Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Oops! I found out about this the other day, but forgot to mention it: Penn (yes, Penn) will be in next season’s "Dancing with the Stars".

Now, if you’re done making those comical rubbing-fists-in-eyes motions, I’ll continue. His partner will be Kym Johnson, who I hope is 17 feet tall, as Penn is ginormous (my biggest shock when I met Teller is that he is my height, roughly 5′10″ or so; I always assumed he was three feet tall). I also hope her insurance is paid up. He may try to saw her in half or shoot her or set her on fire, which, honestly, would be totally cool.

I honestly don’t know what to make of this news, except to say that I will definitely watch it. I have to give him the benefit of the doubt; he picked up playing bass pretty quickly, so maybe he can dance.

I also discovered that he will be on the Oprah Winfrey show today as they introduce the new season.

Hat tip to The Friendly Atheist for reminding me this, though my title is way better.

UPDATE: A DoD press release states that "Nearly all of the debris will burn up on reentry within 24-48 hours and the remaining debris should re-enter within 40 days." They also say that confirmation that the fuel tank carrying the hydrazine was disrupted will come within 24 hours. Stay Tuned.

UPDATE II: CNN video of a press conference by the Pentagon has some footage of the missile very clearly hitting the satellite. Very cool… and at the very end of the few seconds of the footage, I’d swear a bow wave forms as the expanding cloud slams into the very thin atmosphere at that height. Also, they appear to have seen indications of hydrazine in a spectrum of the explosion they took, which means it looks like they hit the tank.

CNN is reporting that the Navy successfully blew up the spy satellite USA 193 that was in danger of an uncontrolled re-entry:

At approximately 10:26 p.m. EST today, a U.S. Navy AEGIS warship, the USS Lake Erie, fired a single modified tactical Standard Missile-3, hitting the satellite approximately 247 kilometers (133 nautical miles) over the Pacific Ocean as it traveled in space at more than 17,000 mph.

Well then. This was reported to have been postponed, but I guess the seas calmed down enough for them to take the shot.

Interestingly, the CNN story says the missile had no warhead. A simple impact is enough to do the deed; at relative velocities of several miles per second a small pebble can do serious damage.

I’ll note that in their video, CNN shows Hubble when talking about the satellite. Geez.

I don’t know what more there will be to this story until the pieces come down, which may take a few more weeks. As usual, when I learn more, I’ll post!

Well, since the eclipse here in Boulder was almost a total bust (haha, get it?) — thin but varying clouds obscured it, though as I write this a thin crescent of lit Moon can be seen, kinda — I might as well let you know that the new Tangled Bank carnival of science is up at Greg’s place. Lots of fancy schmancy sciencey thingies there.

Update: looks like the satellite smack-down was postponed, too.

I happened to stumble on a page after my own heart: the science of fairy tales. It’s a cute diversion for a few minutes, but unfortunately, it’s a bit lacking. It only tackles three fairy tales, for one thing. The Little Mermaid one is a stretch (talking about how sound can be captured), though the flying carpet story is fun.

This could be a good starting point for a site teaching science to kids, in fact. Can you spin straw into gold? No, but stars that explode make gold out of other elements. Can beans grow overnight into a stalk that can reach the clouds? No, but kudzu grows a foot a day (I grew up near houses engulfed in that evil ivy), and giants can only get so big before their bones can’t support their weight. And as far as the Emperor’s New Clothes goes… that one can be taught as is. It’s a perfect example of critical thinking in action.

… because Scorpios are skeptical.

Via Rebecca comes the news that my mancrush, David Tennant, isn’t the biggest fan of astrology.

Heh. It’s ironic, given all the mumbo-jumbo Doctor Who espouses sometimes. As I’ve said before, the only people the stars affect directly are astronomers.

Still, I recall being much amused when I found out that David Duchovny is a skeptic about most antiscience topics, while Gillian Anderson has more of the touch of the woo.

Real life is always cooler than fiction.

Hey, don’t forget about the lunar eclipse tonight!

Somehow I missed this one at the AAS meeting I attended in January: a team of astronomers found that our galaxy is twice as thick as previously thought!

The Milky Way is a spiral, meaning it’s a flat disk. Face on, you can see the glorious spiral arms and the central bulge, with the disk spreading across an impressive 100,000 light years or so.

But edge-on, it’s much thinner. The exact thickness depends on what you’re looking at, though, making this a bit dicey. High-mass stars tend to stick right to the mid-plane, the line dividing the galaxy in half (like a layer of icing through a cake). Lower mass stars can reach farther above and below this plane (lighter weight stars get tossed around more easily). Other methods produce different results yet.

The astronomers in question here looked at warm gas in the galaxy… sorta. What they did was examine pulsars, dead, dense stars that send out short, sharp radio signals. As those signals pass through warm gas, they get spread out in wavelength, so that the longer wavelengths arrive a wee bit later than the shorter ones. The amount of dispersion of wavelength tells you how much gas the signal passed through.

The astronomers looked at pulsars where the distances were known, and the pulsars themselves were well away from the galactic mid-plane. When they did this, they could determine the density of the warm gas between us and the pulsars, and where that gas stops.

The results: the warm gas stretches 6000 light years above and 6000 light years below the mid-plane. Before, it was thought the galaxy was only half this thickness.

Like I said before, this doesn’t mean the galaxy itself is twice as thick as we thought in general, because the thickness depends on what you measure. But this does throw a monkey wrench in some ideas about the size of the galaxy, and the distribution of gas within it. Why is the gas spread out so much more than previously thought? How did it get there?

Surprises like this are generally important. It means we get to revise theories, and that in turn means we’re edging closer to the truth. That’s what science is all about.

Tip o’ the dew shield to BABloggee Rich for sending this along!

The Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down safely today.

There’s not much to add to this, except to note where I first heard that it was down, when I checked about a half hour after landing. The NASA website? No, no mention there. The Kennedy Space Center site? Nope, nothing. The KSC Space Shuttle Landing blog? No, that hasn’t been updated since February 17!

No, I saw it first on… Fark. Yes, Fark.

Nice work, NASA.

Too many Farkisms fit here:

I’ll note too that after I drafted this post, NASA’s main page has a note that Atlantis landed safely.