, or in the year 3000 (did Futurama ever cover this?), but it won’t be much longer than that.

Note that the lobes appear to be tilted away from us by about 40 degrees or so. That’s a good thing. When stars like Eta Carinae explode, they tend to shoot of beams of energy and matter that, at its distance of 7500 light years, could kill every living thing on Earth. But since it’s pointed away from us, all we’ll get is a spectacular light show. If you’re keeping score at home, gamma-ray burst aimed at you = bad, pretty supernova with no accompanying high energy radiation = good.

I just wrote a lot about Eta for my upcoming book, so if you like this kind of stuff you’ll love that chapter. It gave me the creeps, so I’m glad I’m done with it. Now I’m off to write about black holes devouring the Earth…

As I wrote earlier today, the Space Shuttle Atlantis separated from the space station Tuesday morning. I happened to stumble upon the fact that they would be close together for a while, and decided to check my local view. They would pass almost directly overhead at 10:00 p.m. local time! Added bonus: they would be pretty bright, so I could easily get good pictures of them.

So I did.

(Click on the images for bigger ones hosted on Flickr.)

The image above is of the two as they rose through the trees north of my house. The Shuttle is the fainter streak on the left, and the ISS is brighter (it’s pretty big now) on the right. Note that they are on slightly different tracks: since Atlantis undocked, it was on a slightly different orbital path. The blotches in the sky aren’t clouds, they’re from crud inside my camera. I need to get it cleaned.

This one is cool: as they passed overhead, they went past the Big Dipper; you can see the handle stars on the left (including Mizar and Alcor, a close double star).

Each picture is a 13 second exposure. During that time, each of those spacecraft moved about 60 miles, or 100 kilometers or so. There are seven people on board Atlantis, and three on the ISS. We put people in space, and you can see it from the ground. No telescope, no binoculars, just you, your eyes, and a little foresight to know when and where to look.

And while they’re separating more and more every hour, you should really check and see if you can see them from your location. It’s worth it.

Very, very cool:

A cosmic horseshoe, courtesy of Einstein! Fraser has the details.