Blogs / Bad Astronomy

An article just came out over the wire discussing a study which shows — yet again — that the phase of the Moon has no effect on humanly efforts.

Nurses, cops, doctors — they all swear that things get crazy around a full Moon. However, study after study shows that is simply not the case… yet the swearing continues.

(more…)

I wasn’t planning on posting about this. Honestly; it was too self-serving, even for me. Not to mention embarrassing. But PZ, that neckless cephalopod, outed me. So here I am.

Before you click on the video below, please bear in mind that I know the guy who made it; we’ve met at Randi’s Amaz!ng Meeting and have talked many times on various boards and such. He’s a good guy… in fact, after watching the video, I would say his greatest flaw is that he’s not Scarlett Johannson.

But if that were the case, then I certainly wouldn’t be posting the video.

I have no further comments.

The Phoenix mission to Mars was due to launch on Friday, but nasty weather in Florida has postponed it. The earliest it will launch is Saturday; check the Phoenix site for details.

I like to think I have seen pretty much every science fiction ever made, so I’m shocked when I find one I haven’t.

While searching for something else entirely (I love that Series Of Tubes) I found this:

Has anyone ever seen this? Is it any good? I may have to find a copy.

No one knows exactly when — maybe it was 5000 years ago, maybe 10,000 — a young star exploded.

It suffered through a fitful life. Born with something like 40 times the mass of the Sun, it led its life a thousand times faster than our more modest star. Hydrogen fused to helium in its core, and then helium to carbon, and carbon to neon… while the vast interplay of light and force drove wave after wave of dense shells of matters off its surface.

Eventually, time ran out. The fuel in the core gone, it collapsed, sending out a fleet of ghostly neutrinos and a shock wave so gigantic that it crushes the human mind to dust. Septillions of tons of matter exploded outward, and a supernova was born.

The gas that was once the core of a sun screamed out at a fraction of light, but something was in the way– the octillions of tons of gas shed earlier by the star, as well as gas and dust left over from its birth just a million or two years before. The two collided, and countless shock waves were generated. The matter surrounding the exploded star was compressed, rammed, and sculpted into thin shells and ribbons. This material, even compressed, is ethereally thin by human standards; seen face-on, the sheets of gas are faint and diffuse, but when they present their edges to us, we see them as sharp filaments, like a soap bubble’s edge. The material glows with the same basic physical principles as a neon sign: sulfur, oxygen, and hydrogen contribute their own unique fingerprints to the eerie luminescence of the gas.

And so we see the aftermath of the cosmic catastrophe that is the Veil Nebula, an arcing structure that has, since the explosion, expanded to a diameter a full six times larger than the Moon in the sky, even though it is something like 36 billion times farther away. It’s located in the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan, high in the summer sky for northern hemisphere observers– but you’ll never see it with the naked eye. Millennia have faded its glory, even though it probably shone almost as bright as the Moon when its light first touched Earth. Now, though, you need a big telescope and dark skies to see it at all.

The image above is newly released from the Hubble Space Telescope, which can resolve fine details in the nebular structure. We understand a huge amount about how stars explode, and what happens in the subsequent centuries, but there is also much we don’t know. Images like this one and the others released with it give us a forensic insight on the event that destroyed an entire star. We learn more about the nuclear fires at its heart, the subsequent alchemy of the expanding debris, and the effects of depositing unimaginable energies into its environment.

But it’s also very pretty. There’s a lot to be said for that as well.

Pamela Gay is an astronomer, educator, outreach chick, writer, and all around cool person (much like me, of course, except for the chick part).

She is currently at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement Science (something I plan on doing more once my book is out the door), and she went to two different talks by Gerry Wheeler (head of the NSTA) and Neil Tyson, famous astronomer. They both had something to say about how we as public-faced astronomers convey our message. Pamela wrote up such a great blog entry that I’ll just link to it again. And I’ll note that I was planning to write this entry by like line 5 of her reading her blog, long before she started throwing accolades my way. We just love each other.

Update: I had an image here, but evidently it’s not of the space debris in question, so I removed it.

From Digg (via Digger and BABloggee John Huntington) comes the news that an extremely bright object burned up over Croatia. That site has a video with brief footage of the bolide, including one near the end where the object calved (split). It’s pretty cool.

Unfortunately, I don’t speak Croatian, so I have no idea what they’re saying on the video (any BABloggees from that area, feel free to translate in the comments). I hardly need to, since the footage itself is so amazing.

One thing– it says the fireball was at magnitude -20, but I’m not convinced. That’s about 1% of the Sun’s brightness, and the object didn’t look that bright. Brighter than the Moon, maybe, but not anywhere near even a percent of the Sun, at least in that footage.

I wonder how big the object was? It may have been about the size of a car, I’d guess, given the brightness. It wasn’t breaking up in the footage except for that one calving event, so it may have been metallic (rocky bodies tend to disintegrate, like in the famous Peekskill meteorite footage). Hard to say. Also hard to say if it hit the ground or not. Maybe they talk about that in the video.

Still, amazing, and a nice prelude to the Perseids coming up in a few days (more about them later this week).