Let me start this off by first noting this is an unconfirmed report. We don’t have anything solid yet. Keep that in mind, please!

Via my pal Kiki Sanford comes news that the results of an experiment showing neutrinos moving faster than light (FTL) may have been due to equipment malfunction. Science Insider is reporting, citing unconfirmed sources, that a GPS had a bad connection to a computer, and this caused the timing for the experiment to be thrown off:

According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos’ flight and an electronic card in a computer. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed. Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos. New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis.

Here’s some background. A few months ago, scientists in Europe made a startling announcement: they had measured the velocity of neutrinos, a type of subatomic particle, and found they were moving faster than light. They created a packet of neutrinos in one spot, detected them in another, and then very carefully timed how long the flight took. By dividing the distance by the time, they found that the neutrinos got from Point A to Point B 60 nanoseconds faster than light would!

Obviously, this caused quite the uproar. The scientists involved were careful to state they were’t actually claiming FTL travel, just that they got this result. They also asked for help in figuring it out. Lots of ideas were aired out, and new experiments tried, but in the end timing was always the critical factor. The distance the particles traveled was known to very high accuracy, but the timing was far more difficult to ascertain.

The timing was done using a GPS system, which in theory is accurate enough to do the trick. There are lots of ways you have to be very careful when using GPS, and a lot of folks focused on that. Most of these were pretty high level issues (accounting for relativity, for example), but I never heard anything like "Hey, better try reconnecting that there cable."

To be clear: this is unconfirmed, and still in the rumor stage. If this turns out to be the case, though, then we’re essentially done here. I’ll be very curious to see how this plays out over the next few hours and days. Stay tuned!

You might think I’m posting this just because of the awesome title above, but in fact it’s for a video that’s even better. I know!

Here’s the scoop: after WWII, the US government found they had some extra sodium no one wanted, so they disposed of it.

In a lake. Full of water. And by the way, it was ten tons of pure sodium.

So yeah, you wanna see this newsreel footage from the event:

Holy crap.

[UPDATE: By a funny coincidence, I just found out that io9 posted a similar article with 10 videos featuring explosive chemical reactions!]

Sodium is highly reactive. It’s way over on the left side of the periodic table, which means it really wants to give an extra electron to any receptive atom or molecule that happens by. Water will happily accept that electron, but at a cost: the reaction creates sodium hydroxide (NaOH) and hydrogen gas (H₂). It also generates a lot of extra energy in the form of heat. A lot. And there’s hydrogen around. Remember the Hindenburg?

So yeah. Heat + hydrogen = BANG. Especially when you’re dumping that much sodium into a lake! The explosions generated by this were impressive, to say the least.

In high school we did something like this, though on a very small scale. Our teacher took a tiny bit of sodium and put it in a glass with water in it. Sodium is very light, and floats. It reacted with the water, but far more slowly than in this video, rolling around on the surface. As it did, it released the hydrogen, which is lighter than air (and also warm from the reaction) so it rose. The heat ignited it, and so as the ball of shiny metal sodium rolled around on the water’s surface, a tiny blue vertical flame followed it around. It was one of the coolest things I had ever seen, and probably made my nerdy adulthood that much more inevitable.

Oh, and all that surplus WWII sodium? While that would destroy the ecology of a lake, in this case it was already a heavily alkaline lake with no fish in it. While I wouldn’t say this was a great thing to do, at least they thought to minimize the impact. But cripes: don’t try this at home.

Tip o’ the vent hood to Corante.

I’m not sure why so many people think I don’t read xkcd, but a metric buttload of people sent me a link to today’s comic [marginally NSFW]. I thank all of you who did, but take note: given that I am a vastly huge geek, and xkcd is the most popular geek comic in the observable Universe^†, rest assured I read it.

I have something to add, but go read the comic first. Go.

Back now? OK, so now that you’ve seen it, I have to note we used to make a similar joke when I was in grad school. When my roommate Erik and I ran a night sky lab, he would show students the constellations (they had to learn a handful of them and a few stars for a quiz). In the winter, when it came time to point out Orion, he’d show them Betelgeuse, Rigel, the belt… and then when he pointed out the "dagger", he’d quip, "… and if you want to call that a dagger, be my guest. But I think we all know better."

^† Or is it SMBC? We need a quattuorlitteras acronymically-known web comic stats-off.

César Cantú is an astrophotographer in Mexico. I follow him on Twitter, and hardly a week goes by without him posting a link to some amazing picture he’s taken of a celestial object.

And this is no exception: here is his image of Comet Garradd, a chunk of ice and rock that’s currently about 200 million kilomertes (120 million miles) from Earth:

[Click to encomanate.]

Isn’t that lovely? The comet itself is a bit smeared out since it moved over the time as the picture was taken. But even so, wait a sec — you may have noticed something else odd about this picture. Comets have a tail, right? So why do you see two tails, a blue one pointing off to the left and the other reddish, pointing off to the right?

Aha! Oh, I love a chance to lecture a bit. Bear with me. This is cool.

As I said, comets have a lot of ice in them. As they near the Sun that ice warms, and turns directly into a gas (that process is called sublimation). This gas expands away from the solid nucleus, forming a fuzzy cloud called the coma (Latin for "hair").

Now this is where things get interesting. This coma has both gas in it as well as dust and grains of rock carried off as the ice goes away. The Sun blows out a wind of subatomic particles called the solar wind. This ionizes the gas — strips off one or more electrons — and that gas then gets dragged along with the solar wind. That wind is moving, traveling at several hundred kilometers per second, far faster than the comet moves. So that tail gets blown directly away from the Sun. It tends to be blue (or sometimes green), due to the ionized gas in it.

But the dust and rock isn’t affected as much. As it moves off the comet, it tends to lag behind a bit, following the comet in its orbit. This material reflects sunlight and also reddens it a bit, so that makes the dust tail look yellow or red.

And that’s why there are two differently colored tails pointing in different directions! You can read more about this here.

In fact, I can show you what’s going on even better. The JPL website has an orbit simulator for comets and asteroids, and I created a diagram for Comet Garradd for when César took his picture:

The Sun is in the center, and the planets are labeled; I deleted the orbits for all the planets except Earth and Jupiter so you can get a sense of the plane of the solar system. The comet is in blue, and as you can see its orbit is not at all aligned with the planets; it punches upward through the plane on the right, and then plunges back down on the left. It may be hard to get a 3D image of this in your head, but I added in the two tails: the blue ion tail pointing away from the Sun, and the redder dust tail lagging behind the comet itself. From the viewpoint of the Earth, "underneath" the comet, the tails appear to be on opposite sides of the comet and pointing in opposite directions! It’s just perspective making it look that way; at this point in the comet’s orbit the tails are actually closer to 90° apart.

Strange, isn’t it? I’ve found that three-dimensional thinking is one of the tougher barriers to people really understanding how objects move in space (that, and the vast physical scale of space that crushes our minds to dust). But perspective counts! In astronomy, as well as life itself. And when you get a little perspective, why, sometimes things are even cooler than you first thought.

Image credit: César Cantú.

As we find more and more planets orbiting other stars, we keep finding ones that are weirder and weirder. Enter GJ 1214b: while much more massive than the Earth, it’s apparently mostly water!

[Click to enhydronate this artists's illustration.]

The planet — orbiting the star GJ 1214 at 40 light years from Earth — was actually discovered in 2009 by the MEarth project, which is looking for Earth-like planets around, cool, dim red dwarf stars. This is fertile ground for the search: these stars are extremely common, making up something like 80% of the stars in the sky. Not only that, but because they are cool, a planet at the right temperature to have liquid water on the surface would have to be close to the star. That means its period is shorter, making it easier to find (you don’t have to wait a long time for the effects of its orbit on the star to be seen).

In this case, though, it’s not terribly Earthy! First off, it’s massive, weighing in at 2.7 6.5 times our own planet’s mass. It’s also orbiting the star at a distance of a mere 2 million kilometers, giving it a temperature of something like 230° Celsius (450° F): hot enough to roast a chicken.

But it apparently has something the Earth does: water, and lots of it. From our viewpoint, the planet passes directly in front of its star once every 38 hour orbit (this is called a transit). When it does, it blocks the star’s light a little bit (which is how it was discovered). But the planet also has a thick atmosphere, and when it passes in front of the star, that atmosphere absorbs some of the starlight. As it happens, different things in the atmosphere absorb light differently. Water vapor, for example, has a different impact on a spectrum taken of the star’s light than, say, carbon dioxide.

So by breaking the light up into lots of colors and carefully measuring it, it’s possible to figure out what’s in the planet’s atmosphere. Earlier observations could tell that something was absorbing starlight, but they couldn’t tell what. New Hubble observations (PDF) indicate that the best fit to the observations is: water. Haze, for example, absorbs more visible light than infrared, but that’s not what was seen. The spectrum matches the way water absorbs light best, and in fact indicates the atmosphere may be as much as 50% water by mass!

Given the planet’s size of about 35,000 km (22,000 miles), its density is quite low: about 2 grams per cubic centimeter. Compare that to Earth’s density of 5.5 grams per cc! A rocky world more massive than Earth would most likely be denser than 2 grams/cc, so that’s consistent with this planet having lots of water (which has a density of 1 gram/cc).

The scientists involved indicate this planet would be really weird. There may be exotic forms of water there, due to the high temperatures and pressure deep in the planet’s atmosphere. Most likely the planet formed farther out from the star and migrated inward, a phenomenon that is apparently very common in planetary systems. I’ll note other planets like this have been found, too, but not with such a high-precision spectrum and therefore such certainty.

I know that our solar system is pretty weird; we have all manners of strange things floating around in it. But there’s nothing like seeing something so weird it makes us look positively normal by comparison. Sometimes we really do need a swift kick in the planets.

[P.S. My hearty congrats to Zach Berta, the lead author on the Hubble observations. I got to interview him for an Episode 2 of "Bad Universe", and he was very welcoming and fun to hang out with (and got an IMDB credit out of it). We talked quite a bit about GJ 1214b for the interview, and I'm glad to see this planet and its discoverer get some press!]

Image credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Aguilar (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

Earlier today, the Solar Dynamics Observatory had a front seat to a pretty nifty event: a partial eclipse of the Sun. For about 100 minutes, from its orbital viewpoint SDO saw the Moon pass in front of the Sun, partially blocking it. SDO semi-fictional mascot Camilla Corona created a really cool video of the event, using footage from different wavelengths edited together:

The false color images show the event at a variety of different "colors" in the ultraviolet, where different temperatures and behaviors of the Sun are apparent. One shows the magnetic activity creating loops and towers of plasma arching from the Sun’s surface, another the roiling cells of hot plasma rising from beneath the surface which then cool and sink, and another the extremely hot plasma of the Sun’s corona.

This event happens every few months as the geometry of the Moon, Sun, and SDO’s orbit align in just the right way. See Related Posts below for videos and pictures from previous SDO eclipses.

So you might be wondering what this would look like to the eye were you onboard SDO (and not dying from the vacuum of space). Why, it would look like this:

How awesome is that? Click to enumbrenate.

This was taken in visible light using a filter that lets through bluish-green light (and displayed grayscale). You can see a nice little group of sunspots there… which is hardly "little": that grouping is comfortably larger than Jupiter, more than ten times the size of the Earth!

You can follow Camilla Corona SDO on G+ and on Twitter to stay on top of what our local star is doing.

Image credit: NASA/SDO

The news about Heartland Institute just took a decidedly odd turn. Recently, internal documents leaked from the far-right group revealed their antiscience agenda, including their funding strategy, donor list, and most startlingly a paper outlining their strategy to "dissuade teachers from teaching science".

When these documents were posted, Heartland started threatening the sites hosting them, as well as bloggers who wrote about them including a 71-year-old veteran). This part is very important: Heartland has made repeated claims that the strategy paper is a fake.

Now, the leaker has outed himself: Peter Gleick, a research scientist with the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security, which among other things investigates the impact of hydrology on human health and how climate change plays into it.

In his admission, Gleick says he initially received the Institute’s internal documents in the mail anonymously. Given their potential impact, he tried to confirm their reality. How he did so, though, is something of an issue:

In an effort to [confirm the accuracy of the documents], and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name.

In other words, Gleick used a false identity to get more information from Heartland itself. This is an interesting situation, to say the least. I’ll note that faking an identity is not necessarily wrong or illegal. And if there is a greater moral good involved, like exposing dirty dealings on issues that have a major impact on people’s lives — say — it might even be understandable. On the other hand, if he impersonated someone real, then this may be a situation of identity theft. There’s also the question of whether he did everything he could to find out the veracity of the documents before taking the path he did. I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t have all the information, so I don’t really have an opinion on this. On the other hand I have very little doubt that how people come down on this point will depend very strongly on where they stand on the reality of climate change.

However, how he obtained this information is not really the point. The information on those documents and their veracity is paramount. In his article, Gleick continues:

The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication.

Emphasis added. Note that Gleick is explicitly saying the strategy document about the Heartland Institute trying to dissuade the teaching of science is in fact real, despite the claims from Heartland saying it’s not. He is also saying he did not make any alterations, so again he is claiming they are actual Heartland Institute internal documents. Heartland has indeed admitted that nearly all of the documents are in fact real, but maintain the strategy document is a fake.

From the standpoint of an outside observer, this boils down in some ways to a he-said-she-said situation. Heartland says the document is a fake. Gleick says it is not. While people on both sides have made arguments for and against its authenticity, the actual evidence we have from both sides is circumstantial. Unless the strategy document contains some sort of traceable information, or the Heartland Institute’s files are opened, there may not be any way to know for sure. However, Gleick has said he can explicitly confirm the documents are the same. I expect there will come a time when he’ll have to do so publicly.

Obviously, some will paint Gleick as a criminal and fraud, and others as a whistleblower and hero. In the NYT blog Dot Earth, journalist Andrew Revkin has already said Gleick’s reputation is ruined and his credibility destroyed, while at least one commenter is already calling him a hero.

However, there are things we do indeed know. One is that the Heartland Institute has a long history of climate change denial. Another is that they were huge cheerleaders of the manufactured Climategate nonsense, involving stolen emails from real scientists, but threatened to sue bloggers when their own documents were exposed in this very similar way. This reaction by Heartland is very telling, in my opinion.

And even that, in the end, is nothing more than a distraction, something taking away from the real issue: the Earth is warming up. This is reality, and this is overwhelmingly supported by the scientific evidence. And the other thing I know for sure is that groups like Heartland, as well as ones like the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Mail, and many, many more, will now double their efforts to sow doubt on that fact.