Blogs / Bad Astronomy

A British man is selling his entire collection of Doctor Who collectibles because he has come to the epiphany that the good Doctor is the work of the devil.

Now far be it for me to make fun of someone’s religion… but if your religion is telling you Doctor Who is evil, you’re doing it wrong.

Anyway, the good news is that he’s selling all his stuff on eBay, but the bad news is the article doesn’t say when. My schedule coming up is a bit full (more on that later) so I doubt I’ll be able to keep up with this. If a BABLoggee out there gets wind that the stuff is online, please let me know. He has a full-size TARDIS! Squeee! I’m sure it’ll be way too pricey for me, but an astronomer can dream…

Tip o’ the sonic screwdriver to Rav Winston.

This cute bugger to the left is the molecule amino acetonitrile, a close cousin of amino acids. It’s an organic molecule — it’s based on carbon — and it’s thought to be a precursor, a building block of the simplest amino acid, glycine.

Cool, huh?

Well, yeah, but that’s not the thing. The thing is, this molecule has been found floating in space near the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

That’s cool.

We know that there are complex organic molecules in space. Just like individual atoms, molecules can emit light at very specific colors, and by finding those colors of emitted light we can detect the molecules. In general, the light is actually in the radio wavelength part of the spectrum, so giant radio telescopes are used to find them. The observations are a bit tricky, because molecules have lots of ways of emitting different kinds of light, so the total energy the molecule has to emit at any particular color gets gets spread out over all the different colors. Think of it this way: if you poke a hole in a milk carton, the milk will rush out, but if you poke 100 holes, the milk will dribble out of each hole. Think of it this way: the more lottery winners there are, the less each winner gets from the contest. In the same way, because molecules can emit light in many colors, each color gets less of the total energy, making it fainter and harder to detect.

So molecules, especially complex organic ones like amino acetonitrile, are pretty faint emitters and hard to see. But scientists at Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, did it. They identified 51 different specific colors of radio light coming from a dense hot cloud of gas near the galactic center, and those colors are tagged as being from our friend above. This cloud, called B2, is a known haven for organic molecules such as formaldehyde, ethyl alcohol, and acetic acid (given those last two, my guess is that alien winemakers in B2 have their successes and failures).

Amino acids are the building blocks of life, as biologists are fond of saying; they are the basis of proteins and are the way our genetic code is mapped in our DNA our DNA is coded to make them. Finding them in space is an interesting task, because that would mean the conditions to form amino acids are easy to come by. Plus, it’s possible for them to literally rain down from space. Amino acids have been found in meteorites, for example. But never in space.

So finding amino acetonitrile is a big step in finding a proper amino acid in space. It means that another big piece of the amino acid puzzle is available in space, and that’s encouraging. Finding a true amino acid source in space may just mean we need to be more diligent and look more carefully. It’s there, and announcing its presence, but it’s whispering.

I don’t have much info about this, but space.com is reporting that Alan Stern, who for the past year or so has been NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science, has resigned. No reason has been given yet. However, it says that NASA’s chief Mike Griffin "reluctantly accepted" the resignation, so this doesn’t sound like it was just an end-of-tenure sort of thing.

Stern has overseen a lot of reform in the planetary science aspect of NASA, getting missions on track and on budget. There have been lots of problems, of course, because hey– it’s NASA. But from what I’ve heard Stern has been doing a good job at headquarters. As a planetary scientist himself he knows both sides of the business (admin and science) and again from what I hear he’s been well-liked and things were going well. His resignation is a shock to me, and I can’t help thinking this isn’t a good thing for NASA. The timing is funny too, since NASA just had a nasty PR hit over the announcement to shut down the Mars rovers, which drew such an outcry that they changed their minds, and reinstated the rover program.

But was that enough to cause Stern to resign? I wonder if more bad news is coming. There’s no way to know yet, and I won’t speculate. We’ll see for sure soon enough.

In the meantime, Ed Weiler, an old hand at NASA (he was chief scientist for Hubble for many years) will take over for Stern. I assume that will be temporary until someone else can take over permanently. Stay tuned.

Hat tip to BABloggee Kevin Jung for letting me know about this.

Over at EarthSkyBlog, Larry Sessions wrote a post suggesting that we call the extremely bright gamma-ray burst GRB 080319B "the Clarke Event", since it happened around the same time that ACC died.

This may surprise you, but honestly, I don’t have very strong feelings about this idea. Clarke was a huge influence on so many people, of course. That is without a doubt! And obviously the GRB was one of the most incredible events we’ve ever seen.

But tying the two together in this way strikes me as artificial. Astronomers have done such things before; there was a tremendous explosion on the surface of the Sun on July 14, 2000 that’s called The Bastille Day Event. That makes sense, and the name arose organically.

And I have no issues for calling the GRB the Clarke Event, but campaigning for it strikes me as, well, forced. Either it’ll happen or it won’t. The poetic alignment of the two events is enough for me, to be honest. I won’t go out of my way to merge the two. If it happens, it happens, and I’ll pick up the lingo like anyone else will, but I don’t feel particularly strongly about trying to make it so.

Hat tip to the many BABloggees who wrote to me about this!

I just got back down off my roof with The Little Astronomer; we were up there to watch the Shuttle and space station rise into the sky. The view was very cool: they rose over Boulder, and as they got higher they headed straight into Orion; specifically Rigel, the bright star marking Orion’s knee. Even better: as they rose, they passed into the Earth’s shadow. As the sunlight gradually dimmed for them, we saw them get fainter. We didn’t see the Jules Verne remote cargo carrier, unfortunately. I’m not sure why.

Best yet: I got pictures! I loaded all six onto Flickr. Below are two cool shots; click them to embiggen to Flickr.

This is a 10 second exposure taken a few minutes after 9:00 p.m. The odd glow is from a neighbor’s light across the street. It’s pretty, though! You can see Rigel just above center, and Orion’s belt at the top. The ISS was pretty bright and very easy to see; it’s the streak in the middle.

The next picture was taken about 15 seconds later. The scene has changed!

First, you can see both the Shuttle (lower streak in line with the upper one) and the ISS. Second, the ISS has faded! See how it gets dimmer as it moves up; the line gets fainter near the top? It was passing into twilight, and so as seen from the station the Sun was "setting", and the station itself got dimmer. The Shuttle dimmed a few seconds later when it got that high off the horizon.

Again, go to Flickr to see these in higher resolution. They turned out pretty well! I may have to put the full-res versions someplace.

And remember: all I had here was a tripod, a digital camera, and some foreknowledge. That’s really all it takes! So the next time something like this happens, you can get pictures too. It’s not hard.

What’s that? Creationist sympathizers in Florida are trying to force an unnecessary and unneeded bill providing for the Orwellianly-phrased "academic freedom" of teachers and students?

Yeah, shocker. Brandon Haught of Florida Citizens for Science has the details. If you think this isn’t a big deal, read how the bill is summarized on the Florida Senate’s page:

Provides public school teachers with a right to present scientific information relevant to the full range of views on biological and chemical origins. Prohibits a teacher from being discriminated against for presenting such information. Prohibits students from being penalized for subscribing to a particular position on evolution, etc.

Hey, remember when Oklahoma did that a few weeks ago? I guess Florida legislators are jealous that Oklahoma is hogging all the ridicule.

Brandon says the creationists are lighting up the Senate switchboards with phone calls, so if you’re a Floridian and you like reality the way it is, then please take a moment and make your voice heard as well and let the Florida Senate know that this bill is a waste of time, energy, money, and will hurt our students and the reputation of Florida. The bottom of Brandon’s post has links that will give you what you need. He’s also tracking the progress of the bill on another page.

Update: I got pictures!

Astropixie notes that the Space Shuttle just undocked from the Space Station, and Jules Verne, the European cargo carrier, is just a few thousand kilometers away as well.

This means that if one passes overhead, you can see all three in a triple pass!

They’ll be passing the US around 9:00 Mountain time. It’s not hugely favorable for me in Boulder, getting only 23 degrees above the horizon. Worse, I have to look over the city of Boulder to see them, which means a bright sky. Still, I’ll be looking. Check heavens-above.com to see if you’ll get a good view too!