I’m getting email and tweets about a Flash-based interactive tool where you can zoom in and out on the Universe, getting a scale of things from the tiniest fluctuations in the quantum foam of space to the size of the Universe itself. It’s done logarithmically, using factors of ten, and does a pretty good job. It’s called The Scale of the Universe 2. It takes a few minutes to load, so be patient!

What’s funny is, no one who has linked to it seems to have remembered that the two brothers who created it, Cary and Michael Huang, made a very similar tool a little over a year ago (which itself owes its existence to the Eames brother’s venerable "Powers of Ten"). The new one is better in many ways, of course (though I like the music in the old one better; everyone’s a critic). There are some nice improvements, like some animation, more objects, things that are relatable to kids (the size of the Minecraft world, for example), and more.

One of the things I like about tools like this are the surprising little bits that you learn if you’re really paying attention. For example, at a scale of a few billion kilometers, the only familiar object displayed is the orbit of Neptune. Everything else is a star, and all those stars are red. That’s because the only stars that can get that big are massive red supergiants, stars at the ends of their lives that are far heftier than the Sun. If someone notices that oddity and looks it up, hey, they found out something cool!

Which brings me to one minor thing I’d change about this: clickable links. It’s not hard to stop at someplace along the scale, see something you don’t know ("thou", and "twip"? I had to look those up) and then search for it, but having embedded links to the names would be cool.

I’d also love to see something like this tested in classrooms. I have a pretty decent grasp of scale, so this is fun for me, but I wonder if a kid would get the same feel for it? Right around the one meter mark, where you can see a human, a flower, and an elephant, the scale gets odd. That’s because the scale isn’t linear, it’s logarithmic, changing dramtically quickly with a small movement of the scrollbar. To me, that throws off my internal scaling sense. I wonder if this kind of thing might actually give people a false sense of scale, making very small and very large, distant things seem nearer in size to us? Most people already have a squashed sense of scale — even logarithmically, the Universe is vastly difficult to appreciate; most of it is empty even over large degrees of factors of ten. It’s hard to appreciate even how far away the Moon is, and it’s the closest thing in the sky!

Again, I’m just curious. But I do see this as a nice way to get people hooked on cool stuff, and to get them more curious about the Universe around them. And that’s fine by me.

Sometimes, the images from the Cassini Saturn probe are so cool it’s tempting just to post them and say, "Look at THAT!"

See what I mean? [Click to gigantesenate.]

But of course, I can’t just leave it at that. This image, taken on January 4, 2012, is a bit different than most. Sure, we see Saturn’s magnificent rings, nearly edge on from this perspective. And we’ve seen this icy moon Enceladus many, many times (see Related Posts below for tons more pictures). Look at the bottom of the moon: see those fuzzy streaks? Those are geysers of water spewing from cracks in the moon’s south pole! Cassini has been studying them intently ever since they were discovered; they are proof that liquid water exists under the surface of Enceladus, though it’s still being argued over whether it’s in pockets, like lakes, or the whole moon has an ocean of water under the surface.

Despite all that, I keep getting drawn to the crescent shape itself. We can never see that from Earth. Saturn is much farther out from the Sun than we are, and geometry demands that from home we always see these worlds nearly fully lit by the Sun. The only way to see them like this is to go there.

But also, that giant circular feature is really interesting. It’s big, maybe 200 km (over 100 miles) across, and a bit darker than the surrounding surface. I tried locating it on an atlas of Enceladus, but it wasn’t obvious at all. I thought it might be an impact basin, but a little scrounging online led me to a paper by Cassini imaging team leader Carolyn Porco, which says there are no large impact basins on Enceladus! So what is it?

Well, why not go to Dr. Porco herself? I sent her a note, and she kindly replied. That region is called Diyar Planitia, and it stands out among the surrounding terrain because it’s much smoother. It does have narrow surface features, but they’re too small to be seen at this resolution. At the low angle at which we’re seeing it here, it looks a little bit darker than the rougher terrain around it, so it’s easier to see (which is why on an atlas it’s harder to find). It is roughly circular, but that may simply be coincidence. Enceladus has been massively resurfaced, with some areas much older than others, due to various forces under the surface — looking this all up I learned a new one, called diapirism, where lower density material underneath higher density material can rise up and break through. That’s one process that’s helped change the surface of Enceladus over the eons.

That’s pretty nifty. And think about that! Today I learned of what is to me a new region of the solar system, one that has an interesting and complicated history, molded by vast forces over long-stretched times, one of which was also new to me. How wonderful to get all that from what’s otherwise just a pretty picture!

But of course, in science, there’s no such thing as just a pretty picture. Science is a tapestry, a vast complex fabric interwoven with countless threads. Each of those threads is amazing, each important, and each leads to another. And that’s where the true beauty of science lies.

I caught this video on Geekologie, and it made me laugh. This is a brilliant idea: a woman put a camera on a hula hoop, and then, well, hula’ed:

[WARNING: some folks might feel ill watching this. I will not be blamed if you have to wipe vomit off your keyboard.]

[Note: at the end of the video there are links to other videos like it.]

I found this fascinating. For one thing, the motion is slower than I would’ve expected. I suspect that may be due to an illusion when you watch from the outside as a hula hoop being used; humans are notoriously poor at judging rotating reference frames. After all people, still try to argue with me that centrifugal force isn’t real, when it it quite clearly is.

Even more amazing to me was that I didn’t get ill watching that video. I tend to get a seasick on a kid’s swing or when reading in a car, so the fact I was fine watching this is weird. But I have pretty good 3D spatial reasoning, and have a lot of practice swapping reference frames — trying to figure out when the Moon rises, what configuration planets are in, and how to point a telescope give you a lot of practice there — so maybe that helped. Beats me.

But I wonder what other weird change-of-frames would benefit from using this camera technique? That might make a fun series of videos.

Sometimes, I like to think of a photon of light as a car on a road. As the road dips and curves, a car has to follow that path, dipping and curving as well. It might be weird to think of space as curving, but it does. Gravity from massive objects warps space, and a beam of light moving through that curved space curves along with it.

This is the principle behind what’s called gravitational lensing. A beam of light passing by an object — a big galaxy, say, or a cluster of galaxies — bends one way. A beam headed in a slightly different direction bends a slightly different way. This can really mess with what we see… which I can prove! Check this out: a Hubble image of the galaxy RCSGA 032727-13260.

What a mess! All those arcs and blue smudges are images of that one galaxy. The light from that galaxy traveled nearly 10 billion light years to get here! But when it was halfway here, that light passed by the big cluster of galaxies — the red fuzzballs — in the middle of the image. As it did, the curvature of space distorted and warped the light from the galaxy, and by the time it reached us here at Earth the image looks like this. The outstretched, smeared-out arc is amazing; I’ve never seen one that long and well-defined before.

Not only that, but the image gets broken up into several separate images. There are no fewer than four different repetitions of the background galaxy in the big image. To show that, I put three of them together here. It’s goofed up, to be sure, but you can kinda sorta see they are the same galaxy, flipped over and/or smudged out.

The cool thing about this is we can learn about the more distant galaxy by examining these images. (more…)

I love science. OK, duh, but I really do. And when I go on vacation, I can’t help but see science everywhere, and in every case it makes the trip more fun for me. Seeing local geology, biology, how the stars might look different at a different latitude… it adds to the vacations, makes it better.

That’s why my wife and I started a company called Science Getaways. We figured there are lots of other folks out there like us who would really enjoy taking a vacation that has bonus science added in. Our first planned trip is to a gorgeous Colorado dude ranch called C Lazy U. Besides the usual amenities of such a place — horseback riding, great food, spectacular views of the Rocky Mountains — we’re adding SCIENCE! And scientists: we have a geologist, a biologist, and an astronomer — hey, me! — who will be on hand to give talks about the local nature scene, and then we’ll take hikes to put that new-found knowledge to practical use. I’ll be running a stargazing session every evening with my new 8" Celestron telescope, and I’m hoping to do some solar observing during the day as well.

IMPORTANT NOTE: We’ve negotiated a special rate — the price we’re offering is actually less than the usual ranch rate. We’re hoping to have the entire ranch for our group, but if we don’t have enough reservations by March 1 we can’t guarantee it. Space is limited, so please book now if you plan to come.

By the way, we’re also on Facebook and Google+ if you’d like to add us.

I hope to see lots of BABloggees there!

In the race to find the weirdest planet orbiting another star, we may have a front runner: GJ 667Cc, a super-Earth orbiting one star in a triple system that’s actually relatively closeby. And oh yeah: it just so happens to be in just the right spot to be potentially inhabitable!

Of course, I have some caveats, so don’t get too excited. But this is a weird and pretty cool one!

GJ 667 is a triple star system that’s right in our back yard as these things go: it’s only about 22 light years away, making it one of the closest star systems in the sky. It’s composed of two stars a bit smaller and cooler than the Sun which orbit each other closely, and a third, smaller star orbiting the pair about 35 billion km (20 billion miles) out. Stars in multiple systems get capital letters to distinguish them, so the two in the binary are GJ 667 A and B, and the third one is GJ 667C.

That third star is the interesting one. It’s a cool, red M dwarf with about a third the diameter of the Sun. Fainter, too: it only puts out about 1% of the light the Sun does. It’s been studied for years to look for planets around it, and while there have been some signs found, this new research is the first solid detection of planets that’s been published.

They used the Doppler method (sometimes called the Reflexive Velocity method): as planets orbit a star, their gravity tugs on it. We usually can’t see this motion directly, but a spectrum can reveal a Doppler shift, similar to the change in pitch you hear when a car or train goes by. If the spectrum has a high enough resolution, and the analysis very carefully done, there’s a lot you can tell by measuring it. You can get the planet’s mass, its period, and even the shape of its orbit.

In this case, the spectrum reveals GJ 667C may have four planets! Two very strong signals pop up with periods of 7 and 28 days, a third one at 75 days, and a possible trending shift in the spectrum that may point to a planet orbiting in a very roughly 20 year period.

It’s that second planet, GJ 667C with a 28 day orbit that’s so interesting. Its mass is at least 4.5 times that of the Earth, so it’s hefty. A 28 day orbit puts it pretty close to the parent star — about 7 million kilometers, or less than 5 million miles (Mercury is 57 million km from the Sun, by comparison). But remember, GJ 667C is a very dim bulb, so being that close means that the planet is actually right in the middle of the star’s habitable zone! The HZ is the distance where liquid water could exist on a planet — it depends on the size and temperature of a star, and also on the planet’s characteristics. A cloudy planet can hold heat better through the greenhouse effect, so it can be farther from the star and still be warm, for example.
(more…)

Recently, a picture of the New England area of the US photographed by astronauts on the ISS made the rounds. It was lovely, and inspired Rémi Boucher and Guillaume Poulin, two scientific communicators at an astronomy center in southern Quebec called the ASTROLab, to see if more pictures were taken. At The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth they found hundreds of photos taken from that pass, so they put them together into a wonderful time lapse video of the journey:

The video starts as the space station is over the Gulf of Mexico. The path of the station took it just east of the US coastline, and this view looks generally to the northwest. You can see Florida clearly, as well as Atlanta (surprisingly far to the west), the gigantic DC-Baltimore-Philadelphia-New York City corridor, then New England. Cape Cod is such an obvious landmark! Finally we can see southeastern Canada, and the Atlantic ocean.

I love how the northern lights are subtle, just hinted at, during much of the video since they are seen from such a great distance and edge-on, only to get brighter and stronger with proximity.

One thing that’s a bit puzzling: what are the lights seen in the Gulf of Mexico at the beginning of the video? My first guess would be oil rigs — there are quite a few of them. If anyone knows for sure, leave a comment!

I’ll note that this video felt much smoother to me than others of its kind. It’s displayed at 30 frames per second, but slowed down to half speed on top of that, which is probably what helps give it such a smooth, velvety feel. The entire elapsed amount of real time is only about 10 minutes — which is a powerful reminder of just how fast 8 km/sec (5 miles/sec) really is.

Credit: Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center. "The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth."; Rémi Boucher – Guillaume Poulin / ASTROLab du parc national du Mont-Mégantic