As long as I’m mea culping… yesterday, I posted a fantastic picture of the Sun showing an enormous arc of material, called a prominence, looping off the Sun. In the post, I mentioned that most of these collapse. But this time, I was wrong: it turns out this one did indeed burst away from the Sun. And you can see it in this animation created from SDO images:
WOW. As you can see, the explosion happened away from us, so it doesn’t look like we’ll be affected by it at all… except, that is, by its utter beauty and mind-crushing size. Remember as you watch that: the Sun is 1.4 million kilometers (860,000 miles) across. When it does something, it does it BIG.
Two news updates, both of which are pretty interesting.
1) The arsenic-utilizing bacterium is still in the news… because a lot of scientists are casting serious doubt on the results. Carl Zimmer, biology journalist (and Discover blogger) wrote a very interesting article about it for Slate (and has followups on his Discover blog). The criticism is not mild, either, with words like "flim-flam" being used. Carl approached the investigators who wrote the paper for Science, and they declined to comment — that’s usually an excuse, but in this case I think they’re right; they don’t want to engage in a scientific debate through the media. But I certainly hope the investigations continue.
I’ll note I reported the press conference results straight — at some level, I have to trust the scientists know what they’re doing, that the peer-review process is working, and the results reliable. In this case, with a result depending on some relatively complex biological and chemical arguments, I was acting out of trust. This trust may yet be proven to be borne out, or it may not. It’s possible the original researchers are correct, and it’s possible their critics are. The best way to find out is more science.
Regular readers may know me as the beloved online blogger for Discover Magazine, but I also sometimes write longer articles for the print version as well.
Last summer, I wrote a piece on the search for small solar system objects that might, theoretically, circle the Sun inside Mercury’s orbit. Called vulcanoids, they are extremely difficult to observe, which is why it’s still not certain if they exist or not (I wrote a brief post about this back in 2008). Two astronomers (and friends of mine), Dan Durda and Alan Stern, are hot on the trail of the purported possible planetesimals; I talked to them about their chase and the history of the search for these hot little objects.
Until now, the article was only available in the print magazine or to online subscribers, but now my brilliant prose is open to the public. Seriously, this is a pretty cool topic, and one that most people don’t know about. The region between the Sun and Mercury is closer to the Earth than the main asteroid belt, yet we know much less about it. Read the article and find out why.
I did a short interview via email with The Charlotte Observer reporter T. DeLene Beeland which is now online. It covers the usual stuff about how the Universe will kill us all, and it’s brief enough to read in between sneaking in games of Angry Birds at work. It’s part of a Blog of the Week feature they have there; Ms. Beeland has a list of other science bloggers she’s interviewed, too, with quite a few familiar names!
My pal Mur Lafferty is a multi-purpose machine: she writes superhero stories (Playing for Keeps is a lot of fun), she blogs, and she podcasts.
In fact, in her latest ‘cast for I Should Be Writing she interviews me! We talk a little about death and destruction from the heavens, but we also chat about writing itself. I give some useless advice on the topic, basically telling people what I went through to become the god of media that I am today — obviously, my advice on this should be suspect — as well as some rules of thumb I adhere to. Actually, one that’s serious is that if it ain’t working, it’s OK to walk away for a while. As long as it’s just for a little while.
I hope you enjoy that interview. And if you did (and really, even if you didn’t) you can always check out this interview of Paul and Storm at Geek Mom. That’s a fun one too, though more about music than writing, and with two nerds instead of one. Unless you count Mur as a nerd, in which case we’re even.
Every now and again I delve back into the ancient art of writing for an actual magazine that has words printed in ink on paper which gets sent to you via the postal service.
Quaint, I know.
But I wrote just such an article for Discover Magazine which is in the December 2010 issue. The article, called "Why Size Matters" is about why defining the word planet is proving to be so difficult.
Funny how writing works sometimes. I got the idea for the article while researching a blog post on a moon in the outer solar system. Curious about its size, I started poking around the web looking for other moon diameters, and then started wondering how big an object you need before gravity crushes it into a ball. I thought I could write the article about just that, but the words apparently had a mind of their own and went in a different direction. I wound up talking about what we think of as planets, and then in the middle of all this I read an advance copy of Mike Brown’s wonderful book How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming (full review coming soon). Mike spends quite a bit of time on this very topic, as you might imagine (he discovered the Kuiper Belt object Eris, which kick-started the demotion of Pluto). I found his thinking to be very similar to mine, and his writing actually gelled a lot of disorganized thoughts I had about all this.
Anyway, the article was fun to write, and I think anyone who likes my blog will like it. I got the issue in the mail the other day, and it’s on newsstands and at bookstores now. I hope you’ll check it out.
My first book, Bad Astronomy, came out in 2002. It’s enjoyed a few printings since then, and still sells nicely.
I get a lot of requests for an audio version, and I’m happy to announce that Audible.com has made one! It’s narrated by Kevin Scullin, a nice guy who contacted me a while back about it. We had some interesting email exchanges, mostly involving pronunciations. That’s something that hadn’t occurred to me! When you write a book, mispronouncing a word in your head is no big deal, but I imagine will generate a lot of mail in an audio book.
The book sells for $19.95, but they have a deal there where you can get it $7.49. Go to the link above for details.
Not to forget you UK folks, there’s a version for you guys as well. It’s pretty much the same, but in your version color is spelled with a u.
There’s a sample on the Audible site, and it’s a little odd to hear my words spoken by someone else. I guess I’ll never make it as a screenwriter.
Anyway, if you get a copy, please leave a comment and let me know what you think! And also rate it on the Audible site. I’m sure they dig that kind of thing. Thanks!
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking, movie reviews, and all that) can be found here.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
"If things worked the way I wanted them to, any reporter about to do another 'sensational' story on deadly meteors would consult this volume, and bang! common sense would find its way into the news. How strange would that world be?" -- Adam Savage, Mythbusters
"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating." -- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising
Regular readers may know me as the beloved online blogger for Discover Magazine, but I also sometimes write longer articles for the print version as well. 
