Just a few years back (well, a coupla decades) it wasn’t well understood how planets form. There were theories, sure, and the best one of the lot was that when a cloud of gas and dust collapsed (due to a collision with another cloud, or maybe the wind from a nearby star, or getting slapped around by a supernova blast), it formed a flat disk. The star formed in the center, and the planets formed farther out.

This theory has been validated many times, and astronomers now accept it as true (I’ve written about this here, here, and here, for example). In fact, we’ve gotten pretty good at finding young stars still surrounded by their disks, and Hubble is particularly good at imaging them. The disk is faint, and can generally be seen because it reflects the light from its parent star, but that star can be thousands of times brighter than the disk. Hubble is good at high-contrast objects like that; the camera I worked on for years was awesome at imaging them (I wrote about one particular star/disk combo on my Bitesize pages).

And now, just a few years into this field of science, it’s gotten to the point where we can catalog oddities; objects that make us scratch our heads and say, "What’s going on here?"

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Blog carnivals are collections of the past week’s (or so) best examples of writing in a given topic… and there are three up and running and vying for attention right now!

1. Carnival of Space
2. The Tangled Bank (science)
3. The Skeptics Circle

I have a few blog entries in there, too, but you’ve probably already read ‘em. So go take a look at everyone else!

Just an update– I’ll be attending (not giving!) a Moon Hoax debunking talk at Fiske Planetarium in Boulder on Friday night at 8:00.

Then, next week, I’ll be attending a talk by Chris Mooney, who wrote Storm World, a book on global warming, hurricanes, and politics. That’s on Tuesday July 24 at 3:00. I’m only 1/4 of the way through the book (I have one I haveta write too) but it’s excellent so far. If Chris’s name sounds familiar, he wrote The Republican War on Science, another must-read.

Any Boulder-area BABloggees should try to get to these events!

A lot of people (cough cough nutters cough cough) point to the terrible ratio of successful to unsuccessful Mars missions and claim that NASA (and evidently the European Space Agency, which they forget about) is covering up something.

I don’t think anything is covered up. But what’s not getting out is how hard it is to get to Mars. The problem is that Mars has planetary gravity, so touching down means lots of thrust to slow the probe, but it also has air, and just enough to make that difficult as well. NASA has actually done pretty well getting things down to the surface (when dumb engineering mistakes don’t interfere), despite the difficulty.

But as payloads increase, things get harder. And we’re now talking about landing people there. That’s not just hard; it turns out that we really aren’t sure how to do it at all.

So says Rob Manning, the Chief Engineer for the Mars Exploration Directorate, and you can read more about this fascinating topic at Universe Today, in an article written by Nancy Atkinson. It’s worth reading about current plans, future notions, and all the pains taken just to set down on the Red Planet. You may be surprised. And if you’re a conspiracy theorist, you may just learn something.

Well, probably not. But now we have someplace to link to when CTers rave about NASA and Mars.

Usually, when someone spouts creationist garbage, it’s because they’ve been misled. We have a case of this, in spades, in the Evansville (Indiana) Courier Press, where a highly deluded creationist has written an editorial so full of crap I’m tempted to call a septic cleaning crew.

To be clear, I think the author is just wrong, but he has clearly been heavily misled — some would say lied to — to by people from Answers in Genesis, a creationist (hahahahahah) think tank.

Check this out:

…then a little more than a year ago, we again were privileged to hear lectures by former evolutionist and atheist Mike Riddle and astrophysicist Dr. Jason Lisle.

To be clear: Mike Riddle and Jason Lisle are from the evil, lying organization Answers in Genesis.

How can I assert this? Assuming the editorial writer is on the level…

Riddle, a former Microsoft trainer, spoke of the Miller experiment, which produced amino acids inside a test tube. When oxygen was added, the experiment failed. Imagine, this key element to life prohibits any organic molecules from forming.

The Miller-Urey experiment put the contents of the Earth’s original atmosphere (methane, ammonia, hydrogen, water — much like the present atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn) into a chamber, and hit it with a spark representing lightning. Amino acids were produced. This shows that the building blocks of life were easy to produce in the primitive conditions on Earth. As the idea goes, later, once life took hold, it evolved to produce oxygen (which can provide a lot more energy to the life process). Oxygen is highly corrosive, and so that changed everything. Eventually, in the adapt-or-die conditions, life adapted to use the gas. But before it did, oxygen was essentially poison. So it’s no surprise that it would mess up the Miller-Urey experiment.

In other words, if Riddle used this to promote an anti-evolution stance, he is not telling the truth, when the truth is easy to find and has been accessible for decades. What does that make him?

Incidentally, the MU experiment was never meant to be the be-all and end-all of how life arose; it was the first of a long series of such experiments that are still ongoing. How life first arose is a fascinating question, and I guarantee that no creationist will be able to figure it out… unless they follow the tenets of science. But scientific method to a young-Earth creationist is like holy water to a vampire.

To continue…

According to Lisle, laser reflectors left behind on the moon’s surface by the Apollo astronauts revealed that our lunar neighbor moves a little over an inch farther away from us each year.

How many billions of years earlier was it scraping our mountaintops?

It doesn’t work this way. The Moon recedes from the Earth due to tides, but the rate at which is recedes depends on many factors. In the past, it receded more slowly than it does today. It formed much closer in to the Earth, but there is no problem with it taking billions of years to get to its current distance. Typically, young Earth creationists take current values of things and extrapolate them billions of years into the past without considering that the values might have changed.

This argument has been debunked for many years. Decades. If Lisle really is an astrophysicist and he said this in a talk, he is either incompetent or a liar. Or both.

One of Lisle’s associates calculated the amount of emissions given off by the various belts of Jupiter shortly before the Voyager probe visited it in the early ’80s. The data returned was in sync with the thousands of years that the mathematics Ph.D. had suggested. The spacecraft had no knowledge of the Bible.

This statement is a total mess, but what I think he means is the prediction by creationist Russel Humphries, before Voyager got to Uranus and Neptune, of their magnetic fields. But his guess was that they were intermediate in strength between Earth’s and Saturn’s, which is a pretty safe bet given their masses. Also, while it’s true that the magnetic fields of those two planets are weird, Humphrey’s model (that God made the planets from water which was then transformed into various other substances) doesn’t predict any of the other odd features (like the tilt of the fields and that they are off-center). He claims it does, but his claim on how some of the odd features formed isn’t really any different than a model assuming the planets are old; in other words, his model doesn’t actually predict those features.

Even a randomly fired gun will sometimes hit the target… by accident.

Years ago my science textbook had illustrations suggesting that our sun gave birth to the Earth and other planets, but this was not the apparent case in a section of the Orion nebula known as M22, where “orphan” planets exist, some orbiting each other without any nearby star.

He either misread his textbook, or it was woefully wrong. Planets and stars form together, with the planets forming in a disk around the star. It’s not uncommon to get gravitational interactions between forming planets which can kick them out of the system; "rogue" planets have been predicted for quite some time and are a successful prediction of the disk-formation theory (which has many dozens or hundreds of other successes).

In Glen Rose, Texas, some have asserted, there are fossilized human footprints alongside ones made by dinosaurs, as they existed together inside a dried-out riverbed.

The Paluxy Tracks? Are you kidding me? This is long, long debunked.

My favorite part of this whole horrifying editorial, though, is the last bit:

It is not my intent to start an argument or debate; please save your hate mail for someone else. However, as some scientists are brassy enough to skip from theory to fact without all the evidence, it is only fair to make others aware that we do not have all the facts, and that additional exciting information is arriving in our generation — data so simple even a cave man can understand it.

That first sentence is the killer. Yes, I am going to write all sorts of nonsense, long-debunked offal, and promulgate outright lies, but please, don’t bother replying. La la la la la la la. I can’t hear you.

If this guy wants to argue evidence, then he should find sources that don’t lie about it. But he clearly doesn’t want to argue at all. All the data point toward an old Earth, an old Universe. Furthermore, it directly contradicts a young Earth.

I disagree with his last statement, too: I don’t think a caveman could understand the data. But I know an "astrophysicist" would. Which doesn’t leave much wiggle room if you claim to have the One True Word, does it?

Tip o’ the blinders to Red State Rabble.

Iapetus is weird. It’s a moon of Saturn, and it’s always been known to be weird. One of Iapetus’s hemispheres is much brighter than the other, for one thing (probably due to collecting material as it orbits the planet). For another, it’s got a pretty big equatorial bulge; it’s not even close to being a sphere. And third, right around its equator, there is this vast ridge of material that’s something like 20 kilometers high!

Yup. It is the walnut of the solar system.

Those two features — the bulge and the ridge — are just crying out that they are related somehow. And now it looks like it may be understood why.

New results just released state that when it was very young, Iapetus rotated very rapidly – something between 5 and 16 hours per rotation. This is what formed the equatorial bulge. But its spin rate now is much longer, about 80 days. Obviously, something in its past slowed the spin.

That something is the immense tidal force of Saturn. This force (really, a product of the gravitational force) can slow the rotation rates of objects. But for Saturn to slow Iapetus, it turns out that there must have been something warming the interior of the little moon when it was very young, and that was found to be radioactive heat. Aluminum-26 and iron-60 are radioactive, and their decay can heat up the surrounding material. Furthermore, they have such short half-lives — meaning they decay away rapidly — that in geological terms it’s as if the heat source switches off.

Now follow this logic: Iapetus spun quickly when it was young, and got the bulge. Its interior was heated by radioactivity. But then that heat source shut down. The moon started to cool, and simultaneously its rotation slowed due to tides from Saturn. When the rotation slowed, the centrifugal force at its equator dropped, and it tried to shrink and resume a spherical shape. But by then the outer crust had frozen. Instead of flowing smoothly into a sphere, the equatorial crust piled up as the Moon shrank, forming the ridge.

Voila. Walnut moon.

Incidentally, because radioactive materials decay at a known rate, and the amount of heating needed to make the theory work implied how much radioactive material Iapetus had, the scientists were able to calculate the age of the moon. The answer? 4.564 billion years, pretty much the known age of the solar system.

Swallow that nut, young Earth creationists!

Speaking of garbage science, I have to mention — regular readers know I can’t help myself sometimes — that Iapetus has long been the target of some, um, nutty ideas. The king of these is of course one Richard Hoagland, who claims that the ridge around Iapetus is artificial. Yes, built by intelligent beings (though as usual he never says who he thinks they are).

You can’t make this stuff up.. oh wait, duh, of course you can. Here’s what he has to say:

[...] it could really be a "wall"… a vast, planet spanning, artificial construct!!

Man, you know this is serious if he uses two exclamation points. I mean, "exclamation points!!" To drive the artificiality point home, he compares the moon to the Death Star from Star Wars in a side-by-side picture — not just once, but twice!

I mean, "twice!!"

He goes on to say:

There is no viable geological model to explain a sixty thousand-foot-high, sixty thousand-foot-wide, four million-foot-long "wall" spanning an entire planetary hemisphere… let alone, located in the precise plane of its equator!

It’s unclear when Hoagland wrote that page, though it’s dated 2005 and there are clues it was in February or March of that year, but at the same time he was feverishly banging away at his keyboard producing that goofiness, a real scientist by the name of Paulo CC Freiere was finishing up an actual paper on the ridge around Iapetus (and you can read a popular-level synopsis of his findings over at Universe Today). In a nutshell (ha! a double pun!) the idea was that Iapetus could have formed that ridge when it slammed into one of Saturn’s rings. The material piled up on the equator, forming that vast range of mountains. That also could explain the difference in brightness of the two hemispheres.

This new idea about Iapetus getting its bulge and ridge by the freezing out and piling up of matter seems more plausible than having the Moon plow into a ring and gathering up matter, but still, we now have two theories on how that structure could have formed. Either or both may turn out to be wrong, but I think the extraterrestrial alien pyramid builders can be dismissed.

Of course, Hoagland continues on his pages to bark on about artificial constructs, doing his usual sleight of hand with over-magnifying images and claiming JPG artifacts are buildings or some such nonsense. And I’ll admit, it’s rather fun to read his stuff, in a schadenfreude kind of way. But in the end, I prefer actual, y’know, science. Speculation is fun, but real science will be more interesting, more exciting, and more satisfying every time.

My email box is flooded with news that the Gruber Prize (not named, unfortunately, for Hans Gruber — who would have been a good astronomer, since he spent quite a bit of time on the roof) was awarded to the two teams who, in 1998, discovered that the expansion of the Universe has been set on overdrive: a mysterious dark energy is accelerating the expansion. I’ll spare the details here and send you off to read an earlier blog entry I wrote explaining it (and a Bitesize piece I wrote at the time, and a followup).

The Prize is for a cool half million bucks, which will be divided up among the two teams. They’ve won many prizes in the past, too. It’s deserved. This was phenomenally tough work, and it’s looking like it’ll hold up. It changed the way we looked at the Universe, and may still have many surprises waiting for us.

I know a whole passel of the folks on those teams; I was tangentially involved at the time with Brian Schmidt’s team, and later wound up working for Saul Perlmutter on the education and public outreach for his SNAP experiment, which will follow up on the dark energy observations. I’ve promised to do this before, but someday I’ll write up my personal involvement; it’s a bit silly but a funny story. Someday.

Oh– Science Blogs’s Rob Knop gets a piece of this as well!

So congrats all around!