I did an interview with Neil Denny of the Little Atoms radio/podcast show in the UK, and it will be broadcast at 19:00 GMT today on Resonance 104.4 FM. The podcast will go up shortly thereafter for those of us unfortunate enough not to live in the land of The Doctor (I’ll post a link when I get it). We talked about the book, of course: asteroids, black holes, and The End Of Everything. It was a fun interview, and I hope y’all like it!

The James Randi Educational Foundation recently got yet another passel of my books to sell on the JREF online store. Like before, these will have JREF stickers in them that I have signed, so it’s a chance to get an autographed book the easy way.

But wait! There’s more! If you buy a book now, while supplies last, you’ll get a free JREF tote bag. Think of it as an extra large stocking, pre-stuffed.

Image of smiley face courtesy Marcus Vegas’ Flick stream.

No, this isn’t a Day the Earth Stood Still reference. Kinda.

GORT in this case is the GLAST Optical Robotic Telescope; it’s a semi-automated 36 centimeter telescope in northern California operated out of the NASA Education and Public Outreach Group at Sonoma State University. That’s the outfit I was part of for six years! We built the telescope to supplement observations by the Fermi gamma ray satellite (which was called GLAST at the time, hence the G in GORT; and in fact we dreamed up the name to match the classic movie robot).

Here’s the image of the gamma-ray burst (GRB) seen by GORT:

The left side is an image taken years ago as part of the Digitized Sky Survey, and the GORT image is on the right, with the gamma-ray burst marked.

It looks rather ordinary, doesn’t it, just your everyday star. But that’s no star. It used to be one, a huge one, maybe even 100 times as massive as the Sun. It ran out of fuel, and its core collapsed. A black hole formed in the very heart of the star, and the forces at play were vast and violent. Twin beams of unbridled fury roared out of the dying star, each containing enough energy to vaporize the Earth a hundred million times over^*. They screamed across the Universe, losing energy as they spread out… and eventually touched us here on Earth, so hugely diminished that it took a telescope to notice them at all. Whole planets may have been destroyed by those beams in their home galaxy, but here, on Earth, the amount of energy we received is less than that generated by the beating of a mosquito’s wings.

That energy swept over the Earth just before sunrise on December 3. The gamma rays from the beams were detected by the Swift satellite, which promptly determined the burst’s position and sent the coordinates to Earth. Sent out via the Internet (srsly), telescopes across the planet responded to the call, and in northern California GORT swung its eye to the position of the gamma-ray burst. Within minutes of Swift’s detection of the burst, GORT began taking its images. The picture above was from just 7 minutes after Swift triggered.

I’m very pleased to say that this is the first GRB GORT has imaged; we tried for a long time while I was there to nail one, but irritatingly they were always poorly placed in the sky, or below the horizon, or it was cloudy, or or or. I wished we could have bagged one while I was still at SSU, but I’m still pretty chuffed the system worked!

GRB081203A (named thus because it was the first burst seen on 2008 Dec. 3) is about 10.5 billion light years away, and according to GORT got to about magnitude 12, which is actually pretty bright for a GRB (though about 1/100th as bright as the faintest star you can see with your unaided eye). Imagine something that far away — 100 sextillion kilometers away — that you can see with a small telescope!

GORT is a nice setup, but it’s literally made from off-the-shelf components. You could have a similar observatory yourself in your own yard, though it’ll set you back a few dozen grand. Still, it’s not like a major institutional observatory costing tens of millions of dollars. This kind of thing is affordable by practically any University, and there are a lot of amateurs who have even slicker setups (retired lawyers and doctors have time, money, and interest). Telescopes like GORT are in many ways the equal of much larger telescopes form decades ago. The technology these days is amazing.

My thanks to Kevin McLin at SSU EPO for sending me the images and answering a couple of lingering questions I had about GORT. Also my congrats to him, Lynn Cominsky (the EPO lead) and all the others in the group. Very cool, and well done!

So, is this a good review or not?

I did an interview with a Chinese newspaper a few weeks ago about my book, Death from the Skies! It went pretty well, I thought, and they just published the article.

It’s all Chinese to me. Click to embiggen.

The whole article is longer than that screen grab I made. Sooooo… did they like it? Beats me. But there’s been interest in publishing a Chinese edition, so maybe that’s a clue. Now, if only we can sell a billion copies…

Asteroids are sexy again.

Sure, in 1998 we had two blockbuster movies ("Armageddon", which sucked, and "Deep Impact" which was excellent) showing us that asteroid and comet impacts could generate giant tsunamis, wipe out all life, cause lots of quick-cut camera shots, make Ben Affleck cry, and so on, but in the intervening years they haven’t gotten as much attention. There have been documentaries on TV and some coverage in the dead tree media, but that’s about it.

But in the past couple of weeks there’s been a resurgence of interest. Of course, having three big, bright fireballs lighting up the skies recently didn’t hurt: the one in Darfur months ago, or the one in Canada weeks ago, or the one in Colorado the other night (which I missed, dagnappit!). Maybe it was the publishing of a brilliant book with a whole chapter dealing with asteroid impacts. Hard to say.

But most likely it was the reporting on findings from panels of top-level scientists on the topic that’s caused a mini-flurry of stories. The BBC news had a story on it just the other day. They interviewed Professor Richard Crowther, chair of the UN Working Group on Near Earth Objects (NEOs); and as you might expect, his conclusion was that we need to get off our asteroids and do something:

The document says most asteroids entering the Earth’s atmosphere are small and burn up before reaching the surface. But it is the larger ones – perhaps 200m or more across – that would need to be deflected away from a collision course with the Earth.

Even a rock 50 meters across could take out a city, exploding high in the atmosphere and generating a devastating shock wave and fireball. But it’s literally impossible to find asteroids that small very long before impact. 150 meters or so is a reasonable size to find, and that’s also about the size where they start doing damage on a large scale.

The UK newspaper The Guardian also picked up on this story, talking about (what I think is) a different group called the International Panel on Asteroid Threat Mitigation:

The international community must begin work now on forging three impact prevention elements – warning, deflection technology and a decision-making process – into an effective defence against a future collision,’ said the International Panel on Asteroid Threat Mitigation, which is chaired by former American astronaut Russell Schweickart. The panel made its presentation at the UN’s building in Vienna.

This is an important point, We need to find these suckers, we need to understand what to do, and we need to understand how to do it. Think of it this way: we find an asteroid 300 meters across, and calculate it will hit in Germany. Uh oh! So we launch a rocket, use our tech, and push it out of the way… kinda. Something goes wrong, and it only gets nudged. We recalculate the path… and find out it will now hit Pakistan. Oops! Their government might be a little ticked over such a thing, so we need to have some sort of process in place to deal with these (fairly realistic) issues.

I’m glad that scientists are able to get their reports out to the public, and I certainly hope the UN takes the threat seriously — they will meet in February to discuss the issue. This is a global problem, and needs to be dealt with on an international scale.

From February 19 – 22, 2009, I’ll be in San Diego attending Spacefest, a fantastic conference featuring scientists, astronauts, artists, and space afficiandos. I’ve written about it before, so you can get the details there.

Kim Poor, the organizer, just informed me that he has updated his guest list: it now includes Apollo 12 astronaut Dick Gordon, as well as Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood — the stars of the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey"! That’s very cool. Moreover, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart will give a talk about how to prevent asteroid impacts, a topic he is an expert in (as people who have read my book already know).

I had a fantastic time at the last Spacefest (check out my photos on Flickr!), and I’m really looking forward to this one. Plus, San Diego is a happening town, and I always enjoy visiting. I hope to see plenty of BABloggees there!

To everyone in the Denver area: my talk scheduled for Thursday night December 11th at the Denver Museum of Science & Nature has been canceled. Looks like there weren’t enough pre-registrations (too close to the holiday season maybe?), and so they decided to postpone the talk until next year. I apologize to anyone who was planning on attending. I’m always hoping to do more events in the local Denver metro area (including Boulder of course), so I’m sure other things will turn up. Sorry about this.