Bad Astronomy » Cool stuff

Maiden flight for ESA’s Vega rocket tonight

Phil Plait — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:32:17 +0000

The European Space Agency’s new launch vehicle, Vega, has its first "qualification flight" scheduled for Monday morning: the launch window is from 10:00 to 12:00 UTC (05:00 to 07:00 Eastern US time). ESA has a page where you can watch the launch live.

Vega is a smaller rocket, designed to haul 300 – 2000 kg payloads to low Earth orbit. It’s 30 meters tall by 3 meters wide (100 x 10 feet), so we’re not talking huge here. But this is a size needed for smaller payloads that don’t need huge thrust. This first launch will loft nine satellites in total: the AlMaSat demonstration satellite (30 cm on a side); another called LARES which is 390 kg in mass, designed to test an aspect of relativity called frame dragging (where a spinning object such as the Earth warps space by dragging it along with its spin, like a viscous fluid); and seven tiny satellites called picosats.

Given that this is the dead of night my time, I’ll watch it in reruns, but if the timing is more amenable to ...

Another interactive way to scale the Universe

Phil Plait — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:06:41 +0000

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’ 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, ...

The staring eye of a crescent moon

Phil Plait — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:39:56 +0000

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 ...

A hoopy frood

Phil Plait — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:00:58 +0000

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 ...

Funhouse galaxy

Phil Plait — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:00:10 +0000

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 ...

Science Getaways: Update

Phil Plait — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:36:40 +0000

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" ...

Exoplanet in a triple star system smack dab in the habitable zone

Phil Plait — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:00:54 +0000

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 ...

Appalachian nocturne: a tour of the eastern US from space

Phil Plait — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:24:34 +0000

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 ...

Superbowl science 2012

Phil Plait — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:14:17 +0000

Today in America is our most revered holiday: the Superbowl. I am not particularly invested in either team — I had to look up who’s playing, to be honest — but there is something about the game I like: science! Yes, science, of which there is plenty to be had during any sporting event. You just have to look for it.

Last year, during the big game, I tweeted a series of science facts relating to football, and, when the game was over, collected them into a blog post.

I thought it would be fun do it again — this time, I’ll use the hashtag #Sciperbowl — but this year, instead of waiting to collect them, I’ll simply update this post as I add them. That way you don’t have to wait until the end of the game to see them all.

So sit back on your recliner, keep one hand in a bag of chips and another on the refresh button. Let’s see how to really enjoy this game! I’ll start the tweets and start updating this post at the start of the game.

First Quarter

1) Realistically, a ...

Get Scott Sigler’s The MVP for $3 off

Phil Plait — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:12:20 +0000

Wanna get Scott Sigler’s brand-spankin’ new novel The MVP for three bucks off? Read on…

Scott is a pal of mine, but he’s also a few other things… like a NYT best selling author, for example. His science-based horror books like Infected, Contagious, and Ancestor are really fun (and ookie) reads. He’s been writing a really good science fiction sports series of novels about the Galactic Football League, where humans play football side-by-side with aliens… who may be able to leap five meters in the air, run far faster than humans, and oh yeah: also might possibly want to eat the other team.

His new book in the series, The MVP, is available for pre-order starting right now! And because I am super special and wonderful and love my readers, if you pre-order the book with the coupon code badastro you get $3 off the price!

Just go to his site, order the book, and put badastro into the coupon code field to get the discount. This code also works on his other hardcovers in the GFL series, including The Starter and The All-Pro (the first novel ...

East of the Blue Marble

Phil Plait — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:45:39 +0000

Last week, I posted an exceptional image of our home world as seen by the Suomi NPP Earth-observing satellite. The image was so popular that NASA released a second one, this time of the Eastern hemisphere, showing once again why it’s called the Blue Marble:

[Click to engaiaenate, or grab the terrestrialicious 11,500 x 11,500 pixel shot].

Like the other one, this is a mosaic, created over six different orbits — the bright north/south swaths are actually the reflection of the Sun in the ocean as the satellite passed over that area multiple times.

Although the satellite is in low Earth orbit, just a few hundred kilometers off the surface, the images have been mosaicked together to represent the view as if you were about 13,000 km (8000 miles) away. You’re seeing most of but not quite all of the entire hemisphere here. The inset image shows why; the farther you are from Earth the more of it you see.

If you’re having a hard time picturing that, imagine taking a camera and holding it a couple of centimeters from your ...

Q&BA: Pound for pound, are humans hotter than the Sun?

Phil Plait — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:19:08 +0000

[Note: Every week I hold a live video chat on Google+ where I answer questions from readers. I call it Q&BA, and when I get a question that stands alone, I'll make it its own video. ]

Every now and again, I hear this urban legend that pound for pound, the human body is actually hotter (or has more energy) than the Sun. I got this question in a recent Q&BA video chat session, so I tackled it. The answer is pretty interesting, and depends on how you ask the question!

I actually wrote about this legend on the blog a while back, and I show all the math. I really like this question, since it has a straightforward answer that makes it seem wrong, but then if you look at it more carefully the answer is a little trickier. And even in the video and that other post, it’s not really a complete answer; if you read the comments on the post you’ll see people arguing over it.

That’s really the best kind of question: the ones that keep on going! There’s ...

Give Pluto your stamp of approval

Phil Plait — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:00:32 +0000

In 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will zip past Pluto, giving us our first close-up view of this tiny world.

The team behind the space probe have a nice idea to help raise awareness of it: make a new US Post Office stamp commemorating it. My friend Dan Durda, both an accomplished astronomer and artist, created this lovely design of the stamp:

[Click to enhadesenate. Note: the word "Forever" means the stamp is always good for first class postage, and is crossed out here to prevent forgery.]

It shows the spacecraft going by Pluto and its (relatively) freakishly large moon Charon. I like how he didn’t go for photorealism, but instead used an oil paint-like feel for it. The stamp is meant as a followup — I might even say send-up — of a US stamp issued in 1990 about Pluto that has the label "Not Yet Explored".

I like this stamp! I’d love to see it made official, too. Alan Stern, the head guy for the mission, created a petition to help that along. It takes more than just a nice stamp design ...

Q&BA: What happens if you are exposed to the vacuum of space?

Phil Plait — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:21:08 +0000

[Note: Every week I hold a live video chat on Google+ where I answer questions from readers. I call it Q&BA, and when I get a question that stands alone, I'll make it its own video. ]

A lot of people, it seems, have morbid thoughts about space. Why else would I get asked this so much: "What would happen to the human body exposed to the vacuum and cold of space?"

Of course, this sort of thing is depicted in scifi movies a lot, and people are curious about it. And even though the movies always get it wrong — you don’t explode, or freeze instantly — it does make folks wonder about it. And while the reality isn’t maybe as gooey as in the movies, it’s still pretty nasty.

I wrote about this in my review of the movie "Mission to Mars", as well as answering a question many years ago from a reader. And even though it’s an icky thing to think about, it does give me a chance to talk about heat transfer, which is pretty, um, cool.

Strange yet cool VLA time lapse video

Phil Plait — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:20:30 +0000

I’m sure what I can say about this, except that it’s oddly engaging.

I’ve been to VLA*, many years ago to do a video for an educational activity, and I don’t recall seeing them behave quite this way. Maybe I should’ve waited until night time.

Tip o’ the side lobe to my pal and science nerd Jeri Ryan on Google+.

* Yes, I know the name was recently changed to the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, but I’ll be honest: I don’t like the new name. If they had just called it the Jansky Array that’d be fine. But if the old name was clunky, it had an easy acronym. Now the name is longer and the acronym harder! So to me, it’ll always be the VLA. And get off my lawn.

Mesmerizing, towering loops of solar magnetism

Phil Plait — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:02:58 +0000

I know I’ve been writing about the Sun quite a bit lately, but I have a followup to yesterday’s cool video of the big solar flare… and you’re gonna like it.

I was fooling around with helioviewer.org, watching the flare in different wavelengths of light detected by NASA’s Solar Dynamics observatory, when I switched to 17.1 nanometers — in the far ultraviolet. At that wavelength, the glowing plasma that flows along the Sun’s magnetic field lines is very bright. The images were so beautiful, so incredible, I made a video animation of them, covering the time range of January 26, 2012 at midnight to January 28 at noon (UTC), which includes the huge X2 solar flare that erupted on the 27th. The video shows huge loops of magnetism on the Sun’s surface, glowing plasma flowing along them… and then 48 seconds in the flare changes everything. Watch:

Holy wow! Isn’t that awesome? Make sure you watch in in HD, and make it full screen to get the whole effect.

What you’re seeing is Active Region 1402, a sunspot cluster. This is a tangled collection of magnetic field lines piercing the surface of the Sun. Like ...

Real time footage of aurora shows them dancing and shimmering

Phil Plait — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 05:56:25 +0000

Photographer Alistair Chapman traveled to Tromso, Norway — 300 km north of the Arctic Circle — to capture video of the aurorae from the recent spate of solar storms. What he caught on camera is remarkable: shimmering, waving, dancing lights moving in real time!

[Make sure you set it to 720p; Chapman says higher-def footage is coming soon.]

That’s amazing. Aurorae video is generally done with time lapse to show the movement, which is usually slow. I’ve often wondered just how fast the movement really is; I always figured fluctuations in the solar particle density, speed, and magnetic fields would produce real-time changes in the lights, but I’d never seen anything like this! After a search of YouTube I actually found several more.

I know some people will think this is fake, and I had my skeptic hat on while watching it. Note that in most time lapse you can see the stars move; in this they don’t, indicating (unless it’s a complete fake) short periods of time during the filming. Given that, plus the existence of other video like it, I’m thinking this is real.

Mind you, the movement you’re seeing isn’t a physical motion. It’s ...

The Sun’s still blasting out flares… BIG ones

Phil Plait — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 13:35:22 +0000

Active Region 1402, the same sunspot cluster that blew out a solar flare and caused all the ruckus last week, is still being feisty: just before rotating to the other side of the Sun, it erupted in an intense, pulsing solar flare that actually was much more powerful than the one that happened last Monday. This was an X2 class flare, making it more than twice as energetic as Monday’s.

Happily, the flares were on the edge of the Sun’s disk, so the bulk of the radiation was aimed away from the Earth, but it still makes for some pretty dramatic footage. Using helioviewer.org I created a video showing about 2.3 hours of the Sun as seen by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. It shows the Sun in the extreme ultraviolet (at a wavelength of 19.3 nanometers if you wanna get geeky), where magnetic activity is seen easily. Watch the upper right corner of our friendly star… and make sure you make it HD and full screen.

Isn’t that awesome? The flare got so bright the automatic software dimmed the rest of the Sun to compensate, giving you an idea of just how powerful ...

Will you see the lights tonight?

Phil Plait — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:45:10 +0000

The solar storm that erupted from the Sun yesterday reached the Earth today at about 15:00 UTC (10:00 a.m. Eastern US time). The wave of subatomic particles has been impacting the Earth’s magnetic field, and we’re starting to see some auroral activity:

Isn’t that lovely? That was taken at 18:00 UTC today from a webcam in Abisko, Sweden. Can you see the handle of the Big Dipper right below the green curtain? [More aurora webcam sites are listed below.]

The two biggest questions I’m getting on Twitter and Google+ are 1) is there any danger to this storm, and b) can I see the aurora from [my location]?

First, no, we’re not in any danger from this event. Even though it sounds terrifying — an explosion the equivalent of billions of nuclear weapons launching hundreds of millions of tons of subatomic particles Earthward at speeds of million of kilometers per hour! — we’re pretty well protected down here on the surface. The Earth’s magnetic field catches the particles, and most of those get dumped harmlessly in our upper atmosphere. That can create the aurora displays, but won’t dose ...

The Sun aims a storm right at Earth: expect aurorae tonight!

Phil Plait — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:00:26 +0000

Around 04:00 UTC on Monday morning, January 23, 2012, the Sun let loose a pretty big flare and coronal mass ejection. Although there have been bigger events in recent months, this one happened to line up in such a way that the blast of subatomic particles unleashed headed straight for Earth. It’s causing what may be the biggest space weather event in the past several years for Earth: people at high latitudes can expect lots of bright and beautiful aurorae.

I’ll explain what all that is in a second, but first here’s a video of what this looked like from NASA’s SOHO satellite.

Wow! Make sure you set it to high def.

So what happened here? The sunspot cluster called Active Region 11402 happened.

Sunspots are regions where the magnetic field lines of the Sun get tangled up. A vast amount of energy is stored in these lines, and if they get squeezed too much, they can release that energy all at once. When this happens, we call it a solar flare, and it can be mind-numbing: yesterday’s flare exploded with the energy of hundreds of millions of nuclear bombs!

Q&BA full video chat session online

Phil Plait — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:43:55 +0000

On Sunday, I did a live video chat on Google+ where I took astronomy and space questions from folks and answered them as best I could. It was a lot of fun, with several hundred people showing up! I did some minimal editing of the session and put it on YouTube for your enjoyment:

The video resolution is not that great, I know, and I’m working on solutions for that. I’m looking into recording the feed locally on my PC so that I can upload a better version. If you have suggestions, I’m listening (but anyone starting a PC vs Apple war will be eviscerated; be ye fairly warned, says I).

I’m also always happy to get suggestions from people too. I have plans to do this on a weekly basis, and would love to improve it. Whaddaya got?

[P.S. In the "Related posts" below I have some links to the old Q&BA v.1.0 videos. Those got to be so time-consuming I had to stop doing them, but things have gotten much better since then! I'm looking forward to doing this more often now.]

Related posts:

- Q and BA Episode 7: By Any Other Name

Wait just a (leap) second

Phil Plait — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:00:43 +0000

This summer will be a little bit longer than usual. A tiny little bit: one second, to be precise. The world’s official time keepers are adding a single second to the clocks at the end of June. This "leap second" is needed to keep various time scales in synch. It’s a bit of a pain and won’t really affect people much, but if it weren’t done things would get messy eventually.

This gets a bit detailed — which is where the fun is! — but in short it goes like this. We have two systems to measure time: our everyday one which is based on the rotation of the Earth, and a fancy-schmancy scientific and precise one based on vibrations of atoms. The two systems aren’t quite in synch, though, since the Earth counts a day as a tiny bit longer than the atomic clocks say it is. So every now and again, to get them back together, we add a leap second on to the atomic clocks. That holds them back for one second, and then things are lined up once again.

There. Nice and simple. But that’s spackling over all ...

Live Q&BA video chat today at 20:00 UTC!

Phil Plait — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:46:43 +0000

[Apologies, folks, I totally forgot to update this post with the link. Hopefully most of you figured out how to find it. I'll do better next time; I'll make a checklist. ]

I will be doing a live video chat session — what I call Q&BA — on Google+ today at 20:00 UTC (3:00 p.m. Eastern US time). I’ll be using Google+’s Hangouts On Air, which lets an unlimited number of people watch live.

I’ll post a link to the Hangout chat session here when it goes live. You don’t have to sign up for Google+ to see it, but it does help in three ways: 1) whenever I do this again you’ll be notified more in advance by following my posts there; b) when you go to the post with the embedded video stream you can +1 it (G+’s version of liking something) so I can get an idea of how many people are following; and γ) Google+ is pretty cool and you should probably be on there anyway.

I will take questions from folks by reading the comments in the Hangout post, and also on ...

Superb time lapse: “My Soul”

Phil Plait — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 14:00:32 +0000

This is a wonderful, wonderful time lapse video made by Minnesota photographer Mark Ellis put to the music of Peter Mayer.

You absolutely must make sure it’s in HD and make it full screen.

I am a lifelong appreciator of music, both listening to it and making it. As much as I love hearing an artist’s creation, there is an amazing synergy that occurs when we get a visual to go with it. Perhaps that’s why I love movie soundtracks so much; two different senses combined add up synergistically to more than their arithmetic sum. This video and the music exemplify that beautifully.

I am very impressed with the photographic work in this, and that’s not even including the incredibly cold conditions under which a lot of it was made! And as an astronomer I have to add a couple of notes. Pay attention at 4:00; the lyrics to the song say, "… counting galaxies like snowflakes…", and Mark artfully puts in a view of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. I particularly like the shots where foreground trees are in focus while the sky is out ...

Time lapse: Yosemite

Phil Plait — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:27:31 +0000

Apparently I could do nothing but post incredible time lapse videos all the time. Watch this staggeringly beautiful video, "Yosemite", and be in awe.

[YES, make it full screen and HD!]

The video was made by Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty, and the music? "Outro", by a group called M83.

Ha! That’s the name of a spiral galaxy I’ve written about once or twice before. Even thrice. And it’s appropriate, given how prominently our own galaxy features in this video.

The shots of the park during the day aren’t too shabby, either.

I’ve lived out west for twelve years now, and I’ve never made it to Yosemite park. Maybe it’s time to change that.

Tip o’ the piton to Chris Perriman.

Related posts:

- Time lapse: The Aurora
- Time lapse: old rocks and old skies
- Orion in the Mayan skies
- The lines in the sky are stars
- Incredible all-sky picture
- Very Large Telescope, Very Stunning Time Lapse Video