Another cool bit of astronomy news: astronomers have discovered the first triple asteroid known to get near the Earth. Asteroid 2001 SN263 was thought to be a typical single body that has an orbit that sometimes brings it near us. This made it a target for mapping using the giant 300 meter Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. They can actually get three-dimensional maps of asteroid using the dish. By sending pulses of what is essentially radar at an asteroid and timing how long it takes the pulses to reach the asteroid and return to Earth, a rough map of the rock can be made — a pulse that takes slightly longer to get there and back means you’ve bounced it off a part of the asteroid that is slightly farther away. Think of the astronomers as bats, the telescope as the bat’s sonar, and the asteroid as a mosquito, and you’ll get the idea.

When astronomers took a shot at SN263, they got a big surprise: they got three separate returns, indicating that a big rock is being orbited by two smaller ones. The main mass is roughly spherical and 2 kilometers across. The smaller moons are about half that size. The observations were made when SN263 was about 11 million kilometers from Earth.

Other triplet asteroids are known (like 87 Sylvia), but this is the first one known that gets near Earth. This is a pretty interesting find. The orbits of the moonlets will allow the densities of the objects to be determined, which can yield insight into the formation mechanism. One possible formation explanation is a slow collision with another asteroid causing the main body to fracture. Or did the system form all at once? The densities of the three bodies can support or rule out different mechanisms (for example, a very low density main mass is hard to fracture).

Plus, the stability of the system needs to be understood; if the orbits are unstable, that means it formed this way recently (well, astronomically recently). Did this object form in the asteroid belt and get sent inward by some gravitational encounter? Or did it form in its current orbit?

All of these questions are interesting scientifically, but they have real-world implications as well. The more we know about near-Earth asteroids, the better! If you disagree, I suggest going to your local natural history museum and checking out the dinosaur bones. Look around. See how all the dinosaurs on display are dead, and no live ones are around?

Yeah. They didn’t know anything about asteroids. But we do, and we need to learn more.

Why we need skepticism more than ever, a sonata in two parts:

1) China bans ghosts from the internet. Does that include being Rick Roll’d?

2) Woman exorcises public housing ghost, Toronto goes halfsies. Actually, I have no snarky joke for this one. Basically, the tenants of the haunted room together with the psychic extorted the government to pay for this, since it was cheaper than having the tenants evicted. Actually, the cheapest thing to do would be to direct the tenants to Randi’s site, the Skeptic Dictionary, and SAPS, and tell them to get a grip on reality. The moral of the story: remember folks, if your pseudoscience costs less than doing the right thing, you can get away with it.

Tip o’ the ghostly tail to Fark 1 and 2.

Now, rye didn’t I think of this? Update: If that link doesn’t work, the page is cached here.

Oh well. Crusty as I am, all I’d get out of it are a bunch of crumby burnt offerings, anyway.

Tip o’ the chef’s hat to Derek from Skepticality.

OK, it’s a manufactured holiday, blah blah blah. That doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with it! If you have someone you love who also shares your love of the sky, then have I got the pictures for you.

I already linked to scientist valentines cards, and the one I made on my own. But what about real astronomical objects? Turns out there are quite a few.

Let’s start close to home… astronomically speaking.

You may already know about the famous Mars Valentine Crater:

But did you know about the Valentine Mars mesa?

The asteroid Eros was visited by the NEAR spacecraft, which took the picture below. Eros isn’t heart-shaped (it’s spud-shaped), so why include it? Well, don’t you know your mythology?

Heading outward into the Universe, we can find IC 805… also called the Heart Nebula, taken by the gifted astrophotographer John Chumack and posted on BAUT:

And finally, something I have never seen come up before. I wanted this list to be as complete as possible, so I went through different types of objects in my head. Crater? Yup. Mesa? Yup. Asteroid, nebula? Yup². Then I wondered, are there any heart-shaped galaxies?

And bang, right away I knew which one would fit the bill.

These are the famous Antenna Galaxies, two galaxies in the act of colliding. They are not usually rotated this way, so the heart-shape isn’t obvious. In fact, I wonder if anyone else has ever thought of this? A (brief) search didn’t turn up anything.

But how perfect is this? The two galaxies are merging, becoming one. For millions of years they have been dancing this tango, at first reaching out long arms to each other, then sweeping past each other perhaps several times before finally uniting.

And the outcome of such a marriage is similar to that in humans… birth! Those reddish pink regions are where countless millions of stars are being born before our eyes. The ultimate product of love gravity.

So if you do happen to celebrate Valentine’s Day here on Earth, maybe it’ll help a bit to keep your eyes on the skies. There’s love to be found just about everywhere.

And hey, if all of this works, you can finally ask, Did the Earth move for you?

… if I may refer to myself in the third person.

Anyway, I’m trying an experiment. I’m fiddling with doing a live video chat every week for an hour, and I want to give it a test run. At 7:00 p.m. Mountain time (02:00 Thursday morning Universal Time, 1.5 hours from the time I post this entry) I’ll be live on my new UStream channel. Here’s a handy countdown clock to help you know how much time is left until the chat:

When you go to that page, if it’s working (and I’m logged in), you’ll see a window with me sitting in my office, blabbering about something. There is a chat room embedded on that page, so you can chat with me and each other, and I’ll try to handle the load of the conversation! You are automatically put into the chat room with a name like user87950875 or some such; "type /nick [nickname]" (replace [nickname] with whatever nickname you want) to change your name.

As part of the experiment I am embedding the video stream here. If this works, you’ll see me on this blog page when I’m on!

Eventually I hope to do this on a regular basis, and make it fancier like Chris Pirillo does (and thanks go to him for his help in getting me to understand this fancy schmancy tech).

See you on the web! Actually, I won’t, but you’ll see me…

Update: I think that went pretty well! Lots of folks, fun comments, and good questions. I know there wasn’t much lead time, but this was an experiment. When I do this again I’ll give more notice. But I do want to make it a weekly event.

Brandon Haught from Florida Citizens for Science just sent me a note that things are actually looking up in Florida in fighting the creeping crud of creationism^©:

The American Institute of Biological Sciences released a letter in support of the science standards.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State also released a letter in support of the standards.

The Florida Academy of Sciences presented a supporting resolution at Monday’s public forum meeting in Orlando.

Links to those letters are on the FCS site linked above. Also, Monroe County, one of the contested counties, has passed a resolution in favor of the standards that support evolution!

This is great news, but the stare BOE meets next week, and we’ll see where things fall then. But this bodes well.

A few weeks ago I wrote about what what the Presidential candidates think about science. At the time, I said there wasn’t much on Obama, for example.

That’s no longer true. Popular Mechanics has posted a guide to some sci-tech issues and what the candidates think about them. The interesting issues (since you’re sitting here reading a science blog) are science/education and space. There are links there for Clinton and Obama, though interestingly not for McCain or Huckabee (who, as I write this, is still campaigning). Their list is not terribly up-to-date, as they still list Romney, who dropped out a while back now.

I didn’t see anything gasp-worthy in the statements made by either Clinton or Obama. Both will support science education, both want climate change studied, both want make sure NASA continues its bold exploration blah blah blah. Don’t get me wrong: they both look pretty good in these categories, it’s just that the statements are pretty much boilerplate (that is, standard rhetoric). I’d like to see some specifics other than "complete the space station". How about, put a human on the Moon by 2020? Send a robotic mission to probe the ice in Europa? Make sure we have enough tracking and data relay satellites to support long-range and long-term high-data rate missions?

I know, science and space aren’t key issues with most voters. But I suspect they are to readers of this blog, so there you go. More grist for the mill. I’ll be voting on issues like the economy, the war, immunity for telecoms, torture, foreign policy, and the like. But my eye will also be on science issues, because in my opinion (and let’s face it, it’s more than that– it’s a fact) they are also critically important to our future.