Blogs / Bad Astronomy

But of course, we know that. That puts the lie to everything Ben Stein says in his craptacular movie Expelled, too, since it’s illegal to teach religion in schools. And why doesn’t Ben ever mention Chris Comer in the movie? She really was expelled due to creationism… but maybe Stein would rather you didn’t know about her. Hmmmm.

The heroes at NCSE put out this video, which drives home the point about just how deceptive creationist promulgators can be, showing yet again that they are hypocrites, ignoring the Ninth Commandment.

The Milky Way Galaxy is relatively typical of galaxies today, if a bit on the beefy side. It has about 200 billion stars, and is 100,000 light years across.

Now imagine a galaxy with that same mass, but only 5000 light years across. That would be an incredibly densely packed galaxy, and in all honesty, pretty freaky.

But that’s exactly what astronomers using Hubble and Keck have found! Probing the early Universe, 11 billion light years away, they found nine galaxies that are as massive as galaxies today, but far more compact. The galaxies are very young, only a half to one billion years old, judging from the types of stars they contain. Not only that, they appear to be quiet: unlike our galaxy today, these distant compact galaxies are not actively forming stars. It’s as if they formed all their stars all at once right from the start, and then that was that.

This plot shows that these galaxies really are small and massive. Size is shown on the vertical scale (bigger galaxies are near the top) and mass along the horizontal (more massive galaxies to the right). A big massive galaxy would be to the upper right, and a low mass, dinky galaxy to the lower left. These oddballs are marked, and are clearly separate from other galaxies: they are massive, yet small.

That’s really weird! What could cause such galaxies to form so tightly jammed with stars? One idea is that in the early Universe there were pockets of dark matter, places where it was somewhat denser than on average. Hydrogen would have collected there, attracted by the fierce gravity, and formed the galaxies. Constrained by the dark matter pockets, the galaxies would have been very dense and formed stars furiously for a short period until all the hydrogen was used up. That would explain their small stature, dense stellar population, and lack of ongoing star formation. But it’s just a hypothesis for now.

What’s also odd is that we do not see any galaxies like these today; any galaxy of comparable mass that we see in the current Universe today is far larger, like our Milky Way. So these galaxies existed in the past — possibly in large numbers — but we don’t see them now. Where did they go?

They may get bigger with time. It’s not clear how they would do that, but perhaps the more massive stars fall to the center, flinging lighter stars outward, puffing up the galaxies over time (I describe this process a bit in a post yesterday about globular clusters). Maybe they collide and puff up — though that means they would get even more massive than we see them, and they’re already as hefty as galaxies today. Maybe they grow dark over time, and we just don’t see them any more.

Actually, I don’t like any of these answers very much. We obviously need a lot more observations of these tiny dense suckers. However, we’re pretty much at the limit now; it took Hubble’s and Keck’s incredible resolution to be able to see these things at all. We’ll have to wait for the Hubble servicing mission in September to get even deeper images, when the new Wide Field Camera goes online. I suspect that STIS, the spectrograph that I used to work on, may be able to help as well, if the astronauts can fix it too.

Either way, it’s cool to know the Universe can still throw us the odd curveball or two. The more we look, the more weirdness we find.

Fancy yourself a science writer? Do you like weather?

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (right here in Boulder!) is holding a four-day science writing workshop on June 23-27, and they’re looking for applicants. This will be fully funded (well, there are five fellowships), but you have to have the chops: they’re looking for applicants with "five years of writing, producing, or editing experience for a general-interest audience," as an example.

I normally don’t post things such as this, but NCAR is way way cool, and I support fully what they do. And, of course, we need more trained science writers, trained specifically in topics of interest and import. I know a few pro writers read my humble blog, so apply! The application deadline is May 16.

We just got back from Carolyn Porco’s talk in Boulder about the Cassini mission to Saturn (yes, my whole family went — quite the occasion!). It was, as usual, very inspiring and interesting — and this is the third time I’ve seen it. I never get tired of seeing the iconic image of a Saturnian eclipse (click to enlargify):

… which is why I chose it as the best image of 2006. And of course, afterwards there were lots of people talking with her, so I basically just waved hello and got the family home. I actually like that picture of her talking to a woman from the audience; when you take still pictures you capture a moment that is not always perceived by eye. Sometimes you catch people in funny expressions (with their eyes closed or their mouths drooping open and such) but in this one it looks like the woman is making a particularly interesting point, and Carolyn is responding in tune with her.

As usual, I really recommend attending her talks. They’re very uplifting.

A gold star to whoever can tell me what moon she named her coat after.

What’s better than a story about a blurry, grainy, out of focus overly-zoomed in photo of a UFO?

Stories that don’t even have pictures.

We have two — yes, count e’m, TWO — stories of UFOs seen with no footage, just eyewitness reports. The first comes from Texas, where two women describe what they saw a few nights ago: a bright light moving across the sky, that suddenly disappeared after making a sharp turn.

It sounds like what they saw was an airplane in the distance, reflecting the Sun (the article says they saw it "at night", but doesn’t specify early evening or any specific time). When an airplane is so far away it appears as a point of light, it can dim very rapidly — making it disappear — as it turns and changes its aspect to a viewer. I’ve seen this effect many times. I’m not saying this is what they saw for sure, but it sounds likely.

The second story is, if anything, worse than the first. This time it was in Alabama, and the descriptions make it sound pretty much like they saw a meteor heading toward the horizon. One witness said:

“When it was coming through the sky, I really thought it was an airplane that lost control so I came to a complete stop on the road. When I got out and looked at it was no sound coming from it.”

No sound, and he says it didn’t appear to be an aircraft.

“It speed up to maybe two hundred miles per hour it went straight to the ground and disappeared.”

Remember, when anybody gives a distance, size, or speed, you can almost be 100% positive they are wrong. Without knowing the distance, you cannot judge the size or speed, and if you don’t know the size, you can’t know the distance. So the witness was just guessing; this happens all the time in such reports. But this report sounds precisely like a meteor, and most people have little or no experience with bright bolides, so they can be fooled easily.

Let em say this clearly, too: I have no issue with people who think they have seen UFOs. What bugs me are credulous news stations that report these things without talking to someone who actually knows anything about this! In both cases, that would have helped immensely.

As usual with tales of UFOs, tip o’ the tin foil beanie to Fark.

A museum exhibit is getting ready to travel the country with an extremely controversial idea: evolution isn’t perfect.

Oh wait, that’s a false controversial idea. Reality-based folks know it’s not perfect. We have bad backs, ridiculously poorly designed organs, and a whole host of other problems because we haven’t perfectly adapted to our environment yet. Genetic drift and pressures of environmental adaptation take a while, and we’ve only come out of our arboreal phase a few million years ago.

Well, that, or because some chick gave some dude an apple. I can never keep all this "science" straight.

Tip o’ the herniated L5/S1 disk to my bro Sid.

I’m not a huge fan of MySpace; the layout is awful, the interface nonsensical, the actual social networking capabilities limited^*.

Now imagine taking the epic dumbosity that is Expelled, and putting it on MySpace. You might expect a black hole of stoopid would form from the incredible density of nonsense in one place.

You’d be right.

The caretakers of the Expelled MySpace page did something so mind-bogglingly silly that you’d think it had to be a joke; they put up a poll (scroll down a bit), asking the question, "Do you think the theory of Intelligent Design should be taught in our education system?"

Evidently, a little while after the poll went up, unsurprisingly, it was heavily leaning toward "yes". But then PZ noticed, as did many others. You can guess how things went after that:

Heh. Don’t let me stop anyone from piling on, by the way. I suspect eventually the poll will be pulled, once the caretakers of the page figure out which one is the hole in the ground.